Jonathan Mirsky reviews Robin Munro's report on China's Political Psychiatry. It's being used as an instrument of political persecution in China. The pretext is changing from "mentally pathological 'counterrevolutionary behavior' or 'behavior that endangers state security'" to "negative political speech and action". (via Arts & Letters Daily).

Meanwhile, I ran across an article about Eastern State Penitentiary

In 1842, Charles Dickens visited it. I used to pass it when I walked to Temple U, but I never saw the inside. According to Daniel Brook, based on Quaker thinking, it was supposed to be a "house of repentance", where silence, solitude, surveillance, and anonymity ruled. Dickens described its system of "rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement" as "cruel and wrong." "I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body." After interviewing a man who was two years into a five-year sentence for larceny, Dickens, one of the world's greatest chroniclers of human degradation, wrote, "I never saw or heard of any kind of misery that impressed me more than the wretchedness of this man." Brook notes the resemblence to the modern "supermax" prison. One psychiatrist has concluded that the regimen in security housing units drives prisoners insane.