The New Asylums

James Gilligan is Visiting Professor of Psychiatry and Social Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Adjunct Professor at New York University, and is President of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, a private nonprofit research and consulting firm. For more than 30 years, in addition to conducting a private practice in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, he served on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, where he specialized in developing treatment, research and training programs devoted to the psychiatric evaluation and rehabilitation of violent youth and adults, with a special emphasis on violence prevention. As Director of the Medical School’s Institute of Law and Psychiatry, he led a team of colleagues from Harvard teaching hospitals who were responsible for providing mental health services to the Massachusetts prisons and prison mental hospital, and for reducing the incidence of suicides, homicides and other violence in those institutions, from 1977 through 1992, in response to Federal court decisions ordering the Department of Correction to improve the quality of psychiatric care provided to the populations under their control. In the course of that work, Dr. Gilligan served as Medical Director of the Bridgewater State Hospital, the maximum-security prison mental hospital for the "criminally insane" in Massachusetts, for five years; Clinical Director of mental health programs throughout the Massachusetts prison system for ten years; and Senior Psychiatric Consultant to two of the Regional Adolescent Programs of the Departments of Mental Health and Youth Services, the major detention facilities for juveniles who were violent and mentally disturbed.

In 1991 Dr. Gilligan gave the Erikson Lectures at Harvard on "The Roots of Violence." During 1993 and 1994 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge University (England), where he expanded those lectures into the book Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes (1996), also published in paperback as Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (1997). He is also the author of Preventing Violence: An Agenda for the Coming Century (2001). His most recent book is Youth Violence: Scientific Approaches to Prevention, a volume in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2004).

The current research projects that he and his research staff at the Center for the Study of Violence are conducting include an evaluation of the effectiveness of an experiment in violence prevention in the San Francisco jails, which has demonstrated significant reductions in violent behavior during incarceration and the first year following release.

Ann-Marie Louison is the director of technical assistance and mental health policy and the former director of mental health programs at the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services (CASES). Louison has a Master's in Social Work & Applied Social Research. In 1999, Ms. Louison joined CASES and became the co-founder of the Nathaniel Project, an innovative alternative-to-incarceration program for felony offenders with severe and persistent mental illnesses and co-occurring substance abuse disorders. The Nathaniel Project won several awards, including the 2002 Special Achievement Award from the American Psychiatric Association, the 2002 American Probation and Parole Association’s President’s Award and the 2002 Thomas M. Wernert Award for Innovation in Community Behavioral Healthcare. In June 2003, the Project was licensed by the New York State Office of Mental Health to bill Medicaid to provide evidenced-based Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) services. In 2004, Ms. Louison gave a national teleconference presentation for the National GAINS Center entitled “Strategies for Effectively Integrating Consumers as Staff and Experts into Jail Diversion Programs.” She has also worked as a social worker in a large state psychiatric hospital in New York City, and for several years as a probation officer in England, supervising parolees and probationers.

Producer Miri Navasky began her career in documentary film when she joined the staff of FRONTLINE in 1991. For nearly a decade, she worked on various FRONTLINE films including The Choice ’92, a political biography of the 1992 presidential candidates, Smoke in the Eye, an expose of the media’s coverage of the tobacco industry, Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? a special 3 hour biography, and The Gulf War, a four-part in-depth examination into the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf Crisis. In 1999, Navasky co-produced the first in-depth investigation into the life of a school shooter. The Killer at Thurston High, won the BANFF award for the best social/political documentary.

In 2000, she left her staff position to form an independent documentary company and began to produce independently for FRONTLINE. Her next film, A Crime of Insanity, examined the ways in which the legal and psychiatric worlds can collide through the single criminal case of a 26-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who ended up hanging himself in his prison cell. Navasky's most recent FRONTLINE film, The New Asylums, is an exploration of the complex social problem faced by jails and prisons throughout America as hundreds of thousands of the mentally ill are being held behind bars. The film aired on FRONTLINE in May 2005 and has recently been nominated for Excellence in Journalism, the first media award being given by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.

Producer Karen O’Connor joined FRONTLINE in 1993 to work with filmmaker Ofra Bikel on Divided Memories, a special four-hour FRONTLINE series that examined the legal and psychological controversies surrounding the issue of repressed memory. Prior to joining FRONTLINE, O’Connor produced for public television station WGBY and for ABC News in New York. In 1996, O’Connor was named FRONTLINE series editor, where she worked on a number of films including, Valentina’s Nightmare, a FRONTLINE/BBC co-production that powerfully recounts the mass horror of genocide seen through the eyes of a 13-year-old survivor of one village massacre; Behind the Mask, a FRONTLINE film that looks at the inside story of the IRA’s 30-year armed conflict in Northern Ireland; and The Invasion of Iraq, a retrospective of the key participants, strategies and turning points of America’s Operation Iraqi Freedom.

O’Connor remained in her staff position at FRONTLINE until 2004 when she began to work full-time with co-producer Miri Navasky. Her producing credits include: A Crime of Insanity and The Killer at Thurston High. The New Asylums is her most recent FRONTLINE film.

Dr. Reginald A. Wilkinson has been the Director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC) since 1991. He has been employed with DRC since 1973 and has served in a variety of positions, including Director of Training, Warden, and Regional Director of Prisons. Wilkinson received B.A. and M.A. degrees from The Ohio State University, and was awarded the Doctor of Education degree from the University of Cincinnati. Director Wilkinson is a past President of both the Association of State Correctional Administrators and the American Correctional Association. Currently, he is the Vice Chair for North America of the International Corrections and Prisons Association (ICPA) and Chair of the National Institute of Corrections Advisory Board. Dr. Wilkinson is also the President and Executive Director of the International Association of Reentry. He has received many awards from organizations such as the National Governors’ Association, the Volunteers of America, and the American Correctional Association. Wilkinson has also published numerous journal articles and book chapters on a variety of correctional topics.