Mittersteig: Microhistory of Austria's First Forensic Psychiatric Prison

The Mittersteig prison in the heart of Vienna is Austria’s first and oldest prison specifically designed to confine mentally ill offenders. Opened in 1975, it has been since been responsible for confining and treating criminals who committed their crimes due to their severe psychological 'abnormality' but who were nevertheless considered legally accountable for their deeds -- 'psychopaths' in public and internal parlance of the time. We present our new project that aims at writing a microhistory of the Mittersteig prison in the first decade of its existence (1975-85), based on access to extensive prison files. After situating Mittersteig in the history of post-Nazi legal and social reforms in Austria, we focus in particular on the question how psychiatric experts of the time understood psychopathology as well as potentials to treatment and betterment. While the spiritual fathers of the reforms that led to the establishment of Mittersteig were driven by an acute need to distance themselves from the hereditary paradigm in forensic psychiatry, personal, institutional, and discursive inertia weighed heavy against the humanist ambitions of the reformers. Based on analyses of the forensic psychiatric evaluations of the first cohorts at Mittersteig, we will present both the structure of its inmates as well as an analysis of the way the 'psychopath criminal' was constructed at the time.