> Politically it's much easier to sell "prison type 2: mental hospital edition" than it is to make "global prison: sweden edition", much like they have low security / high security prisons.

On one hand I agree that it would be a lot easier initially to sell the idea; on the other hand the public sentiment around prisons as they exist today and the unwillingness to treat prison residents as if they are human beings is a fundamental social problem that will corrupt attempts to build compassionate and helpful asylums.

I don't believe there's a shortcut; our prisons are horrible in part because society tolerates that. They will also tolerate abuse in mental hospitals, they will also very quickly dehumanize people who are committed to mental institutions. And very quickly you will find yourself in the position of needing to argue for basic human rights inside mental institutions and realizing that the same people who are antagonistic to prison reform are also going to be antagonistic to treating the mentally ill with dignity and respect.

That you feel that you can't really effectively argue for general prison reform to the general public is the canary in the coal mine. Your instincts are correct, you do not live in a society that cares about the rights of prisoners. Attempting to trick that society into caring about some of those rights by renaming prisons to hospitals... it's not going to work. The same people will vote and will have the same attitudes about segments of society that they would prefer please go exist someplace else where they can be ignored.

It's just going to be prison 1.0 with a different name on it. If you can't convince people to care about prison 1.0, you also will not have a defense when those same people stop caring about prison 2.0 for the same reasons.

Honestly, if anything having a different name on it will make it easier for the general public to ignore abuses in both asylums and regular prisons. The sentiment will be that asylums are "nice" so they're obviously caring for the sick people who don't know better, and mental health in prisons isn't a problem, those people go to asylums. And since asylums are nice, why do we have to wait for people to commit crimes? It's not like we're sending them to prison. And on and on...

I just don't think there's a marketing trick that can be done to get around that problem; it's reinforcing delusions people have about the justice system rather than correcting them. We have to actually do the work to change social views on prison.

And I think the distinction itself is kind of unhelpful for that effort. To be very clear, mental institutions and asylums are prisons. If saying that out loud rubs people the wrong way, it's because we know deep down that our current prisons are awful places and we all (myself included) desperately want to figure out some excuse to use so we can say that sympathetic human beings don't go there. Telling the general public "they don't deserve to be in prison, they deserve to be in a hospital" is in many ways just allowing people to feel less bad about the people who are in prison, it's a way to allow the general public to continue clinging to the idea that prison isn't about rehabilitation or treatment or safety. It's a way to allow the general public to shrug when people are sent to prisons because "it's just a hospital." But calling prisons a different word doesn't make them not prisons, it just makes us feel better about putting people into them.