COFAR blog

The Fernald Developmental Center has been closed for a decade, but it remains a political lightning rod for opponents of state-run care for persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Massachusetts.

The latest organization to attack Fernald is the federally funded Disability Law Center (DLC), which appears to be using a recently discovered breach of the privacy of former Fernald residents to further tarnish the reputations of Fernald and two remaining Intermediate Care Facilities (ICFs) in the state.

The Boston-based DLC is a legal rights advocacy organization that has long lobbied for the closure of congregate care settings and for the expansion of the state’s network of privatized group homes.

GBH News, a Boston-based National Public Radio affiliate, reported last week that the DLC has filed a complaint with the federal Office of Civil Rights (OCR) alleging a privacy breach involving records of former Fernald residents. The DLC complaint is based on the publication of photos in January by The Boston Globe showing what appear to be large numbers of those records, which had been dumped on the floors of now-abandoned buildings on the campus.

The OCR, which is under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has opened an investigation of the alleged records breach based on the DLC’s complaint.

While we strongly support the OCR’s investigation, it is a statement made by an attorney with the DLC concerning the alleged breach that caught our attention. The attorney is quoted in GBH’s story as saying the following:

Why do these things (privacy breaches) happen to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and don’t happen to able bodied people? It challenges us to ask about how we allow institutions like Fernald to exist to begin with, and how we haven’t reckoned with the history of those institutions. (my emphasis)

Leaving aside the fact that privacy breaches can and do happen to both disabled and non-disabled people, we would agree that the breach in patient privacy at Fernald implies a major managerial failure on the part of the state, and we think the administration should take responsibility for it.

But what does a privacy breach have to do with whether Fernald should have existed, and why should the blame for that particular breach be placed on the people who ran and worked at Fernald? It is the state administrators who were in charge of closing Fernald and disposing of the property who should have seen to the proper handling and storage of the residents’ records.

Moreover, in saying the privacy breach “challenges us to ask about how we allow institutions like Fernald to exist,” the DLC attorney appears to be referring to the Wrentham Developmental Center and the Hogan Regional Center, the only two institutions like Fernald that still do exist in Massachusetts. It thus appears that the DLC is using the records breach involving Fernald to tarnish the reputations of Wrentham and Hogan, perhaps in order to push for their closure.

We hope neither the Healey administration or the Legislature falls for this. It’s a red herring.

As we have frequently reported, the administration is effectively allowing state-run residential services for people with developmental disabilities in Massachusetts to die by attrition. This will spell disaster for the care of those people.

The Healey administration and the DLC know full well that many privatized group homes have become the new warehouses of abuse and neglect in Massachusetts. The Department of Developmental Services (DDS) is unable to adequately oversee the system, and is obsessed, as the Globe has reported, with retaliating against families and guardians who dare to complain about poor conditions in corporate provider-run group homes and day programs.

We would note that the DLC, over the years, has turned down a number of requests for legal representation by individuals we advocate for, saying the DLC lacks resources. Yet the DLC is apparently continuing to use its limited resources to push for the closure of two state-run facilities that provide a critical backstop for care in the DDS system, and that are subject to stricter oversight and that provide care that meets stricter federal standards than the standards that apply to group homes.

Consistent focus on the early history of Fernald

It is also apparent, based on the DLC’s complaint and GBH’s coverage of it, that both organizations are interested only in discussing the darkest periods of Fernald’s history prior to the 1980s. There is no mention by either the DLC in its complaint, or by GBH, of the significant improvements at Fernald and other similar institutions in Massachusetts that were made as a result of the intervention of the late U.S. District Court Judge Joseph L. Tauro, starting in the 1970s.

What the DLC complaint does say is that the failure to secure medical records after Fernald’s closure:

…places additional barriers before…historians documenting the practices which took place at this site (Fernald) over decades. This includes promotion of eugenics, squalid living conditions, physical abuse, and as noted in the Globe article, the ‘Science Club’ experiments of feeding children radioactive isotopes in their oatmeal over a seven year period. (my emphasis)

Similarly, GBH, in its article on the DLC’s complaint, stated:

The Fernald, as it was widely known, is home to a dark history of abuse, including reports of research on children by Harvard and MIT that laced breakfast cereal with radioactive iodine. (link in the original) 

But these terrible episodes of Fernald’s history had largely ended by the 1960s – a half century before Fernald was closed over the objections of the families of many of its remaining residents in 2014.

As we have pointed out before, the man for whom the institution was later named—Walter E. Fernald—was initially an active proponent of eugenics laws that were being adopted in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries in the U.S. But by the 1920s, even Walter Fernald had come to reject the principles of eugenics, and “became a supporter of community placement…” for persons with developmental disabilities, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

The radiation experiments on children took place from the 1940s through 1961, according to the GBH link above. 

This is not to suggest that these abuses and immoral racial theories that involved Fernald should not be studied or publicized in order to warn us not to repeat that history. But to make those events the sole focus of any historical account of Fernald raises questions about the political agenda of those engaging in it.

Judge Tauro noted the positive transformation that Fernald and other similar facilities had undergone when he disengaged in 1993 from his oversight of Ricci v. Okin, the landmark consent decree case that brought about those improvements.

Tauro wrote that the improvements had “taken people with mental retardation from the snake pit, human warehouse environment of two decades ago, to the point where Massachusetts now has a system of care and habilitation that is probably second to none anywhere in the world.”

Proposed state commission also appears to have a bias

As we have reported, a state commission created by the Legislature in 2022 to study the history of Fernald and other similar facilities in Massachusetts also appears likely to have a similar bias against today’s congregate care models, and a similar fixation on Fernald’s early history.

In February, after GBH published an article discussing the commission uncritically, we informed the news station of our concern about the commission’s potential bias and its proponents’ apparent disinterest in Judge Tauro’s role in improving Fernald and the other facilities. Unfortunately, a noted above, our perspective was not recognized in GBH’s subsequent coverage of the alleged privacy breach.

We certainly hope it isn’t the case that this administration is ready to abandon state-run residential care and that it plans to cite the Fernald privacy breach as a pretext for doing so. So far, we haven’t been able to get the administration to make any sort of public statement about its intentions with regard to either the Wrentham or Hogan Centers, or about the commonwealth’s similarly declining network of state-run group homes.

Until the administration does signal its intentions in this regard, we’re left to read the tea leaves. And as usual, it is the former Fernald Center and how it is still portrayed by its long-time adversaries long after its death that appear to provide those possible clues.