COFAR blog

A state commission established in 2023 to study the history of institutions for the developmentally disabled and mentally ill in Massachusetts has issued a final report which, as expected, almost completely vilifies those facilities.

The report by the Massachusetts Special Commission on State Institutions, which is dated May 25, paints an overwhelmingly negative and untrue picture of the history of the institutions, often couched in extreme terms. The report only briefly mentions the dramatic improvements in those centers for the developmentally disabled that occurred starting in the 1970s.

We repeatedly predicted that the Commission would examine only the history of the institutions prior to the 1980s when those facilities were notorious for abuse, neglect and poor conditions.

Our concern has been, and now remains, that opponents of the Wrentham and Hogan Intermediate Care Facilities (ICFs), the state’s two remaining congregate care centers for people with developmental disabilities, will use the report as justification for pushing for the closure of the facilities.

Notably, the report demands a formal apology from the governor, who, it claims, “must acknowledge the enormity of the legacy and harm of mass institutionalization that reverberates today.”

But what about the improvements that were made in institutional care starting in the 1970s in Massachusetts under the landmark Ricci v. Okin class action lawsuit? The late U.S. District Court Judge Joseph L. Tauro, who oversaw the consent decree in that case, said in 1993 that the care in the institutions was by then “second to none anywhere in the world.”

Isn’t that improvement also part of the legacy of institutionalization in Massachusetts? Should Governor Healey apologize for that?

What about the high federal standards that Wrentham and Hogan meet today? And what about the families that are fighting to keep Wrentham and Hogan open as the state pursues a policy of letting Wrentham and Hogan die by attrition?

Also, what about the legacy of deinstitutionalization, which the report does not criticize, but which has also caused much harm?

While the report has tried to make a positive contribution in calling for making public the historical records of the care of residents of institutions in Massachusetts, the report appears to assume that those records contain only damning accounts of that care. That is, of course, not true; but, the report implies that the purpose of providing public access to the records is to reveal “atrocities” committed in the institutions.  As the report states:

By hiding a story of mass human rights abuses, the Commonwealth is preventing society from engaging in a full reckoning with the atrocities that have been inflicted on disabled people throughout our history.

Sensational claims concerning closed facilities

The report also makes a number of sensational claims that lack evidence of what it alleges are shocking activities that have taken place on the campuses of closed facilities. Among those allegations, for which the report doesn’t provide any details, are that some unidentified campuses have been used for pornographic photo shoots and “white supremacist celebrations.”

As the report puts it:

At their most offensive, (former institutional) sites have been used for pornographic photo shoots, white supremacist celebrations, community festivals, and amusement parks that would never be tolerated at similar sites of significant human rights abuses in Massachusetts or America.

I have not been able to find any references on line to pornographic photo shoots on the campuses of closed institutions. As noted, the Commission report provided no examples of it.

Brandeis University’s student newspaper, The Justice, reported that graffiti featuring markings of Neo-Nazi groups has been discovered on the walls of one of the buildings on the campus of the former Fernald Developmental Center. But the Waltham Police Department stated that “there are no known organized hate groups operating in the area.”

So, while vandalism at the former Fernald Center has been an ongoing issue, there is no information I could find that refers to white supremacist celebrations being held there. The Commission also provided no examples of amusement parks on the campuses of former institutions.

The amusement park reference might be to the development by the City of Waltham of a portion of the Fernald campus as a memorial park and “universally accessible” playground, with an electric train, a mini golf course, and a spray park “that would make it the largest disability-accessible park in New England.” The park received two awards from the Massachusetts Recreation and Parks Association in February for its design and commercial partnership.

In addition, the Commission report includes what appears to be a false claim that there is a threat of a “revival of large-scale institutionalizations” in Massachusetts. It provides no evidence for the claim.

While the report doesn’t appear to specifically recommend the closure Wrentham or Hogan, it claims institutionalization “stubbornly remains.” The statement appears to be an indirect call for the closure of facilities such as Wrentham and Hogan. If the report is referring only to institutions for the mentally ill as stubbornly remaining, it doesn’t specify that distinction.

The report’s full statement on this issue is:

Precisely because the public is largely unaware of the countless tragedies inflicted by these institutions—tragedies told in this hidden history—people with disabilities today face very-real threats by the non-disabled including the revival of large-scale institutionalizations where the practice has been abolished, and its expansion where it stubbornly remains.

Rights abuses were not ‘overlooked’

In its coverage of the Commission’s report, GBH News, a Boston-based National Public Radio affiliate and one of the more fervent critics of the former Fernald Center, quoted Alex Green, vice-chair of the Commission and one of the chief proponents of the Commission’s creation. According to GBH News, Green stated:

I think that there’s a massive ongoing act of erasure happening about one of the most significant and overlooked human rights tragedies in the history of this state and the country. It [the report] really gives us a devastatingly personal sense of how the state turned the idea of care into a much darker thing that harmed a lot of people.”

But the Ricci class action case and Judge Tauro’s involvement clearly show that those human rights abuses were not overlooked. They were addressed and corrected.

Moreover, even with regard to the early history of institutional care in Massachusetts, the Commission’s report appears to be uniformly negative when, in reality, not everything was necessarily bad about those early years.

As Ingrid Grenon noted in her book, “From One Century to the Next: A history of Wrentham State School and the Institutional Model in Massachusetts,” the 1920s was a period when the then Wrentham State School, under the direction of its first superintendent, George Wallace, had a caring staff and administration, and offered a multitude of services and activities for the residents.

Grenon’s book points out that Wrentham, like other similar institutions that sprang up in this state and around the country, entered a long decline, starting in the 1930s as it became more and more overcrowded and understaffed. The state schools in Massachusetts were finally brought back to excellence as a result of the Ricci v. Okin class action litigation.

But the Special Commission has this to say about those early years of institutional care in Massachusetts:

…Massachusetts developed, sustained, and exported many of the first legal, medical, educational, charitable, and social systems for placing people with intellectual, developmental, and mental health disabilities in institutions: practices widely understood for more than 75 years to be a violation of fundamental human rights. (my emphasis)

In sum, we would again emphasize that the report appears to have made some positive contributions with regard to the need for public access to records and for the identification of unmarked graves on the sites of the former institutions in Massachusetts.

But it is unfortunate that the report repeatedly leaps from those issues to unwarranted condemnations of the role and history of institutional care in the state. It’s clear from the report that the Commission did not closely examine the full history.

As we’ve previously noted, Green and other proponents of the Commission made statements prior to serving on the Commission that were almost uniformly negative about care at the former Fernald Center, in particular.

That negative agenda appears to have muddied the positive contribution that the report has tried to make with regard to the role of institutional care in Massachusetts.