The state's mistreatment of the disabled dead

Boston Globe

a day ago

For 50 years, his brother David yearned to know where John was buried and how he died, but
Every year, states reject thousands of public requests for medical records and hidden burial locations of the disabled dead. They claim they are protecting patient privacy. It is a perverse abuse of an important legal protection for the living, and it has a frightening impact. With every person turned away, states prevent a long-overdue reckoning with how our continued reliance on government programs for institutionalizing disabled people has ripped apart the lives of Americans for nearly two centuries.
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That's why they called the disabled people under their watch 'inmates' — not 'patients' — and subjected them to enslavement, sexual violence, and psychological torture.
Three years ago, we took up these issues by spearheading the creation of the Massachusetts
Massachusetts reformers first planted the seeds for a nationwide mass institutionalization movement in the mid-1800s. Ever since, the state
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Yet much of this story is hidden. A
Without consequences for state and local leaders who have knowingly allowed it to happen, this neglect enables communities to rewrite history. For example, at the Fernald School where John Scott died in 1973, powerful local interests are
Nationwide, towns and cities have raced to redevelop former institutional sites without listening to survivors who say that there needs to be
Massachusetts needs to pass much-delayed legislation to manage and open historical records while committing to a coordinated effort to open burial records, make an earnest search for unmarked graves, memorialize this history, teach it in schools, and stop this massive act of erasure. It must begin with a formal state apology because, as we saw with David Scott and so many others, we cannot walk out from under the shadow of institutions when it still hangs over so many today.