Despite the real reforms of recent years, the state hasn’t done justice to the past. When people set out to learn what happened to family members, they find no one who stands ready to help. Paper records sit mouldering in scattered office files. Comprehensive accounts of state schools and hospitals and the lives lived within their walls have not been compiled.
To get things moving, I’ve filed a new bill to establish a special commission on the history of the Massachusetts state institutions that housed citizens with supposed intellectual or mental health disabilities. Twenty or so of these places were operating in the ’70s, before “deinstitutionalization” became a watchword of reformers.
Read The Barrett Report…