Massachusetts Unseals Records of Abuse of Disabled People in State Institutions

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https://truthout.org/articles/massachusetts-unseals-records-of-abuse-of-disabled-people-in-state-institutions/

Massachusetts Unseals Records of Abuse of Disabled People in State Institutions

The state is baring the history of generations of disabled people and the violence many faced while institutionalized.

By Marianne Dhenin , TRUTHOUT
Published March 8, 2026

A new Massachusetts state law passed in November 2025 will make records from state institutions for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities or mental health conditions accessible for the first time. Generations of disabled people lived and died in those institutions beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Many experienced horrific abuse, and their histories have long been obscured.

“Our estimate is that we’ve opened more than 10 million records with this law,” Alex Green, a disability justice advocate who worked on the legislation and is also the author of A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled, told Truthout. “The argument is that family members have a right to see that information, know it, and safeguard it. And eventually the public does as well, so that it can understand the enormous atrocity that has occurred.”

Massachusetts operated more than two dozen schools, hospitals, and other residential facilities where individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities and others labeled “feeble-minded” were warehoused, beginning when the institution later known as the Fernald School opened in 1848. That institution was the first public school of its kind in the Americas, and it only closed in 2014.

Tales of abuse at Massachusetts’s Walter E. Fernald State School and other state-run institutions, such as Pennsylvania’s Pennhurst and New York’s Willowbrook, helped drive a movement for deinstitutionalization in the 1950s and 1960s. Willowbrook was the subject of a historic civil rights lawsuit after a television exposé revealed to new audiences that the adults and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities warehoused there were beaten, experimented on, and deprived of fundamental rights.

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1. Walter E. Fernald State School

conducted nuclear medicine research in children, I explored the abandoned school with a few friends after it was shut down, and it was eerie.

Other notorious state-run institutions in Massachusetts include Danvers Lunatic Asylum which later became Danver State Hospital, and Northampton State Hospital.

Danvers State Hospital