The Historical Context of Institutionalization

The Architecture of Exclusion

To understand if disability deserves heightened judicial protection today, we must look back at a century of state-mandated exclusion. The Supreme Court's Carolene Products Footnote 4 suggests that a history of purposeful unequal treatment is a primary reason for courts to step in and protect a group from the political majority.

Eugenics and the Law

In 1927, the Supreme Court provided a legal veneer for eugenics in Buck v. Bell. Justice Holmes infamously declared that three generations of imbeciles are enough, while cities across America enacted Ugly Laws that prohibited people with visible disabilities from even appearing in public. These weren't just medical decisions; they were deliberate legal strategies to remove those deemed unfit from the social fabric.

Extractive Abandonment

In Adler-Bolton and Vierkant's Health Communism, they describe the asylum as a site of extractive abandonment. Capitalism categorizes disabled people as a surplus population, where the state extracts economic value through massive administrative systems while simultaneously abandoning the individuals to physical and social isolation.

Mapping the History

Let's test your understanding of these historical concepts. Match the practice on the left to the logic it represented on the right. Correct. This connection demonstrates how the law was used to enforce social and economic hierarchies.

Transinstitutionalization

The push for deinstitutionalization in the mid-twentieth century was meant to be a liberation. However, as Jamelia Morgan argues, many were simply transinstitutionalized. Today, jails and prisons have become the nation's largest psychiatric facilities, turning disability into a carceral status defined by surveillance rather than care.

Applying the History

Consider a city council that denies a permit for a group home, citing neighborhood character. How would you use the history we've discussed to argue this is an Equal Protection violation? Type your argument below.

Lesson Recap

We have traced the trajectory from forced sterilization to the modern carceral state. This history of purposeful unequal treatment is the foundation for arguing that disability classifications deserve the highest level of judicial scrutiny.