This Remembrance Day, Remember the Dead So We Can Fight for the Living
Jess Whatcott
The third Monday in September (September 16, 2024) is California Memorial Project Remembrance Day. Remembrance Day acknowledges and honors those who have died while confined to disability institutions in the state of California. In addition to honoring the dead, Remembrance Day also reminds us that thousands of people are still institutionalized, in some cases indefinitely, in the state’s hospitals and developmental centers as well as in privately run institutions. It is also an opportunity to interrogate new policies created by Governor Gavin Newsom and the state legislature which threaten to pave the way for building more locked, secure disability institutions.
The California Memorial Project was established in 2002 by the state in collaboration with three disability organizations – Disability Rights California, the California Network of Mental Health Clients, and People First California. The purpose of the project is to locate gravesites of state hospitals and developmental centers, and to make a plan for marking and restoring the gravesites. The project also works to identify the names of those who died while institutionalized, including those whose remains were donated for medical research.
Through this research the California Department of State Hospitals now estimates that 45,000 people died in state institutions from the 1880s through then 1960s, and that most of their remains are in unmarked mass gravesites. By 1927, California had six state hospitals (Stockton, Napa, Agnews, Patton, Mendocino, and Norwalk), one so-called state home in Sonoma, and another institution called the Pacific Colony. In 1920, the governing body of these institutions – the Board of Charities and Corrections, which also oversaw the state’s prisons and reform schools – calculated that the population of the state hospitals was over 10,000 people, with 42% classified as female. This amounted to 1 of every 285 people in a state population of around three million being committed to a state hospital.
A wide variety of people were sent to state institutions, described by a state agency in 1912 as “a vast class of nervous and mental conditions embracing insanity, epilepsy, and feeblemindedness on the one hand; alcoholic tendencies, vice, eccentricities, absence of the moral sense, undue excitability and various anomalies of conduct and disposition on the other” (see Whatcott, Menace to the Future, page 30). Due to the popular embrace of eugenics discourse, physical impairments, chronic illness, and neurodivergence were presumed to signal “weakness” that required institutionalization. Gender non-conformity could also be treated as a disability. Tragically, families with disabled family members, both adults and children, were advised to commit their family members and move on with their lives as if those family members had died. Consequently, many people spent their entire lives in institutions without family contact.
By the 1950s, a number of forces converged that led to deinstitutionalization policies that closed some, but not all, institutions, and dramatically cut the population of people confined to disability institutions. In Decarcerating Disability, Liat Ben-Moshe describes the self-advocacy and psych survivor’s movements as revolutionary abolition movements, in their partially successful pushes to depopulate and close state hospitals and other disability institutions. In 1967, the California legislature passed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which narrowed the criteria by which people could be indefinitely institutionalized in a state hospital. Over the next thirty years, several state hospitals were closed or converted to developmental centers. A parallel self-advocacy movement to close long-term residential developmental centers (sometimes called training institutes) continues to this day. Six years ago, California closed one of its oldest disability institutions – the Sonoma Developmental Center – to long-term residents, although it remains partially open as a nursing and intermediate care facility.
Today, five state hospitals remain open in California, with an average daily population of about 6,000 people. A locked, secure treatment center at Porterville Developmental Center continues to confine disabled people who have come into contact with the criminal legal system beyond the short-term. Additionally, the California Department of Corrections added the word “Rehabilitation” to its name in 2004. The change came with many new types of prisons to confine disabled people, including prison hospice, geriatric units, and psychiatric units.
Over 50 years after the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act led to the closure of some disability institutions, the narrative that this policy was a failure has grown stronger. In particular, people from all over the political map have blamed deinstitutionalization for causing increasing rates of homelessness. The idea is that people with disabilities, especially psychological distress, who would have (prior to the 1950s) had a place to live and be taken care of, are now stuck living on the streets and self-medicating with substances. In 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a new policy called CARE (Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment), which includes elements that force individuals with mental health and substance use disorders into court-ordered treatment programs which may include required medication and/or in-patient treatment. Although Newsom emphasizes that CARE treatment is a “diversion from more restrictive conservatorships or incarceration,” and will be community based and “self-directed,” individuals who do not comply or meet treatment benchmarks can be put under conservatorship.
Further, Newsom pushed the legislature to put Proposition 1 on the March 2024 primary ballot. According to analysis by Katherine Wolf, Proposition 1 did two things: first, it changed the allocation of funds collected through the Mental Health Services Act, the money collected through a 1% tax on personal income over $1 million per year. One aspect of the change moves money away from innovative and often peer led services to housing “interventions” for chronically homeless people with substance use disorders, which may include treatment facility stays and investment in so-called CARE courts. Second, Proposition 1 allows the state to sell $6.4 billion in bonds to build permanent supportive housing, community-based treatment, and residential care settings. Only $2 billion goes to permanent supportive housing, mostly for veterans.
Alarmingly, language that would have prevented the rest of the money from going to locked, involuntary treatment facilities for mental health and substance use disorders was removed from the bill at the last minute. In contrast to the history of large state-run institutions, new institutions are likely to be smaller facilities run by private corporations under state contracts. Although initially the ballot measure had a wide lead in the polls, a grassroots campaign lead by disabled advocates and mental health consumers managed to narrow the yes vote lead to less than 1%.
Now, more than ever, we must disrupt the narratives about disability institutions in the state of California. We need real solutions for homelessness, not more disability institutions. The California Memorial Project Remembrance Day will be held in person at some sites across the state, and also virtually on September 16, at 1 pm on Facebook Live. For more information visit Disability Rights California’s web page. This Remembrance Day, let us remember the dead so that we may fight like hell for the living.
About
Jess Whatcott (they/them) is an educator, writer, and abolitionist organizer based in San Diego, California. Their book Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics is available now.
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