American Conservative editor and former Buckley Fellow John Hirschauer has a long, must-read City Journal essay on the activist-led closures of two of the four remaining state institutions for the mentally disabled in Pennsylvania: Polk and White Haven. It’s a difficult — and at times heartbreaking — read, but an important one, with implications above and beyond the cruel human cost endured by the disabled residents of the two facilities. “To their critics, Polk and White Haven Centers are relics of an era when the disabled were shunted away to large impersonal institutions, doomed to lives excluded and segregated from the community,” John writes. “To the advocacy groups who work tirelessly to close institutions, deinstitutionalization represents both best practices in the field of developmental disabilities and a moral imperative. To their supporters, Polk and White Haven are critical backstops in the disability-services system, a placement of last resort for the most medically and behaviorally challenged individuals.” A sample:
As conditions improved at the state schools and the residents who wanted to leave facilities were able to do so, the debate over the future of institutional care for the disabled changed. Research demonstrating that many individuals with disabilities improved upon discharge from the institutions, and the general mood of “liberation” attending the 1960s and 1970s, led disability-rights activists to argue that the schools needed to be abolished, not reformed.
Parents, staff, and some residents resisted. If facilities could meet federal standards for the provision of active treatment, and residents and their guardians were satisfied with the care provided, then why should the preferences of activists take priority?
Yet advocacy groups in Pennsylvania and around the country coalesced around the position that all remaining state schools should be closed and their residents placed into “community-based” settings, even if residents and their guardians opposed community placement. The Arc of Pennsylvania, the commonwealth’s largest disability-rights group, called on the commonwealth to “close all state centers and provide quality and comprehensive services in the community.” Its Philadelphia chapter supports the closure of all “of Pennsylvania’s State Centers and the closure of all large private” institutions. Sherri Landis, head of the Arc of Pennsylvania, said that it was “embarrassing” that the commonwealth “still operates state-run institutions for people with intellectual disabilities.”
To many parents and residents who have relied on the stability, specialized care, and institutional knowledge found at state-operated facilities, this commitment to total deinstitutionalization seems dogmatic. Edward Whalen, father of a man with intellectual disabilities who lived at a state school in rural Connecticut, told the New York Times in 1995 that “advocates are mesmerized by the mystique that all institutions are bad, that the buildings should be razed, the earth bulldozed over and then salt poured on the grounds so it will never rise again.”
As I noted on Twitter, the deinstitutionalization fantasy is one of the more gruesome illustrations of the practical conclusions of 1960s-era classroom radicalism. The human suffering caused by the activist campaigns against Polk and White Haven should serve as a powerful case against indulging that radicalism elsewhere.