A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Alberta’s Eugenic Years

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Description

Using rare interviews with former inmates and workers, institutional documentation, and governmental archives, Claudia Malacrida illuminates the dark history of the remedy of “mentally defective” children and adults in twentieth-century Alberta. That specialize in the Michener Centre in Red Deer, probably the most last such facilities operating in Canada, A Special Hell is a sobering account of the connection between institutionalization and eugenics.

Malacrida explains how isolating the Michener Centre’s residents from their communities served as a type of passive eugenics that complemented the active eugenics program of the Alberta Eugenics Board. As a substitute of receiving an education, inmates worked for little or no pay – infrequently in homes and businesses in Red Deer – under the guise of vocational rehabilitation. The success of this model resulted in huge institutional growth, chronic crowding, and terrible living conditions that included both routine and strange abuse.

Combining the powerful testimony of survivors with a detailed analysis of the institutional impulses at work on the Michener Centre, A Special Hell is very important reading for those interested within the disturbing past and troubling future of the institutional remedy of people with disabilities.

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