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Photo Credit: James Bavosi |
At one time, 7,000 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities lived in Massachusetts institutions.
From Burton Blatt's pictorial "Christmas in Purgatory" describing the conditions in those institutions - "There is a hell on earth, and in America there is a special inferno. Abandon All Hope, you who enter here. I sometimes wish that God were back. Suffer the little children."
I started my career in 1974. I personally witnessed the filth, stench and nakedness that was the Fernald State School. I was working with men who had been tied down, kept in solitary confinement and given lobotomies.