Creating the Back Ward: The Triumph of Custodialism and the Uses of Therapeutic Failure in Nineteenth Century Idiot Asylums

Authors

Philip M. Ferguson, Chapman UniversityFollow

Files

Description

"My focus in this chapter is on the origin of the back ward rather than its demise. Where did the “back wards” that [Burton] Blatt and [Senator Robert] Kennedy witnessed come from in the first place? What 3 exactly were those “antecedents of the problems observed” that Blatt cited? This chapter reviews that history and argues that, in fact, there is a specific narrative to the evolution of the institutional “back ward” as an identifiable place where people with the most significant intellectual disabilities were to be incarcerated and largely forgotten."

ISBN

9781137393234

Publication Date

5-2014

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

City

New York, NY

Keywords

disabled, disability services, Human services, Culture, Photography

Disciplines

Disability and Equity in Education | Inequality and Stratification | Other Sociology | Social History | United States History

Comments

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published in Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, edited by Liat Ben-Moshe, Allison C. Carey, and Chris Chapman, in 2014. Some changes may have occurred between this version and the final publication.

Recommended Citation

Ferguson, P. M. (2014). Creating the back ward: The triumph of custodialism and the uses of therapeutic failure in 19th century idiot asylums. In Ben-Moshe, L., Carey, A., & Chapman, C. (Eds.), Disability incarcerated: Imprisonment and disability in the United States and Canada (pp. 45-62). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Copyright

Palgrave Macmillan