People With Disabilities Need Services in the Community
Congress should invest in state efforts to move away from caring for people in institutions and large group homes.
Caring at home.
Photographer: Gianrigo Marletta/AFP via Getty ImagesThe year was 1909, and Charles Wilbur was near the end of his life. As he looked back on a career promoting and operating institutions for people then called “feeble-minded,” he suffered profound regret.
“My views are decidedly changed since I learn that Society only desires to get rid of them and be protected from them when the older ideas were to uplift them by every means that could be used,” Wilbur wrote to a colleague, bemoaning the shift toward lifelong institutional segregation for people with intellectual disabilities. “Now when thus congregated in Droves like cattle it is about as much as we can accomplish to keep them comfortable and fed and clothed after a fashion, but without the affectionate influences most children get at homes. Shut up by themselves the large Asylum is no better than the County poor house and in my judgment not as good.”