The Carcerality of Eugenics

This chapter describes the everyday experience of institutions in the early twentieth century, focusing on the types of care, treatment, and rehabilitation that patients were purported to receive. Building on Liat Ben-Moshe’s argument that disability institutions are part of the carceral industrial complex, this chapter identifies how care was indecipherable from the carceral; care became punitive, and punishment strategies were adapted from treatment. This line of inquiry draws out the ways that pathologization and criminalization operate simultaneously to create the carceral state. Using a gender analysis, this chapter also expands on what Angela Y. Davis calls the “punishment continuum” by naming how eugenics institutions operated specifically as sites for the punishment of those assigned to the category of girls and women.