Menacing the Present

This chapter provides a history of California’s institutions from the 1950s into the present. While the population of people living in institutions has declined dramatically, some disabled people are still confined for life. Today, these institutions resist closure by integrating criminal incarceration and containment of the so-called mentally ill. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has, since the 1950s, leveraged public fear of the “mentally ill” and substance abusers to build innovative prisons that continue to conflate care, treatment, rehabilitation, and punishment. This fantasy of humanitarian incarceration is undermined by endemic medical neglect and forms of death dealing that reproduce the logic of eugenics in a variety of carceral settings. There is hope for an anti-eugenicist future in recent closures of youth prisons, yet abolitionists also face new carceral forms such as immigrant prisons.