Library Collections: Document: Full Text

WITHIN THE WALLS of private and public institutions in this country there are 115,000 defectives. They constitute roughly five per cent of the total number of defectives in the country as a whole. The remaining 95 per cent are walking the streets or holding down simple positions. This remainder is probably outreproducing the normal population by a ratio of 50 per cent. The sterilization laws which 27 states have at present are utilized progressively in but two. When one learns that approximately 80 per cent of our defectives inherited their lack, one gets a glimpse of a huge future problem. The immediate background of the present problem is familiar to social workers -- poverty, low home and family standards, delinquency, ignorance and sickness. A drag on his schoolmates, a joke for the cruel and a threat to his community, the defective committed to a state institution by court or agency receives little better than custodial care to the end of his days.

'Pleasant Home' the Ideal

"This school should be a pleasant home for these boys," said one well known superintendent of a state institution. No one will seriously disagree with that as a statement of the ideal type of environment which should surround the defective. In a friendly atmosphere he should be made secure against dangers, protected from illness and guarded against reproducing his kind. Depending on his mental age he should be given training, be it printing, music or weaving. Or it might be he should be taught how to eat with a spoon or to use the toilet. Constant psychometric testing should measure change or progress. The high-grade moron should be fitted for careful parole so that he can do useful work, and care should be taken to insure him against exploitation. For the large fraction who can never be released from the institution, recreational facilities are important and include, for example, movies, simple athletics, walks, reading and story groups, and outside work with flower gardens. Work programs are equally important for patient and for institution and are easily arranged.

Meet Serious Obstacles

This total program, on paper, is not a difficult one for our well organized society to lay down. Turning from it to the real program of a large state institution, let us observe the obstacles standing in the way of its realization. On this cold and wintry night there are 2,500 morons, imbeciles and idiots asleep in the large brick buildings which surround me. For the past eleven months I have worked here, at one time with a group of 130 morons of school age and at another time with 33 tubercular boys ranging from the lowest incontinent idiot to a moron who tinkers with radios. The problems which hinder the program outlined above divide themselves into two general areas: institutional factors and personal-psychological factors. Each is interrelated with the other, of course, yet each is distinct.

The psychological factors include patient attitudes and actions, personality traits of varying individuals, and the notional ingredients which make mankind so complex. Thus generalizations are suspect, even though necessary. One can safely say that the problem of group and individual discipline is the most acute and omnipresent obstacle to the "pleasant home" goal. Force, violence and restraint are the daily procedure for an attendant who is asked to control and not to train. Too often the attendant's first intact with the system is to be handed a stick and told to take over while the old attendant gets some lunch. Then he finds himself facing a crowd of 100 to 150 defectives, most of whom have a good deal of surplus animal energy and no acceptable place at which to direct it.

Nothing to Hope For

Conditioned thoroughly by a pattern of violence over a period of years, these defectives have nothing to look back on and less to hope for. They know no beauty, no affection and no rewards. Accordingly they exhibit slight regard for consequences -- even those "high-grades" who might think of consequences. In fact, one wonders whether daily corporeal punishment is not a type of fun or exercise for some of them. In many situations control is kept by using a working patient to intimidate the unwieldly group into keeping still. Even though the group may have spent the last four months looking out of the same windows, it learns to obey rapidly such a "firm" working patient. A less firm attendant often needs to call upon the patient helper to quell a fight or stop a near-riot.

As an individual, the defective is likely to be docile, easily led and amenable to direction. Stimulated, and in a crowd, he can create a genuinely dangerous situation because he unconsciously is longing for recreation and exercise. Further, more and more delinquents have been sent to defectives' institutions as they were found to be abnormal by judge or agency. The overcrowding of reform schools has caused this practice to develop. The type is often a "high-grade," something of a leader, and trained in a rougher school than most of the simply defective. Add to this a most serious lack of attendants of any sort and a scarcity of elementary equipment, and the need or a carefully thought-out disciplinary program in American institutions of this type is evident.