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If it was difficult to keep men and women apart within an institution, then separate institutions for the sexes might be the answer, and a number of such institutions were maintained or built: "Custodial care for feeble-minded women of full physical development, in distinctly separate institutions, which was at first considered by many a doubtful experiment, has proved a grand success, and should be followed by every other state in this country" (Winspear, 1895, p. 161).

The extreme in segregation was advocated by Barr who proposed the establishment of one or more national institutions or reservations (Barr, 1897; 1899; 1902; Dunlap, 1899) similar to the management of another large group of deviants in America, viz. , the Indians: "The National government has provided for the Mute, the Negro, and the Indian -- then, why not for this branch of population increasing as rapidly as they, and becoming yearly more inimical to national prosperity. A reservation set apart, affording facilities for agricultural pursuits as well as all the varied industries of a town, would provide an outlet for the surplus population of our institutions, to find there a home with definite life aims constantly realized. Such a colony, under such restrictions and protective care as our experience has proven is essential, a congregate number of institutions, so to speak . . ." (Barr, 1897, p. 13). "Protected from the world and the world from them, these children of the nation, instead of as now, its standing peril, would be a constant object lesson, at once a reproof and a warning to guide us to that 'statlier Eden of simpler manners, purer laws' which the twentieth century shall usher in" (Barr, 1899, p. 212).

Workers in the field were, at times, rather unrealistic. They exhorted the public to marry on a eugenic rather than emotional basis, and to forego marriage altogether if presumably inheritable detrimental traits were observed in their families. Similarly, some workers appealed to parents to institutionalize their children voluntarily: "Greater efforts must be made to have the great public know of the defectives, so that we shall not be accused of having axes to grind when we ask for more provision for them. Institution men must encourage visits, give out information and indeed, conduct a campaign of education, so that in the first place the unwillingness of parents to send their children shall be changed to eagerness, and then will follow the demands of public opinion and the concessions of legislatures" (Johnstone, 1906, p. 237).

At the end of the founding period, legislatures had been asked to permit residents to stay. As late as 1902 (Wilmarth, 1902), discharges from institutions were easy and informal. However, the tone changed during the alarmist period, and increasingly, laws and rules mandated legal and quasi-permanent commitments rather than voluntary and temporary ones: "... parents brought their children after a commitment by a local magistrate and in many cases subsequently tormented the superintendent of the institution by demands for their release. The superintendent was so harassed that he, himself, made a rule that he would receive no children unless they were committed to him by the courts, so that the state was made a legal guardian of the children in the institution. We are happy to say that this principle was afterwards embodied in an act of the legislature, in effect October, 1914, which provided that all admissions and discharges from the state institution at Spring City should be by court commitment" (Cornell, 1915, p. 332).

Since segregation was for the protection of society, it was only logical that commitments should be compulsory; "Segregation does not mean the opening of a boarding home by the state in which parents may place their feeble-minded children, have them trained by much labor, to the point where they become dangerous to the community if allowed at liberty, and then remove them and turn them loose" (Cornell, 1915, pp. 331-332). Johnstone (1908a) recommended that admission of "degenerates" require a trial and an indeterminate sentence. Release would also be only by trial, although little need for such trials was seen: "The only possible reason we can urge for their being set free is a sentimental one" (p. 114).

Apparently, Illinois was the first state to require court commitments, as of 1915 (Harley, 1917), to the exclusion of all other types of admission. Laws of this nature were criticized, not on legalistic or humanistic grounds, but because they might discourage parents from admitting their children (e.g., Carson, 1906).

One is left with the distinct impression that sensing the impending failure to segregate all the retarded, workers in the field vented their frustration by striving to increase the degree of segregation of those retardates already in their custody. Also, the fact that retarded residents had been released into the community both before and after the indictment period would appear to indicate that the decline of successful rehabilitations early during the indictment was an artifact of institutional policy. In other words, institution personnel did not release residents because they did not believe that residents could or should succeed. For instance, until 1967, retardates in Nebraska gained entrance to the state institution only by court commitment; once committed, they could, until 1963, only be released if they were sterilized or otherwise incapable of reproduction. To this day (1968), the law requires that release be preceded by a time-consuming expensive review by a sterilization board.