12/06/2025
Our work in the Boston Globe:
Records from Massachusetts’ infamous institutions, where generations of people experienced mistreatment and abuse, are dramatically more accessible thanks to a new state law.
Advocates and loved ones of people who were abused in the institutions say the law is ending what for some have been years of frustrating efforts to learn the history of relatives who lived in these homes.
Records from Massachusetts’ infamous institutions, where generations of people experienced mistreatment and abuse, are dramatically more accessible thanks to a new state law.
Advocates and loved ones of people who were abused in the institutions say the law is ending what for some have been years of frustrating efforts to learn the history of relatives who lived in these homes.
“It’s a bit bittersweet,” said Kim Turner, a Newburyport woman whose grandfather and great-grandmother both lived at Waltham’s now shuttered Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center. “Something that I’ve been really wanting to know about for decades, it seems like we’re right on the cusp of being able to get that information.”
Newly accessible records also may provide a warning of how dehumanizing large-scale institutionalization can be as budget cuts threaten home care services, said Alex Green, a lecturer on disability rights and a key member of a commission that authored a report earlier this year about state policies that obscured the full history of the state institutions.
The law, signed by Governor Maura Healey at the end of November in a supplementary budget measure, came out of that report. Green said he and other advocates have sought more records access for close to a decade, despite there being little public opposition. The state is notoriously slow to pass legislation.
With the law’s signing, state hospital records are now available to a resident’s family members or academic researchers as long as the subject of the records has been deceased for 50 years. The general public will have access if the documents are at least 75 years old and the subject has been deceased for at least 50 years.
Disability rights advocates, Green said, “intend to use what is found in this work as a direct challenge to what we all predict are going to be significant cuts to services that allow people to stay in their homes.”
The law doesn’t address every recommendation from the commission, Green said. The commission’s report recommended a museum, memorials, and education to preserve the experiences of institutions’ residents, and an official apology from the governor. Reggie Clark, 72, a disability rights advocate who lived at Fernald from early childhood to 1969, said he plans to continue to push for some form of memorial. The state needs a prominent, visible reminder of who lived in these homes and what their lives were like.
“Who else is going to do it if I don’t do it,” he said.
For much of the 19th century and into the 2010s, Massachusetts operated about two dozen schools, hospitals, and other residential facilities for people labeled intellectually or mentally disabled. Legal obstacles, privacy restrictions, and poor record-keeping all have made it difficult, and in many cases nearly impossible, for relatives or descendants of the people who lived in these facilities to obtain their family’s full history. Even living survivors of the state institution system have had trouble getting their own files.
A new law will dramatically increase access to records from Massachusetts' infamous institutions.
