The Tragic Story of Belchertown State School - The Hell Hole One Father Forced America to See

In 1973, a federal judge drove to a quiet town in western Massachusetts and walked into a state institution without telling anyone he was coming. What he found inside would change American disability rights forever. Belchertown State School opened in 1922 as a "school for the feeble-minded," a sprawling Colonial Revival campus on 876 acres of Massachusetts countryside. From the outside, it looked like a small college. Behind the locked doors, over 1,200 residents lived in conditions so horrific that one state official compared it to Auschwitz. For forty years, nobody from the outside checked on what was happening inside. Then one father, a university professor named Benjamin Ricci, visited his young son and found him living in filth. Ricci documented the horror, organized other families, was turned away by fifteen lawyers, and finally filed Ricci v. Greenblatt in 1972, the first class-action lawsuit ever brought against an American state school. When Judge Joseph L. Tauro arrived unannounced, he found residents drinking from feces-filled commodes, naked and covered in sores, and an incessant soundtrack of screaming that he would remember for the rest of his career. His ruling forced Massachusetts to overhaul every institution it operated and helped launch the community-care movement that reshaped how America treats its most vulnerable citizens. This is the story of Belchertown State School. And the people who refused to let it be forgotten. — Sources and further reading: Benjamin Ricci, "Crimes Against Humanity: A Historical Perspective" (2004) Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer and Steven B. Kaplan, "I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes" (1989) Ed Orzechowski, "You'll Like It Here: The Story of Donald Vitkus, Belchertown Patient #3394" (2016) Robert N. Hornick, "The Girls and Boys of Belchertown: A Social History of the Belchertown State School for the Feeble-Minded" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012) Ricci v. Okin, 537 F. Supp. 817 (D. Mass. 1982) Ricci v. Okin, 823 F. Supp. 984 (D. Mass. 1993) — Disengagement Order "The Tragedy of Belchertown" — Jerry Shanks, Springfield Union (1971) "They Need Love, They Get Angry, They Bleed" — WTIC documentary (1972) — #belchertown #stateschool #abandonedplaces #institutionalabuse #disabilityrights #abandonedasylum #forgottenhistory #deinstitutionalization #truecrime #documentary #massachusetts #americanhistory