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Learning to Walk Slow: America's Partial Policy Success in the Arena of Intellectual Disability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Harold Pollack
Harold Pollack
Affiliation:
School of Social Service Administration University of Chicago
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Extract

The history of policies affecting individuals with intellectual disabilities has received attention from social historians interested in gender and family, from the emerging discipline of disability studies, and from scholars interested in the evolving role of eugenic arguments and medical genetics in American life. That history has received less systematic study from the community of policy analysts and scholars traditionally concerned with welfare, poverty, and public health. This is unfortunate because the history of policies affecting intellectual disability offers at least three significant lessons.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 19 , Issue 1: Special Issue: New Perspectives on Public Health Policy , January 2007 , pp. 95 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2007

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References

Notes

1. Trent, James W., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994)Google Scholar. Trent provides the essential starting reference in the social history of intellectual disability. His narrative provides a starting point for this article, though Trent does not focus strongly on income support or public aid policies considered here.

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26. Brockley, “Rearing the Child Who Never Grew.”

27. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind; Segal, The National Association for Retarded Citizens.

28. Segal, The National Association for Retarded Citizens.

29. Cited in ibid.

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41. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind; Tucker, Betty Lee; Buck, The Child Who Never Grew.

42. Zaslow, Jeffrey, “The Graduates: What Happens After Young Disabled Adults Leave School,” Wall Street Journal, 29 12 2005, A1.Google Scholar

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44. Pollack and Pollack, “Bringing Vincent Home.”

45. Soss, Joe Brian, Unwanted Claims: The Politics of Participation in the U.S. Welfare Wystem (Ann Arbor, 2002).Google Scholar

46. Braddock, The State of the States in Developmental Disabilities.

47. This paragraph draws on Pollack and Pollack, “Bringing Vincent Home.”

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49. Ansberry, “Disabled People Find Group Homes Can Be Broken, Too.”

50. Goldstein, Avram and Boo, Katherine, “D.C. Vows Review of Deaths in Homes: Care of the Retarded to Face New Oversight,” Washington Post, 6 12 1999, 1.Google Scholar

51. Melnick, Between the Lines: Interpreting Welfare Rights.

52. Ibid.; Neal and Kirp, “The Allure of Legalization Reconsidered.”

53. Rothman and Rothman, Willowbrook Wars.

54. Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 527–528.Google Scholar

55. Melnick, Between the Lines: Interpreting Welfare Rights.

56. Ibid.

57. Such problems are rarely addressed in academic research. If one searches Medline for the terms “developmental disability” and “representative payee,” one finds no article addressing intergenerational succession in caregiving.

58. See, for example, Jha, Ashish K., Perlin, Jonathan B., Kizer, Kenneth W., and Dudley, R. Adams, “Effect of the Transformation of the Veterans Affairs Health Care System on the Quality of Care,” New England Journal of Medicine 348, no. 22 (2003): 2218–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

59. Lakin, K. Charlie, Polister, Barbara, and Prouty, Robert W., “Wages of Non-state Direct Support Professionals Lag Behind Those of Public Direct Support Professionals and the General Public,” Mental Retardation 41, no. 2 (2003): 178–182.2.0.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60. Braddock, The State of the States in Developmental Disabilities.