In Menace to the Future, Jess Whatcott traces the link between US disability institutions and early twentieth-century eugenicist ideology, demonstrating how the legacy of those ideas continues to shape incarceration and detention today. Whatcott focuses on California, examining records from state institutions and reform organizations, newspapers, and state hospital museum exhibits. They reveal state confinement, coercive treatment, care neglect, and forced sterilization was done out of the belief that the perceived unfitness of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people was hereditary, and thus posed a biological threat—a so-called “menace to the future.” Whatcott uncovers a history of disabled resistance to these institutions that predates disability rights movements, builds a genealogy of resistance, and tells a history of eugenics from below. Theorizing how what they call “carceral eugenics” informed state treatment of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people a century ago, Whatcott shows not only how that same logic still exists in secure treatment facilities, state prisons, and immigration detention centers, but also why it must continue to be resisted.

Jess Whatcott is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at San Diego State University.

List of Abbreviations  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
Prologue. Detention Is Eugenics  xiii
Introduction. A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics  1
1. Making the Defective Class  28
2. The Carcerality of Eugenics  58
3. The Political Economy of Carceral Eugenics  85
4. From Maternalist Care to Anti-eugenics  119
5. Menacing the Present  147
Epilogue. Abolishing Carceral Eugenics  173
Notes  179
Bibliography  203
Index