Sarah Wise : The Undesirables: The Law That Locked Away A Generation

The shocking story of how the government put thousands of ordinary people into institutions, and forgot about them.
By 1950, an estimated 50,000 people had been deemed ‘defective’ by the government and detained indefinitely under a notorious but now forgotten law: the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act.
Their ‘crimes’ were various: women with children born outside marriage; rebellious teenagers caught shoplifting; those with epilepsy, hearing impairments or chronic illnesses who had struggled in school; and many who were simply ‘different’.
Through painstaking archival research, award-winning historian Sarah Wise shines a light on this shameful chapter and pieces together some of the lives that were irrevocably changed by this devastating legislation.