From Silence to Accountability: How Massachusetts’ Special Commission on State Institutions Changed the Law

For nearly two centuries, Massachusetts operated a network of state institutions including state schools for the so-called “feeble-minded” and state hospitals for the “mentally ill” where tens of thousands of people who had been deemed “unfit” were confined, often for life. Labelled inmates, they lived out their lives in anonymity, confined within the walls of crumbling institutions. Many died and their stories were buried alongside them in numbered graves, forgotten cemeteries, and sealed archival files.

In 2023, the Commonwealth took a historic step toward confronting this legacy. At the urging of disability advocates and non-profits, the Massachusetts legislature established the Special Commission on State Institutions (SCSI), charging it with examining the history of institutionalization, identifying ongoing harms, and recommending corrective action. It was the first disability-led and disability-majority truth commission of its kind.

What followed was not simply an academic exercise. It was a process that transformed historical reckoning into concrete legislative change and a sweeping transformation in government transparency.

For decades, even before the closing of most large scale institutions in Massachusetts, families, historians, and survivors faced extraordinary and often unnecessary barriers to accessing institutional records. These records, often the only means of documenting the lives, deaths, medical treatment, and burial of institutionalized people, were found scattered across agencies, privately held, deteriorating, or entirely inaccessible both to families and to researchers.

The Commission’s findings confirmed what advocates had long argued: the Commonwealth’s record-keeping system created “insurmountable legal, procedural, and financial barriers to access.” And these barriers were not just bureaucratic inconveniences. They erased a monumentally important history, prevented families from learning what happened to their relatives, shielded systems of abuse from full public accountability, and denied institutionalized people what every person deserves: recognition, memory, and dignity. Records were strewn about abandoned facilities and sold online while more than 14,000 names of the disabled dead buried in institutional graves were being withheld by the state.

After extensive research, public testimony, and historical analysis, the Commission issued a sweeping report in 2025 outlining key recommendations. Among the most significant were the preservation and protection of records from destruction as many agencies across the state had been engaging in processes that allowed them to destroy records within a prescripted and frighteningly short period of time.

The Commission also urged that those same agencies create systems to centralize and safeguard archival materials. Last and most important, records access for families, researchers, and the public needed to be revisited. The Commission emphasized that access to records was essential not only for families, but for society as a whole. Without access, the history of institutionalization—and the human rights abuses it entailed—could not be fully understood. This specific recommendation would become the foundation for legislative action.

In 2025, Governor Maura Healey proposed legislation modeled directly on the Commission’s recommendations and by November, the legislature passed—and Healey signed into law—a historic measure fundamentally changing access to institutional records. The new law, tucked into a spending measure that was released at the close of the fiscal year, makes all institutional records public after 75 years and allows families and researchers to access records 50 years after a person’s death. The new regulations would also create safeguards to preserve records and prevent their destruction, regardless of the age of the records.

For many families, this is be the first time in generations that they will have an opportunity to learn the truth about their loved ones. Records from more than 25 institutions, including the Fernald State School, Worcester State Hospital, Belchertown State School, and Northampton State Hospital can now be made more accessible than ever.

Governor Healey framed the law as an act of dignity and historical justice, the records necessary to “tell the full story” of institutionalization. Advocates agreed and added that opening these records would force the state to address the broader historical harms done, optimistic that this move would lead to a broader public understanding and reckoning with this difficult history. This is particularly important in Massachusetts, the state that gave rise to many of the harmful and abusive systems and practices used in other states and nations.

This law does not undo the harm of institutionalization. It cannot restore lost lives or erase suffering but it does something essential: it ends secrecy and affirms that the lives of institutionalized people matter. It acknowledges that their stories belong not in locked archives, but in public memory, ensuring that future generations will not have to fight the same battles simply to learn what happened to their own families.

The creation of the Special Commission on State Institutions—and the legislation it helped inspire—represents a turning point but it is only the beginning: the beginning of historical truth-telling, the beginning of accountability, and the beginning of an effort to restore dignity to those whose lives were forgotten for far too long.

More is needed. Implementation of these new laws has been uneven across state agencies, with the state’s Department of Mental Health clinging to old practices that continue to erase this history. They will need to be compelled to comply, and the state still has more than 20 of the commission’s recommendations to take up including the urgent need to open up burial records from the state’s institutions. The very same coalition of disabled people who led this process, including institutional survivors, know that this will not happen without continued advocacy. We aim to ensure that our vision becomes a reality and that our findings help form a bulwark against the present surge of institutional threats to disabled people nationwide.

Kate Benson was the co-chair of the Special Commission on State Institutions. Alex Green served as vice-chair.