Title: Public Hostage, Public Ransom: Ending Institutional America
Author: William Bronston, M.D.
Publisher: Page Publishing
ASIN: 978-1684569090
Pages: 383
Genre: Autobiography / Politics
Reviewer: David Allen
Hollywood Book Reviews
‘Institutional America’ includes but is not necessarily limited to ‘hospitals’ and ‘schools’ for the mentally retarded, the disabled, and the elderly. According to author Dr. William Bronston, who spent a consciousness-raising and harrowing three years as physician and psychiatrist at Middlebrook School in Staten Island, New York, institutions are NOT the way for America to go. (Middlebrook became the iconic locus of the public deinstitutionalization debate in this country in the 1970s.)
His message in Public Hostage, Public Ransom: Ending Institutional America, could not appear at a more opportune moment, when funding for necessities like healthcare and education are getting strangled at the source. Bronston’s book persuasively argues that a single payer system needs to replace Medicaid-based ‘specialty’ funding for individuals with developmental disabilities and for seniors currently in nursing homes. Bronston argues with great force that community-based solutions, such as local housing and placement, serve not only the disabled but the surrounding community as well, and better.
There is a long and aggrieved history to the struggle. In the 1970s in America, deinstitutionalization became a rallying cry for increasing awareness of human rights abuses in institutions such as Willowbrook. Bronston, who had the intestinal fortitude not only to stick it out there but to apply himself and his colleagues passionately to lobbying, to writing memos, to educating the legislature and public, is an activist whose writing, whose appeal for humane treatment and common sense in our treatment of the most fragile, is a clarion call for further ongoing action.
The warehousing of human flesh is a dreadful thing to behold. Mental hospitals and nursing homes are usually built out of the public eye, away from the thoroughfare, for good reason: cosmetize the unwanted, hide them away in blockhouses behind the service road of the expressway. Public Hostage, Public Ransom’s 80-plus photographs, many of them stark black and white, provide a visual documentary to the narrative of forced custody and depredation that accompanies. Bronston is one of those masterfully articulate champions who gets right in there and rubs it in our collective face. When you see the human debris, the living skeletons, that once populated Middlebrook and sister institutions across the land, the blasted denizens of this nether world whose daily routine is limited to ‘three cots and a hot’ and heavy-duty meds and kicks and punches and blows…you will certainly agree, that something must be done.
Thanks to the unstinting efforts of Dr. Bronston, and of like-minded heroes roused to positive action by his and others’ muckraking humanitarian efforts, courts and legislatures closed down Willowbrook in the early 1970s. To his greater credit, the author of this testament to human suffering, waste, and occasional reparation relates changes at Willowbrook to parallel events and progress across the land. Public Hostage, Public Ransom is an extraordinary narrative and photo documentary of one doctor’s quest to make things better.
This book will challenge readers to rethink the structures that govern care for society’s most vulnerable and propels for a future that prioritizes human rights over institutional convenience.