Suffer the Little Children

Recorded Live at Strange Escapes, Waverly Hills Event

Pennhurst Asylum may have opened with the best of intentions, but it didn’t end up that way. In its 79 years of operation, the asylum was characterized by the harshest of patient mistreatment. Its more than 10,000 residents were subjected to what the Philadelphia Inquirer described as “medical experimentation, cruel punishments, and constant threats to physical and psychological well-being.” Residents were trapped, forced into labor against their will, unable to leave, out of control of the most basic elements of their own lives. And that was the adults. Children under five years old were kept in cages, lying in their own filth for days on end. As one newspaper put it in 1972, Pennhurst Asylum was “the shame of Pennsylvania.” Many inmates stayed there as long as 35 years. And some never left.

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