Recent History

Abstract

Institutional scandals from the 1950s till today often involved concern about the excessive and sometimes lethal use of restraint, time-out, seclusion, and restrictions of movement. In the USA, the Department of Justice oversaw many class action law suits against individual states to protect classes of individuals from violation of their constitutional rights and developed case laws to promote the rights of institutionalized individuals to safety and freedom of movement. From the 1960s onward, Britain also saw numerous similar institutional, primarily exposed by the media, rather than the law or professionals. In 1998, the Hartford Current’s documentation of 143 restraint-related deaths started another round of concern and development of new regulation to control the use of restraint. Despite the repeated concerns over restraint and safety, scandals concerning the use of restraint in both community and institutional settings and in educational settings continue till today. This chapter documents a long catalog of exposes and unsafe use of excessive restraint and seclusion in a wide range of countries, settings, and populations that parallel restraint scandals in the nineteenth century.