Melbourne, Australia, had a similar institution, St Nicholas Children's Home. In 1983 my son-one was diagnosed as intellectually handicapped. The head pediatrician called him a vegetable and told me I had to place him in St Nicholas, because such children were a drain on society and my whole family would hate me if I continued to inflict such a burden on them. There was no way i was doing that, son-one was my loving little angel who was only just becoming easy to keep alive.  
To treat my grief on discovering my son would never have the future one envisages for a son I volunteered at St. Nicholas Children's Home, visiting  residents who had no other visitors. The treatment of residents was appalling, and I saw staff enjoying being cruel and vindictive to the residents. I saw them destroying things the residents loved just to be nasty, and the residents were afraid to speak up, having seen those who did murdered by being smothered with pillows.
Son-one is now a happy, middle-aged man. He never could read or write, but he's brave and determined with an excellent memory and a wicked sense of humour. I became disabled myself, and he lovingly helps me manage things.

"How can something like this be allowed to happen?" Simple. The vast majority of people are content with human mistreatment as long as it happens to those people over there and it doesn't cost too much.

Geraldo Rivera is most "famously" known for discovering that Al Capone's vault was empty. He should get a LOT more credit for the Willow Brrook report, which I'd never heard of until now.

Simon is right to point out that the staff were overwhelmed. From my own experience, we were often two staff for a single client. Today, many of the people who were once institutionalized would require one-to-one care, and some even need multiple staff. I worked with one client who required five staff members.

Even seemingly simple tasks take time. At a day activity centre where I worked, we had one client who staff needed 20 to 25 minutes just to fed her lunch. That was one person. Now imagine a ward where one staff member was responsible for 10 to 25 people, many with equally complex needs. Some of them violent, meaning staff had to protect other patients as well as themselves. While drugs "solved" one problem, it also lowered function, demanding more physical care.

None of that excuses the abuse. But it does explain why neglect became inevitable. These institutions were also political decisions. Governments wanted to house large numbers of vulnerable people as cheaply as possible, and staffing budgets reflected that. When you expect one exhausted employee to meet the needs of twenty people, many with profound disabilities, the system is almost guaranteed to fail. Some staff were cruel, but many were simply given an impossible job.

So after SEVERAL DECADES of abuse it took one reporter to finally say "Hey, what if I went in there and got a picture that isn't staged?"

I work with a non profit that helps disabled individuals in NY. One of our clients grew up in Willowbrook. He is in a very protective category of individual through OPWDD. I have cried inside hearing some of the stories he has told me.

This will be a long one, but I hope y'all read it because we can't ever allow ourselves to forget the people that were affected by the horrible 'institutions' and 'schools' that were so prolific in the past.  My aunt was born in the early 1950s and was profoundly autistic. My grandparents tried so hard to find help for their "disturbed" daughter (the doctors' words, not theirs), but nobody knew what she was suffering from, so there was no way for them to help her. She was non-verbal and violent, but when she was around 6 years old a doctor in Houston, one of the MANY doctors that my grandparents had taken my aunt to, examined her and thought he might know what was going on—it was the first time they heard the word autism. He recommended three 'therapist schools,' and my grandparents wrote to them, desperate. Only one—a research clinic in Chicago—responded positively and only with an offer to examine my aunt, not to accept her to their program. When they examined my aunt, they immediately accepted her into their program because she was exactly the kind of child they were researching ways to treat.

The next step was finding the money. My grandfather was a teacher/student at the University of Texas at Austin and my grandmother had to quit her job to care for my aunt full time since my aunt couldn't go to regular preschools and wasn't allowed to go to public school at the time. Anyway, the wife of HE Butts, the founder of HEB, stepped up and helped my grandparents pay for the school, as did many other people my grandparents reached out to for loans to help them pay for the school in Chicago.

That school was AMAZING for my aunt and the other children that attended it. She went form being non-verbal and unable to express herself, illiterate and unable to play, to being verbal, expressive of her emotions, able to read, write and color, and most important able to play with other children. She was happy there and made massive amounts of positive progress. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to stay at the school once she turned 18 and had to transfer back to Texas. While my grandparents lived in Austin she went to the Texas State School and was okay there. It wasn't great, but she was treated well and they helped keep her from losing ground, even if she wasn't very happy there.

When my grandparents had to move to Dallas, my aunt had to transfer to the Texas State Hospital. She was essentially tortured there: they would keep her in isolation as a punishment even though they knew she was terrified of being abandoned; she wasn't allowed to wash herself as a punishment even though the staff knew she had a horror of being unwashed; her clothes wouldn't be cleaned, etc. They would hit her. They would withhold food. My grandparents BEGGED to be allowed to take her out and keep her at home, but the doctors said that she wasn't 'well' enough, wasn't 'stable' enough to be allowed to be out in public.

My aunt died in 1978 when she was around 25. She asphyxiated on her own vomit and died because she was ignored while she was ill. She was left alone and allowed to vomit on herself without help until she died. She wasn't found until hours later.

My grandparents were part of a class action lawsuit against the state that didn't get resolved until AFTER THEY DIED OVER 20 YEARS LATER.

While it wasn't as public or notorious as Willowbrook, it was horrific and it should never be forgotten that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of such 'schools' and 'institutions' that were underfunded, understaffed, and were responsible for the torture and death of thousands of our fellow human beings. Good people. Kind people. People who needed help and had SO much to give this world. People like my aunt, Rosemary.

My Aunt Sherry has Downs Syndrome. Thank God my grandparents raised her in their home. Instead of sending her to a place like Willow Brook.

The idea of a place like Willowbrook existing fills me with complete rage, both as a teacher and as a human being. The apathy and cruelty on display by society when it comes to those considered "lesser" is despicable. It's just warehousing for the unwanted. I know it started out with good intentions, but bureaucracy and money taints everything.

My grandmother worked at a state school in the state where we live from the late 40s to the mid 80s. She worked with what she called her forever babies, a ward of basically adult infants. She washed, fed and cared for them for almost 38 years. It always frustrated her that during the 40s, 5os and 6os parents would just drop off unwanted children who had no special needs to live in an institution that would destroy them. She would say that place was meant for her babies not for children of unwed mothers or children from families with too many mouths to feed. It was a broken system and specialized in breaking children.

My wife works in the training department for a company who cares for developmental disabled folks in NY. The story of Willowbrook is regularly taught in those training courses for new staff to show off all the things NOT to do. Deplorable place and a black mark on NY's history of caring for disabled people.

The saddest part about this whole story is how many people actually tried to intervene. For decades. Even doctors who worked there, sitting US officials and even RFK himself, and still it got even worse.

It wasn’t some unknown covered up thing, everyone knew what was going on and it wasn’t even ignored. People tried to stop it, constantly, and it just wouldn’t stop. Fucking insane

My grandfather’s brother died in a place like that, had Down syndrome and died of tuberculosis. Remained one of my great grandfather’s greatest regret. Lived to be 104, from the 1920s to the 2020s, saw people go from horse carriages to electric cars, but never forgot his son. He saw all these scandals and horror happen in real time, over decades. Asylums, sanitariums, medical experiments and advancement, finding out how bad things got over the years, and never forgave himself. He couldn’t have known, but the fact that later in his life he did find out, absolutely destroyed him.

Every time Simon says Geraldo instead of heraldo, my eye twitches.

My sister's best friend runs homes for dependent adults, and she's determined to not let them end up like this. She has regular homes with only 3-4 patients per home (two so far, last I heard she was licensing a third), with one, maybe two staff at all times for the 3-4 patients. They leave the house for the store, the park, or somewhere else as a group every day. Yes, it's expensive to run things this way, but everyone gets taken care of. Our state is no stranger to institutions like Willowbrook, so I'm glad my sister's friend does what she does.

I know someone who was sent there. It absolutely broke him. He was sent for having ADHD. That's it.

It's a very complex problem with no easy solitions. The best thing for a disabled child is that they are cared by their families or a professional caregiver at their homes, but that is not always possible. I remember once seeing on the news families with disabled children that lack support from the government are specially vulnerable. The report showed a single mother of a mentally impaired child that had to work to provide for themselves and had no means to pay for a caregiver and and no other family to speak of (and ofc no support from the government), so she had to keep him on a leash tied to the bed while she was out working. It was very impactful seeing that, so I still remember that report years later.

Watch Cropsey, the horror of that place didn’t end with the close with the school

While the "Geraldo" vs "Heraldo" is a bit frustrating, the thing that really stands out to me is how influential and good of a reporter he was before he turned to the talk show circuit and became part of the fox news crew.

I live in upstate New York and worked in the community with a couple former residents of Willowbrook. I spoke with the father of one of the former residents. He told me how well they covered up what was really going on there. I also knew a staff member who told me horror stories when he worked there. My employment with NYS OMRDD(Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities)(since been renamed to NYS OPWDD)(Office of People With Developmental Disabilities) was from 1995 to 2004. Abuse was still on going in certain community residences unfortunately. After 9 years I was burned out! How anyone can do that work longer is beyond me. I cared very much for the people I worked with. The issue for me was how myself and other staff members were treated in addition to worrying about abusive members. It was too much for me and I was in my 20's at the time of my employment! After 20 years of looking for different work that paid as well as the state, I ended up back with the state in a completely different line of work. Far less stress for me personally....

I worked with adults that had lived at Willowbrook. When it closed, the children and adults were sent to homes across Upstate New York. They were then part of the "Willowbrook Class" and followed for the remainder of their lives. It's horrible to think of what these people went through. Sad and sick.