A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Alberta’s Eugenic Years by Claudia Malacrida (review)

A Special Hell is an important contribution to scholarship on eugenics that both supplements and extends our understanding of the broad spectrum of eugenics in Canada. Malacrida’s primary interest is in what she calls “a passive form of eugenics,” namely the “lifelong internment of ‘mental defectives’ ” (4) at the Michener Centre, a provincially-run institution located outside of Red Deer, Alberta. Although described by the province as a centre for “the residential care and training of mentally defective Albertans” (3), Malacrida’s analysis leads her to conclude that Michener is more akin to a “gulag” (30) or prison than a care facility. Founded in 1923 as the Provincial Training School, at its peak in 1970 the Centre housed upwards of twenty-three hundred inmates. It is no surprise, Malacrida argues, that the 1920s and 1970s are important in the history of the Michener Centre as well as Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act, enacted in 1928 and repealed in 1972. A Special Hell expands our understanding of eugenics beyond sterilization alone, reminding readers that institutionalization is both driven by eugenic logic and itself a form of eugenic programming.

The text also decentres sterilization as the eugenic practice in twentieth-century Canada: although medical experimentation and sterilization appear in Malacrida’s study, they are not the focal point until chapters 8 and 9. Such an organizational choice reinforces Malacrida’s argument that institutionalization and the dehumanization that accompanies it were important preconditions for Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act. Malacrida notes that social reformers lobbied heavily for eugenic sterilization because “segregation was not adequate in containing the threat of degeneration” (28). It strikes me as surprising that, although this text places institutional segregation and sexual sterilization on a continuum of eugenic practices in twentieth-century Alberta, Malacrida maintains the distinction between passive and active eugenics. These terms distinguish structural practices through which “potentially ‘bad breeders’ are removed from society and the sexual arena to prevent breeding” (63) from medical interventions that cause individual infertility, respectively. I wonder if Malacrida’s argument might be made even more provocative through terminology that connects the eugenic practices of segregation and sterilization rather than distinguishing between them.

Divided into ten chapters and two appendices, A Special Hell offers a detailed history that clearly demonstrates the depth of Malacrida’s research. Chapter 1, “Introducing the Michener Centre,” provides readers with some general academic work on institutionalization, engaging most closely with Foucault’s theories of surveillance and discipline as tools that construct the normal and abnormal subjects. Through concepts including normalization, medicalization, and the development of the professional (a series of terms that will likely feel familiar to academic readers), Malacrida outlines the birth of the Michener Centre. A Special Hell engages closely with the specificities of one institution as a reflection on institutionalization as a general practice. Drawing such connections, Malacrida reminds us that “the benign motives described in the institution’s history were firmly embedded within broader and more draconian discourses concerning the segregation, devaluation, and eugenicization of people who were deemed to be deficient” (5).

Language is a primary point of consideration for Malacrida, and this book opens with a note on language that precedes the text. Here, the author explains her use of historical terms such as mental defective, feeble-minded, idiot, moral taint, and moron without scare quotes “so as not to whitewash the violence embedded in much of the historical language” (np). Language and its companion, silence, are central not only to Michener’s history but also to our current understandings of institutionalization. Through the text Malacrida offers many terms to describe people living in Michener, including inmates, children (in a footnote Malacrida explains that the term “child” was applied to any resident regardless of age), residents, survivors, and prisoners. The title of chapter 2, “Entering the Gulag, Leaving the World,” is similarly worth dwelling on for a moment. This title positions the world of the institution and the world...