Suzy’s Mug Shot
Thoughts on the “admission
photo” taken when my sister
was placed
in a state institution
by Sherry Gray
In the spring of 2004 I was
startled to find my sister’s mug shot. Forgetting I was in
a room full of people, I blurted out loud “Oh,
my god!” The man working the desk at the Indiana State Archives frowned
and asked me if something was the matter. “My sister’s mug shot,” I
answered. He looked at the large black and white photo stapled into the brown
board cover of the file. “Oh, no, that was her admission photo to Muscatatuck,
not a mug shot.”
It looked like a mug
shot to me. Suzy was photographed, poked, prodded, and all her
details recorded as more than 40 years ago she was admitted to
Indiana’s Muscatatuck State Hospital, a place she’d
never asked to go; a place that our parents, their doctors, and state
experts recommended so she would be kept away from society for “everyone’s
best interest.”
In this place she was watched over constantly, only ate at fixed
times, and was taken to and from activities and examinations without
warning, and certainly no choice in the matter. She slept in a large
room with strangers and was cared for by a revolving staff of attendants
hired and paid by the state. She had no privacy and only temporary
possession of any personal things. If she wanted more cake, she had
to steal from her neighbor in the dining room. If she wanted attention,
she found it more useful to throw something than be nice, as nice
girls were ignored.
Suzy rarely got out of her institution to see the outside world.
There were locks on doors and wire covering the windows. No one imagined
then that Suzy should have contact with anyone outside, even with
her family.
This was incarceration
in what the writer and activist Harriet McBryde Johnson calls the “disability gulag.” The
mug shot reminded me that because my sister was labeled mentally
retarded, she was taken away and shut up in Muscatatuck State Hospital,
a place that had more characteristics in common with a prison than
a home.
According to the Indiana
Commission on Public records Web site, the facility, formerly Muscatatuck
State School and Indiana Farm Colony for Feeble Minded Youth, was
founded in 1920. “Initially,
the Indiana Farm Colony, a work farm and residential facility, accepted
only developmentally disabled men over the age of sixteen. In 1925,
with the transfer of the Colony’s administrative authority
to the School for Feebleminded Youth at Fort Wayne, the Epileptic
Village focused less on work and more on education. In 1941, the
Colony became the Muscatatuck State School and began to accept women.” Today,
Muscatatuck is a homeland security training facility managed by the
Indiana National Guard.
Every time I look at
Suzy’s mug shot, I want to cry. Cry because
my sister looks so defenseless and the place so lonely for her. Cry
because I imagine those early days and nights she must have endured
alone in a strange and unloving place, like a puppy grabbed from
the litter and given to a new family. Did she cry herself to sleep
the first nights? Was she frightened and lonely? Did she awake sobbing
calling for her mother or her last caregiver? Or did she have nightmares
of being abandoned?
Ironically, her mug
shot is the best photo taken of Suzy as a child. It is also a rare
one as our family took few pictures of her. The mug shot shows
Suzy seated in a wooden wheelchair with a signboard placed in front
of her. It says “Gray Suzy ’70.”
Suzy is not looking
at the camera, but away to her left, perhaps looking at someone
in the room she knows. Her shiny black hair is cut short, the bangs
a bit uneven, but neatly brushed. She is wearing a short-sleeved
top or dress with a big round collar and two rows of buttons can
be seen starting down the front. Behind her the dark shadow thrown
onto a tiled wall shows that the photographer’s
lights were bright and the room bare. The look in her big dark eyes
is uncertain or worried. She is smiling slightly, but tentatively.
The room around her looks stark and cold, and the chair and board
appear rigid and uncomfortable. The straight lines and dark shadows
suggest an institutional atmosphere.
In the mug shot, Suzy looks shy and a little uneasy; a small and
vulnerable person caught deep in an impersonal institution. I have
been to Muscat-atuck so I remember the tiled walls, long hallways,
high ceilings, and large windows. This photo brings the memory of
my visit back to me. Muscat-atuck looked to me like a combination
prison, hospital, and college campus; its large yellow brick buildings
set on a grassy hillside overlooking fields and woods.
Although my sister survived
pretty well the years of incarceration—and
inattention by our family—the experience left its marks on
her personality and still affects her behavior today. But it did
not destroy her. Now living in a group home in a neighborly little
town in Minnesota and reunited with her family, Suzy has kept the
same charmer’s smile and prankster’s sense of playfulness
that I remember from her baby years. But when she refuses to say
goodbye to anyone leaving her or when she howls with glee on outings
around town, then I remember that 40 years of incarceration have
left their mark.
Suzy’s mug shot
reminds me of what she and many others of her generation endured.
And it reminds me that many individuals still live in large, ugly
institutions around this country who need their families to find
and love them, and to oversee their transition into lives of dignity,
independence, and community acceptance. ![]()
