Prison Eugenics In The Golden State
By Carl Close
In 2003, California Governor Gray Davis issued a formal apology for the forced sterilization of inmates in the state’s prisons, a practice officially banned in 1979.
“To the victims and their families of this past injustice, the people of California are deeply sorry for the suffering you endured over the years,” he said in a press release. “It was a sad and regrettable chapter in the state’s history, and it is one that must never be repeated again.”
Given the mountains of bad publicity surrounding the Golden State’s history of forced sterilization—an estimated 20,000 male and female California inmates were sterilized from 1909 to 1964—it’s easy to see why most people might have assumed that such practices were halted long ago. But new evidence suggests that coercion continued well into the twenty-first century.
