M. Scott Brauer
Fernald Developmental Center
Fernald Developmental Center. To accompany a story about efforts to keep the Fernald Developmental Center open, I photographed the remaining thirteen residents at the facility, aged 49 to 84, in their daily lives. The facility was the largest home for the severely mentally disabled in the United States, housing up to a few thousand residents. The remaining thirteen residents, some who have been there since the 1950s, have special protective status under Massachusetts law because of a settlement relating to illegal radiation testing on them. The facility costs approximately $1 million per person per year to stay open, but the residents' guardians argue that moving them to a private facility (as the state has done with all other such cases) would cause undue hardship at this late stage in their lives.
