num_pages: 240
description: The disturbing forgotten history of Americas experiment with eugenics. In the 1920s and 1930s thousands of men and women were sterilized at asylums and prisons across America. Believing that criminality and mental illness were inherited state legislatures passed laws calling for the sterilization of habitual criminals and the feebleminded. But in 1936 inmates at Oklahomas McAlester prison refused to cooperate; a man named Jack Skinner was the first to come to trial. A colorful and heroic cast of charactersfrom the inmates themselves to their devoted self-taught lawyerwould fight the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Only after Americans learned the extent of another large-scale eugenics projectin Nazi Germanywould the inmates triumph. Combining engrossing narrative with sharp legal analysis Victoria F. Nourse explains the consequences of this landmark decision still vital todayand reveals the stories of these forgotten men and women who fought for human dignity and the basic right to have a family.
language: English
title: In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and the Near-Triumph of American Eugenics
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company