In Our Backyard is a companion to the Mansfield Training School Project. In each episode, the MTS research team picks something that stood out to them in their research on Mansfield and discusses it, drawing on oral histories, institutional records, and archival photographs. Those conversations raise questions about memory, ethics, and life inside an institution. The podcast gives the website an audio component, so people can take in the research in different ways. Every episode comes with a transcript.
Episode One: Labor, Language, and the Institution
In the first episode of In Our Backyard, hosts Kiara Korten and Payton James look at the gap between how the Mansfield Training School presented itself to the public and what residents lived through. Kiara and Payton are 2026 SHARE Apprentices working with Professor Brenda Brueggemann. The pair draws on promotional posters, an internal document on kitchen equipment safety, the documentary Fred’s Story, and the case of Gladys Burr. They examine how the institution described forced, unpaid labor as “occupational therapy.” They ask why work is the only kind of therapy that appears in the records, and what that says about whom society values.
Content note: This episode discusses institutionalization, abuse, and forced labor.
Episode Transcript1
- Kiara: Hello, I’m your host, Kiara Korten.
Payton: And I am your co-host, Payton James.
Kiara: We are the 2026 SHARE Apprentices working on the Mansfield Training School Memorial Project with Professor Brenda Brueggerman. Welcome to the first episode of In Our Backyard, a podcast where we analyze aspects of the research that we’ve done while working on this project. We have been analyzing the archives that we have access to. Payton, tell us about what you’ve uncovered.
Payton: Yeah, I mean, among the many patterns that I’ve noticed, one that’s really stuck with me is the disparity between the public image that the Mansfield Training School has curated versus the lived reality of their patients.
Kiara: What exactly did you notice about how the Mansfield Training School displayed itself publicly versus privately, and what documents helped you in that process?
Payton: I definitely noticed a lot while I was sifting through the documents. And what really stood out to me was how through their public facing documents, Mansfield was conveying themselves as a caring institution that was fueled by the support of their generous community. For example, there’s posters that are celebrating the school’s anniversaries and showcasingfundraising events. And they also had posters that were promoting anything from fishing trips to burlesque fundraisers. And initially, before I’d even finished sifting through all of these artifacts, I found myself questioning what was really so bad about this institution that seemed to care so deeply for its residents. But then when I went on to compare the narratives that these documents were putting out with the perspectives of former residents and private records, I immediately noticed a really stark contrast between the two. And one facet of these documents that really helped me in developing that understanding of the Mansfield Training School was looking at how they handled and spoke about labor throughout all of these documents. And I ended up coming to the realization that they were spinning the maltreatment of their residents into a narrative that would reflect positively onto themselves. For instance, they were portraying forced and unpaid labor as occupational therapy with the purpose of eventually reintroducing their residents into society. And a really strong example of this is in a document titled Standard Procedures Operation of Kitchen Equipment by Patients. And here they were urging the staff to take greater care when operating steam equipment in the kitchen. And it goes on to detail how a patient sustained severe burns because they had opened up a pressure steamer while working in the kitchen. And this theme of residents performing unpleasant and oftentimes dangerous labor persists through the accounts of other former residents. Another instance of this is in a documentary called Fred’s Story. And this documentary shares the story of Fred Calabrese, a former resident. And he shares how prior to being institutionalized he worked as a dishwasher. And then once he got to Mansfield he was forced to work in the laundry room. Here he had to work in scorching heat while completing tasks such as cleaning his fellow residents’ diapers. And he even details how he has to wear a clothespin over his nose in order to do his work. And Fred declared how during his time at Mansfield he felt like he was treated as a prisoner.
Kiara: I totally agree that I think looking at labor is a really crucial aspect to understanding the full scope of the abuse that took place at the Mansfield Training School. I was also really struck by Fred’s documentary and found it very contradictory that he had a job and was functioning in society before he was institutionalized. To add on to this conversation, I feel like it’s also important to look at the case of Gladys Burr. She was 29 years old when she was committed by her family for reasons that she was not aware of and spent 42 years of her life in the Mansfield Training School. Throughout her time there, she wrote several letters to state officials asking for her freedom and saying that she was mentally sound enough to not be at a training school. There’s an article in the New York Times about Gladys’s story. In it, the superintendent at the time responds to a question about how many people are institutionalized when they didn’t necessarily have to be. He claimed that these folks have lived here all their lives and they feel comfortable here. He said they don’t want to leave and we are not going to force them to. Finally, in 1978, Connecticut officials granted her freedom at 78 years old with $235,000 in compensation. A year later, her lawyer filed a suit against a group of state mental health officials seeking $125 million. She testified that the staff beat her, restricted her to bread and water, and made her work overnight shifts in the laundry room. She claimed that she was also forced to lift patients much heavier than her, and at the time she weighed just 85 pounds. Since she was never paid for any of the labor she performed, her lawyer brought forward charges of slavery. And rightfully, they ended up winning their case. And I think this is a really clear example of how poorly and unlawfully labor was handled by the Mansfield Training School. and ultimately the consequences that they faced because of it.
Payton: I think that it’s really interesting that you had mentioned that in Gladys’s case, the institution claimed that residents were comfortable there and that they themselves did not want to leave. Whereas in Fred’s documentary, there’s a video of the superintendent stating that they don’t want to make residents too happy because then they will not want to leave. And these two perspectives are directly contradicting each other, which I think is a really overarching theme here, where the residents’ perspectives are directly contradicting with the superintendents’ and the school officials’ perspectives. Also, this concept of labor being used as a strategy for reintegration in the institution made me think about how Fred stated that he felt like a prisoner. And this is really interesting because in the prison system, labor is often used as a means of providing prisoners with life skills. And all of this together kind of makes me wonder why labor is the route that they’re choosing and why other facets of life that may benefit these people aren’t honed in on at all. And this is only further emphasized in the fact that the only type of therapy that I noticed being mentioned amongst all of these documents and artifacts is occupational therapy.
Kiara: Yeah, I noticed the same thing and it does feel quite exploitative in a way because I think that there’s so much more that goes into integrating into society and building community than what you can provide to the workforce. And perhaps that points to a larger issue about what and whom we value in society.
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