“This place is like a prison”: Disciplining Inmates and Resisting Institutionalization at the Ontario Institution for the Education of the Blind, 1882–1903

Abstract

This article investigates the experiences of the pupils-cum-inmates who attended the Ontario Institution for the Education of the Blind (OIB) between 1882 and 1903. Using testimonies from a provincial investigation conducted in 1900, the article positions the OIB as having developed as an extension and specialization of Ontario’s social welfare and carceral apparatus. It argues that the OIB possessed certain of the structural and organizational features of carceral institutions. During the principalship of Alfred Hutchinson Dymond, the OIB borrowed carceral ideologies and techniques from the British penal reform movement to discipline inmates. Economic pressures combined with the OIB’s organizational functions isolated pupils from broader society, increasing the likelihood of their mistreatment. The writings of the adult pupil Walter A. Ratcliffe, a former schoolteacher and deaf-blind socialist, were prescient in advancing a structural critique of institutionalization. Many of his peers criticized the province of Ontario for associating blindness with criminality.