In Menace to the Future, Jess Whatcott traces the link between US disability institutions and early twentieth-century eugenicist ideology, demonstrating how the legacy of those ideas continues to shape incarceration and detention today. Whatcott focuses on California, examining records from state institutions and reform organizations, newspapers, and state hospital museum exhibits. They reveal that state confinement, coercive treatment, care neglect, and forced sterilization were done out of the belief that the perceived unfitness of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people was hereditary and thus posed a biological threat—a so-called menace to the future. Whatcott uncovers a history of disabled resistance to these institutions that predates disability rights movements, builds a genealogy of resistance, and tells a history of eugenics from below. Theorizing how what they call “carceral eugenics” informed state treatment of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people a century ago, Whatcott shows not only how that same logic still exists in secure treatment facilities, state prisons, and immigration detention centers, but also why it must continue to be resisted.

"“Menace to the Future clearly and accessibly shows that institutionalization is (racialized and gendered/queered) disablement, detention is eugenics, and reproductive justice and abolition are key to liberation. Constructing an original anti-eugenic archive, Jess Whatcott provides an indispensable intersectional analysis of carceral eugenics that cannot be unthought once read. To truly understand why reproductive justice means abolishing confinement and/as carceral eugenics (as Whatcott calls segregation based on biological traits), you need this book in your activist and scholarly toolbox.”" - Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition

"“In this illuminating and incisive book, Jess Whatcott makes sophisticated and potent arguments about eugenics and carcerality, showing how the early twentieth-century institutionalization of people was just as much eugenics as it was sterilization and other forms of biopolitical control. This outstanding book, sustained by a lush combination of archival research and critical analysis, is a welcome and searing addition to scholarship on eugenics, the carceral state, reproductive justice, and disability capitalism.”" - Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination