New York's law, applying to inmates of state hospitals for the insane, state prisons, reformatories and charitable institutions, is also fairly well drawn, providing for a board of examiners, and surrounding the operation with legal safeguards. No operations have been performed under it.
North Dakota includes inmates of state prisons, reform school, school for feeble-minded and asylum for the insane in its law, which is administered by a special board. Although an emergency clause was tacked on, when it was passed in 1913, putting it into effect at once, no operations have been performed under it.
Michigan's law applies to all inmates of state institutions maintained wholly or in part at public expense. It lacks many of the provisions of an ideal law, but is being applied to some of the feeble-minded.
The Kansas law, which provides suitable court procedure, embraces inmates of all state institutions intrusted with the care or custody of habitual criminals, idiots, epileptics, imbeciles or insane, an "habitual criminal" being defined as "a person who has been convicted of some felony involving moral turpitude." It has been a dead letter ever since it was placed on the statute books.
Wisconsin[89] provides for a special board to consider the cases of "all inmates of state and county institutions for criminal, insane, feeble-minded and epileptic persons," prior to their release. The law has some good features, and has been applied to a hundred or more feeble-minded persons.
In 1911 the American Breeders' Association appointed a "Committee to Study and Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population," and this committee has been at work ever since, under auspices of the Eugenics Record Office, making a particular study of legal sterilization. It points out[90] that a sterilization law, to be of the greatest possible value, must:
(1) Consider sterilization as a eugenic measure, not as a punitive or even therapeutic one.
(2) Provide due process of law, before any operation is carried out.
(3) Provide adequate and competent executive agents.
(4) Designate only proper classes of persons as subject to the law.