today in bad stuff

This morning Esther told me about Magdalene Laundries, which I had never heard of, and were extremely horrible and creepy.  The Wikipedia article begins:

The Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, also known as Magdalene asylums, were institutions, generally run by Roman Catholics, that operated from the 18th to the late 20th centuries. They were run ostensibly to house “fallen women”. An estimated 30,000 women were confined in these institutions in Ireland. In 1993, a mass grave containing 155 corpses was uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries.^[1] This led to media revelations about the operations of the secretive institutions. A formal state apology was issued in 2013, and a £50 million compensation scheme for survivors was set up, to which the Catholic Church has refused to contribute.^[2]

Classy as always, guys.

What were these places like?

These particular institutions intentionally shared “overriding characteristics, including a regime of prayer, silence, work in a laundry, and a preference for permanent inmates”, which, as Smith notes, “contradicts the religious congregations’ stated mission to protect, reform, and rehabilitate”.^[18] As this expansion was taking place and these laundries were becoming a part of a large network of institutions, the treatment of the girls was becoming increasingly violent and abusive. According to Finnegan and Smith, the asylums became “particularly cruel”, “more secretive” in nature and “emphatically more punitive”.^[12][13] Though these women had committed no crime and had never been put on trial, their indefinite incarceration was enforced by locked doors, iron gates and prison guards in the form of apathetic sisters.^{[citation needed]}

They were cruel, yes, but did they at least do what they were (ostensibly) designed to do?  No:

Raftery wrote that the institutions were failing to achieve their supposed objective; “the institutions had little impact on prostitution over the period”, and yet they were continuing to multiply, expand and, most importantly, profit from the free labor.

In case this all didn’t sound dystopian enough:

According to historian Frances Finnegan, in the beginning of these asylums’ existence, because many of the women had a background as prostitutes, the women (who were called “children”) were regarded as “in need of penitence”, and until the 1970s were required to address all staff members as “mother” regardless of age. To enforce order and maintain a monastic atmosphere, the inmates were required to observe strict silence for much of the day.

Several Catholic sources have said it’s all just a lie:

In a detailed commentary by the president of the Catholic League, a U.S. advocacy group, published in July 2013, it is claimed that “No one was imprisoned, nor forced against her will to stay. There was no slave labor, … It’s all a lie.”

… but in doing so, they contradict the testimony of over 600 living survivors:

To the shock and outrage of survivors, the religious institutes, the Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, andSisters of Charity, have refused demands from the Irish government, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and the UN Committee Against Torture to contribute to the compensation fund for victims, an estimated 600 of whom were still alive in March 2014.