In some countries, they call them the 'abandonados', the abandoned ones. They're the impoverished mentally ill and mentally disabled patients being warehoused in psychiatric asylums that are more run-down, more uncaring than the most brutal American prisons. Confined in cage-like cells, tied to beds[...]

This is Eugene Richards' 1972 photographic essay, a social document of his home town of Dorchester, Massachusets, previously only self-published. The book includes additional pictures and a text that speaks of racial tension, violence, poverty and crime, tackling such subjects as the Klu Klux Klan i[...]