"Menace to the Future explores how systems of detention in the United States function as carceral eugenics, a mode of segregating and limiting the reproductive capacity of populations whose biological heredity was deemed threatening to the body politic. State confinement was shaped as a site of eugenicist segregation from the early twentieth century, working to facilitate forced sterilization programs, pervasive medical neglect, confinement of disabled and marginalized people, marriage restrictions, and other reproductive injustices. Focusing on California, Jess Whatcott utilizes archive material to investigate a variety of state detention sites through the framework of disablement, racialization, and queering, exploring how these processes have collectively constructed a "defective class" to incarcerate. The early twentieth century history is connected to institutions that still operate in California, as well as to innovations in state prisons and immigrant detention centers that perpetuate eugenicist control of groups deemed undesirable. Menace to the Future is also an account of how institutionalized people have challenged their confinement, decades before an organized disability rights movement. Telling this anti-eugenicist history from below is a genealogy of resistance for today's movements toward disability justice, reproductive justice, and feminist abolition"--