'They Just Took Me Away'

Adults declared “incapacitated” by the courts can lose everything— their homes, their savings, their freedom—to Florida’s sprawling guardianship system.

- By C.J. Ciaramella. Photo by Jahn Garwood

It’s been a year since Jan Garwood, a 72-year-old central Florida woman, won her freedom back and started trying to piece together what was left of her life.

In 2017, Garwood was placed in an assisted living facility against her will. A judge had declared her mentally incompetent and put her in the care of a professional guardian to protect her health and finances. The system was supposed to help her. Instead, Garwood felt like a prisoner.

She was stuck in a lockdown ward for three years, until a local activist and two attorneys managed to get her rights restored. By then, though, she’d lost more than three years. Her guardian had sold her house, leaving her temporarily homeless. All of her possessions were missing. Her savings and the proceeds from the sale of her house were in a trust that she didn’t have direct access to.

Garwood’s case is extreme, but it illustrates the complexities, uncertainties, and sometimes bizarre twists of guardianship cases, also known as conservatorships. Last year, the saga of Britney Spears’ successful efforts to free herself from an onerous conservatorship shined a spotlight on the issue. It was the first time many Americans had heard of conservatorships, but this relatively obscure area of the law, in which the state essentially determines that an adult should be treated like a child, sometimes involuntarily, exerts enormous power over the people who find themselves in the system.