The Shame of the States is an exposé on the conditions of state mental hospitals in the 1940s, written by journalist and social activist Albert Deutsch. Deutsch, praised as a crusader, nevertheless wrote in the preface of this book that "the day of the individual crusader is over." Taking an historically informed approach, he called for a public reform movement as the only way to enact significant change of the state mental hospital system, emphasizing lack of state funding as the cause of the problems he witnessed (mainly the "twin diseases" of overcrowding and understaffing), and pointing towards a lack of public pressure on state representatives as the ultimate reason for the hospitals' limited budgets.