In a regime distinguished by its excessive inhumanity, the Magdalene laundries were its deep end. The story of the Magdalene laundries has been told and told again. But some aberration after independence in the 1920s caused Irish laundries to grow in scale and expand in use, becoming more exclusionary and punitive. But what most tortured those confined in Magdalene laundries was that this could be indefinite incarceration. The system continued to operate until as recently as 1996, when the last of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries closed.