Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (7 page)

The House of Refuge—like every version of the juvenile prison that would follow—was from its inception a race- and class-driven enterprise, intended explicitly for “other people's children.” When the New York House of Refuge opened its doors, the state was at the tail end of a fivefold population increase, due primarily to forty years of Irish and German immigration.
Social engineers of the day were quite concerned with the influx of immigrants from Europe, particularly the Irish, whose arrival, they feared, would lead to “a breakdown in the social order and perhaps a lower class revolt against established moral and political authority.” In an
early example of racial profiling, one training school superintendent offered the following explanation as to why a particular boy had been identified as delinquent:
“The lad's parents are Irish and intemperate and that tells the whole story.”

Within months of opening its doors, the New York House of Refuge secured from the state legislature an allocation of $2,000 per year, allowing
it to harbor greater numbers of young people. According to the
New York Times
,
the rapid influx of confined juveniles stemmed “mainly from three sources, viz.: from the children of poor and often vicious emigrants; from the intemperance of parents, and the frequent want, misery and ignorance of their children; and from the existence of theatres, circuses, &c., whose amusements offered such temptations to children as to lead them often to petty acts of dishonesty to obtain the means of gratifying their taste for such performances.”

Whatever their offenses, actual or anticipated, children did not have to be tried or even arrested in order to be incarcerated in the early nineteenth century. In New York,
agents of the House of Refuge simply roamed the streets of immigrant neighborhoods and rounded up whomever they pleased, consigning children to custody on grounds of anything from impoverishment to delinquency to neglect.

The discovery (or invention) of this large and heretofore untapped population of delinquents proved a fund-raising boon for the fledgling society, which “sought the means of sustaining their institution from the sources which thus supplied them with inmates.” That line of reasoning garnered the society $10,000 from the Excise Fund, drawn from liquor licenses and fees imposed on theaters and circuses, and another $8,000 a year from the Hospital and Passenger Fund. The latter was amassed via a per capita tax on new immigrants, collected before they were allowed to disembark; in other words, a pay-in-advance scheme for the cost of housing the delinquents that each boatload of “vicious emigrants” could be counted upon to spawn, according to the advocates of the House of Refuge.

Good intentions notwithstanding, the less-than-charitable motives that drive the worst excesses of the juvenile prison today—racism, politics, and simple venality—were embedded in the institution before the first brick was laid. The popular narrative of a system born out of selfless concern for children endangered on the streets or in adult prisons, corrupted only later by politics and greed, turns out to be, if not a fiction, at best a partial account. The corrupting elements that plague the system to this day were right there in the blueprint from the very start.

Once it had established the need for its services, the society successfully petitioned for a more secure funding stream, augmenting its annual
allotments with a supplement of $40 “per head” (or child, as they are otherwise known). Tying funding to population created a built-in incentive for growth, and from then on the charitable endeavor known as the House of Refuge operated under an unspoken maxim that would characterize prison growth well into the next century:
if you build it, they will come
—in ever greater numbers, willingly or not.

By 1860, the New York House of Refuge had gone from nine residents to 560, some as young as eight, and momentum showed no sign of slowing. Having obtained a thirty-plus-acre tract of island land in the East River, the society raised upwards of $400,000 to build a massive institution intended to contain more than twelve hundred children.
“The boys' house,” per the
Times
, was “an imposing edifice, having a main building, 80 by 100 feet, 3½ stories high, with two wings, each 255 feet in length, making an entire front of 590 feet. The main building, and the terminal buildings at the end of the wings, are each crowned with a dome.”

Maintaining an institution of this magnitude was a costly endeavor, but those in charge soon found a way to fund it: they put the kids to work. The “boys of more vicious character, and who would be most likely to contaminate those with whom they might associate” rose at dawn and went to school for thirty to sixty minutes before reporting to work making chair frames, sieves, and rat traps—all “under contract,” creating a steady cash flow for the institution. More schooling followed dinner, and then it was off to bed. The “younger and better boys” had a slightly better deal—they were made to work only six hours a day, allowing for an extra hour of education.

The eight- to seventeen-year-olds working these long hours were kept in line by a system of rewards and punishments that bears a striking resemblance to the level systems and behavior modification programs in use to this day. The children were divided into five categories, based on their perceived character (“Class No. 3 are vicious, but a grade better in behavior than No. 4”). On the rewards front, the best of the lot could aspire to a “distinctive badge.” The punishment system was more elaborate, ranging from loss of already scant “play hours” to a bread-and-water diet and solitary confinement to “lastly, if absolutely necessary, corporeal punishment.”

Only toward the end of its account does the
Times
introduce concerns regarding certain aspects of the newly minted institution.

While some of the children . . . undoubtedly become attached to the superintendent and teachers, it is unquestionably true that a large majority are not restrained, by any affection, from acts of violence and insubordination; they regard themselves as prisoners, and as a matter of prudence submit to what they cannot help. . . . The system . . . requires for its highest measure of success what is evidently an impossibility: that one or two men shall become . . . so fully acquainted with the character, disposition and impelling motives of each of 450 boys, as to be able to adapt their instruction and conduct to them in the way most effectually to call out what is good and to subdue what is evil in their natures. . . . If the same number of boys could be broken up into twelve or fifteen families . . . each of those heads of families could attain a far more thorough knowledge of the character, habits and passions of each boy in his charge than can now be done. He would know what temptations assailed each boy with the greatest power, and what influences would be most effective in combating them, and we might hope for a still larger percentage of reformations.

Only one thing, in other words, was needed to improve what the
Times
found otherwise an “excellent institution”: an opportunity for the children to form trusting relationships with adults who viewed and knew them as individuals.

When I interviewed wards of the current system more than 150 years later, I asked them what they thought might improve their lives and prospects. The great majority offered the very same answer: trusting relationships with adults who saw them as human beings. However many children longed for this, few had experienced it, despite countless cycles of “reform” over the intervening years.

Beyond noting this central absence of human relationship, the
Times
had only a couple of suggestions: more religious instruction and better monitoring to prevent indulgence in “the solitary vice.” The heartbreaker comes when the newspaper begins to editorialize about the young wards'
future prospects, warning against the danger of introducing hope into a locked facility.

Injudicious friends of this, as well as of other similar institutions, often do injury by attempting to encourage the boys that if they do well they will attain to high social position and consideration. . . . It is a fact which it would be better to impress upon the children, that no such high destiny awaits most of them. They may and can become honest, upright, conscientious and hard-working laborers and mechanics; they may be able to provide well for those whom they love, and for the families they may rear, but very few of them will ever attain exalted station, and so far as this ambition unfits them for the sober realities of life, it is prejudicial to them.

There it is in black and white, set forth by the “newspaper of record” right from the start: more religion, less masturbation, and the radical curtailment of hope. This is the best one can wish for those “other people's children” raised by the nation's first juvenile institution, one that would become the model for the sprawling system to come.

So much for the American ideal of equal opportunity—the bootstrap ethos American schoolchildren are told makes their nation unique. The parcel of life allotted to those raised by the state, it was clear from the outset, would be forever limited by the experience of juvenile incarceration and the diminished status that it conveyed. Being “other people's children” got them locked up in the first place, and “other” they would remain for the rest of their days. To tell them anything different—to imply, for instance, that such as they might have a shot at the American dream—would be to do them a cruel injustice.

Later accounts indicate that residents of the earliest House of Refuge were all too familiar with these sober realities. There were regular allegations that the private contractors who paid (some said bribed) house managers for wards' labor abused the children who were sent to work for them.
Inside the House of Refuge, violence was “commonplace,” and residents regularly registered their protest by rioting, setting fires, or running away.

These problems did not stop the New York House of Refuge from
being widely replicated. Between 1750 and 1850, the population of the United States grew from 1.25 million to 23 million.
As cities scrambled to keep up with a massive influx of immigrants (and the delinquent children they were expected to produce), similar institutions sprung up across the country. The houses of refuge built in tandem with this wave of immigration, the legal scholar Barry Feld has written,
“constituted the first specialized institutions for the formal social control of youth,” rising as the “development of a market economy and growth of commerce in cities widened social class differences and aroused fear of the poor.”

The juvenile institutions (training schools, houses of refuge, etc.) that opened their doors in the early nineteenth century in cities including Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia defined their mandate in the language of benevolence but, upon closer inspection, had many hallmarks of the traditional prison, most notably locked cells and a culture of total control.

This culture was often a cruel one.
“Children confined in the houses of refuge were subjected to strict discipline and control. . . . Corporal punishments (including hanging children from their thumbs, the use of the ‘ducking stool' for girls, and severe beatings), solitary confinement, handcuffs, the ‘ball and chain,' uniform dress, the ‘silent system,' and other practices were commonly used in houses of refuge.”

As Barry Feld has written,

Punitive delinquency institutions have characterized the juvenile justice system from its inception. Historical analyses of the early training schools described institutions that failed to rehabilitate and scarcely differed from their adult penal counterparts. . . . One account of juvenile correctional programs under the aegis of Progressivism concluded: “The descent from the rhetoric to the reality of juvenile institutions is precipitous. . . . No matter how frequently juvenile court judges insisted that their sentences of confinement were for treatment and not punishment, no matter how vehemently superintendents declared that their institutions were rehabilitative and not correctional, conditions at training schools belied these claims.”

Never slow to seize an opportunity to control an unruly or unwanted population, the state soon got into the training school business itself, opening public juvenile reformatories to supplement or supplant those run by private charities. Massachusetts jumped in first with the
Lyman School for Boys (1847) and the Lancaster School for Girls (1855), and other states soon followed suit. By the end of the nineteenth century, every state in the nation was operating juvenile reformatories. By 1960, there were two hundred training schools across the United States, with a daily population of about forty thousand.

Then as now, the gap between rhetoric and reality when it came to the institution of the juvenile prison was large enough to swallow up the building itself. As historian Joseph Kett has written,
“Those who sought to reform juvenile delinquents in mid-19th century America spoke the lofty language of nurture and environmentalism. Reform schools, they claimed, were not prisons but home-like institutions, veritable founts of generous sentiments. In fact, they were prisons, often brutal and disorderly ones.”

“As children of immigrants and the poor increasingly populated refuges and reformatories, the conditions deteriorated further,” Barry Feld concurred.
“In an early version of ‘blaming the victims,' institutional managers contended that ‘the aliens had only themselves to blame for the decline of the asylum, for they were untreatable or unmanageable.' ”

Almost seventy-five years after the New York House of Refuge opened its doors, the Illinois Juvenile Court Act of 1899 codified thinking about juvenile justice for the first time, establishing a family court and giving it authority over delinquent, dependent, and neglected children (with little distinction made among the three).