Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) by Nell Bernstein

children of the poor, depriving them of their liberty in the name of their own best interest while skirting the burdensome requirements of due process. The civic leaders who comprised the society had little compunction about placing the cart ahead of the horse, granting themselves control over any child they deemed at risk of delinquency well before the law gave them license to do so.
    On January 1, 1825, the New York House of Refuge—the nation’s first known juvenile reformatory—opened its doors, with a society board member holding the post of superintendent and a total of nine youngsters under his supervision.
    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 anearly 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, allowingit 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