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

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 frombeing 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