History of Teenage Institutionalization in America

[Anonymous]

Erving Geoffman?s definition of the institution (1961): The central feature of total institutions can be described as a breakdown of the barriers ordinarily separating these three spheres of life (work, home, and friends). First, all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same single authority. Second, each phase of the member?s daily activity is carried on in the immediate company of a large batch of others, all of whom are treated alike and required to do the same thing together. Third, all phases of the day?s activities are tightly scheduled, with one activity leading at a prearranged time into the next, the whole sequence of activities being imposed from above by a system of explicitly formal rulings and a body of officials. Finally, the various enforced activities are brought together into a single rational plan purportedly designed to fulfill the official aims of the institution.



Pre-19th century

For more than 2,000 years western civilization shamefully neglected the children of our society. They were abandoned throughout Europe from Hellenistic antiquity to the end of the middle ages. Parents deserted their offspring in desperation when they were unable to support them due to poverty or disaster, or were unwilling to keep them because of physical condition, ancestry, religious beliefs, self interest, or interest of another child.

At no point did European society entertain serious sanctions against abandonment; most ethical systems either tolerated or regulated desertion. The English Poor Laws, beginning with the Statute of Laborers in 1349, began regulating the working and nonworking poor, and in 1536 provided an act that states ?Children less than fourteen years of age and above five that live in idleness, and be taken begging may be put to service - to husbandry, or other crafts or labours.?

In 1601, primary family responsibility was added to the English Poor Laws and local authorities were empowered to build housing for the impotent and poor. If it was found that a child?s parents were unable to care for the, the child could be taken away and made an apprentice.

Eventually abandoned and neglected children became the responsibility of the monarch, and the Commonwealth became their guardian. The ?Parens Patriae,? doctrine meaning ?father of the country,? gave courts the right to act in place of the parent and recognized the monarch as the overall father figure (the godfather) of all the populace. This established societal patterns that left children with few personal rights.

The ideas of the European courts and customs, especially the English Poor Laws, set the practices for subsequent social legislation and regulation of the working poor in Colonial America. (They may even be compared with the health, safety, and welfare system in America today.)

In England, society?s attitude toward delinquent children began to change in 1788. The Philanthropic Society of London, under the influence of John Howard(1), established an ?asylum,? a place of safety for delinquent boys. Another group, the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders, established a similar, separate refuge in 1816, and a public institution for juvenile delinquents was opened near Birmingham in 1817.

http://www.corrections.com/news/article ... leid=15285

1800's

Over 180 years ago the first of a long line of prisons specifically designed for young offenders was created in New York City.  Called the New York House of Refuge, its creators called it a ?school.?  The State Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, in its famous decision in Ex Parte Crouse, stated that the aims of the house of refuge were to reform the youngsters within them ?by training . . . [them] to industry; by imbuing their minds with the principles of morality and religion; by furnishing them with means to earn a living; and  above all, by separating them from the corrupting influences of improper associates.? Subsequent investigations have found that there was an enormous amount of abuse within these institutions and failed to provide any semblance of reform. The closures of these prisons came after numerous scandals.  The abuses continued within the institutions that followed (e.g., ?training schools? and ?detention centers?), so that by the early years of the 21st century we read of similar scandals in more ?modern? institutions such as the California Youth Authority (CYA).  This paper summarizes the most recent scandals of the CYA and similar institutions, including juvenile detention centers, and makes some linkage to the earlier houses of refuge.

http://www.sheldensays.com/Res-twelve.htm

Pictures
http://library.louisville.edu/uarc/digre/refugepix.html

Early American Reform

In America similar concerns about housing delinquent and abandoned children led to the separation of juveniles and adults. In 1817, the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism was formed in New York City. In its 1822 paper, ?The Penitentiary System in the United States,? the society argued that there was a necessity to provide new and separate prisons for juveniles. However, the prisons were to be operated as schools for instruction rather than punishment. Vocational training and reformation was stressed.

The first American publicly funded and legally chartered custodial institution for juvenile offenders, the ?House of Refuge,? was established in New York City in 1824. In Philadelphia similar institutions followed in 1860. The first houses were multi-story, grim, prison-like institutions.

During the mid-1800s the almshouse and workhouse practices evolved into the training school, reformatory, truant school or school of industry. The concept of the congregate living and working situation was used as a means of training the abandoned or delinquent juvenile.

The reform school system was introduced in Westborough, Massachusetts, at the Lyman Reform School for Boys, in 1846, and at the Reform School for Boys in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1858. The treatment philosophy of these institutions recognized that juveniles were more likely to be rehabilitated than adults and, therefore, should not be treated within adult institutions.

http://www.corrections.com/news/article ... leid=15285


Lyman Reform School for Boys
Westborough, Massachusetts

The Lyman School was almost self-sufficient. Youth raised livestock, grew vegetables, sewed their own clothes and built many of the facilities located on the school grounds. These facilities were the models for the Colorado?s Mount View Campus in 1881 and Washington?s Greenhill School in 1886.

Reform Movements

Despite the increased use of reformatories or training schools, the notion of punishment rather than reform was difficult to abolish. In the decade of the 1880s(2), the nation experienced a 50 percent increase in the number of prison inmates. Child offenders constituted one-fifth of the prison population, both adult and juvenile. Confinement conditions prevalent at the time, disease, squalor, and overcrowded living areas, led to public concern and initiated a series of reform movements.

Advocates during the 1890s, referred to as the ?child savers,? emphasized the need for prevention and opposed the conditions of the reform schools. They founded children?s aid societies to distribute food and clothing, and to provide temporary shelter and employment for destitute youths. Urban youngsters were placed in apprenticeships with farm families in the West and Midwest.

A similar movement in Chicago was organized by a group of feminist reformers who passed special laws for juveniles and created institutions for their care and protection. Louise de Koven Bowen and Jane Addams were civic-minded philanthropists who transformed child saving from a respectable hobby into a passionate commitment.

Bowen?s primary interest was the protection and welfare of children. She attributed the rise of youthful crime to the corrupting influences of city life, where dirt, crowding, artificiality, and impersonality robbed children of their innocence. Playgrounds, supervised recreation, ?morals police,? kindergartens, visits to the country, stricter laws, and more efficient law enforcement were her solutions to delinquency. The problem of juvenile crime, said Bowen, would be diminished by stringent enforcement of laws and the development of resolute character in youth.

Addams was the epitome of professional philanthropy. Her full-time career was centered on youth and family reform interests. After college graduation, she encountered the concept of a settlement house at Toynbee Hall in London and observed educated university graduates living and providing social services in the neighborhood community.

In 1889 with Ellen Gates Starr, Addams established Hull House. The settlement house was located at the corner of Polk and Halsted streets in Chicago. The neighborhood was a slum with overcrowded tenements, crime, inadequate schools, inferior hospitals and insufficient sanitation. Hull House workers organized clubs, recreation, and educational programs for people in the neighborhood. The distinguishing characteristic of the settlement house was its ability to deliver services without employing professional social workers or welfare agency staff. Social and welfare workers of the time had developed a reputation for being judgmental and punitive.

Contemporary delinquency control and prevention programs can be traced to the reforms of the child savers at the end of the nineteenth century. Socially responsible citizens created special judicial and correctional institutions for the identification and management of troubled youth. The origins of the definition of the juvenile as a delinquent are found in the programs and ideas promulgated by these social reformers. This era of public responsibility was the next step in the evolution of social reform and welfare programs in America.

The child-saving movement provided middle-class women with a vehicle for promoting acceptable ?public? roles and for restoring some of the authority and spiritual influence that women had seemingly lost through the urbanization of family life. (Richard Hofstadter makes the same point about the clergy at the end of the nineteenth century in The Age of Reform, 151-152.) Child saving may be understood as a crusade which served symbolic and ceremonial functions for middle-class Americans.

The movement was not so much a break with the past as an affirmation of faith in traditional institutions. Parental authority, home education, rural life, and the independence of the family as a social unit were emphasized because they seemed threatened at this time by urbanism and industrialization. The child savers elevated the nuclear family, especially women as stalwarts of the family, and defended the family?s right to supervise the socialization of youth (Platt, 98).

The child savers should not be considered libertarians or humanists. Their reforms did not herald a new system of justice but rather expedited traditional policies which had been informally developing during the nineteenth century. They implicitly assumed the ?natural? dependence of adolescents and created a special court to impose sanctions on premature independence and behavior unbecoming to youth.

Their attitudes toward delinquent youth were largely paternalistic and romantic, but their commands were backed by force. They trusted in the benevolence of government and similarly assumed a harmony of interest between delinquents and agencies of social control. They also promoted correctional programs requiring longer terms of imprisonment, long hours of labor and militaristic discipline, and the inculcation of middle-class values and lower-class skill (Platt, p. 176).

1900's

Juvenile Courts

In 1899, the Chicago Bar Association supported a statue which established a separate and distinct legal process for mistreated or delinquent juveniles. The concept followed the Parens Patriae principles and appointed the juvenile court as the representative of the state acting in lieu of the parent and in the best interest of the child.

Cottage Institutions
An important improvement in institutions constructed to house and treat juvenile delinquents began when the prison-like barracks were gradually replaced by smaller cottages and operated according to the principles of the ?family plan? by house parents. Living units were administered by married resident supervisors who lived with the children.

The origins of the family plan can be traced back to the Rauhe Haus, founded in 1833 by Dr. Johann Heinrich Wichern near Hamburg. The separate residential cottage plan was also introduced by the French penal reformer, Frederic Auguste Demetz. The French youth campus was opened in 1840 at Mettray. The cottages were three-story structures, with ground floor workshops. Like the early Pennsylvania prisoner reformers, Demetz believed in the influence of hard work. He also was enlightened enough to set up a form of self-government for the detainees.

The concept or model of self government was instituted in the early 1900s at the George Junior Republic in Freeville, which is near Ithaca, New York. The institution organized the treatment to be a virtual microcosm of the outside world, and self-government meant that youths were involved in the definition and enforcement of rules under the close supervision of staff. This concept is still fundamental in treatment methods known as guided group interaction or positive peer culture.

House Parents

Cottage parents were to provide the paternal supervision, understanding, and counsel that were missing in the youth?s home life. The system exists today at Girls and Boys Town in Nebraska, Le Roy Boys Home in California, The David and Margaret Home in California, and other small, private programs.

Early programs were positive. A surrogate family was better than no family. Today labor laws require a hybrid structure. Statutes limit the weekly work period to 40 or 48 hours per employee. Therefore house parents cannot be ?at home? except for normal working hours. Their presence has to be supplemented by day counselors and other support staff. Homelike stability, therefore, is confused, relegated to rules and procedures from others - the definition of an institution (4).

Between 1910 and 1940, changes to the architecture of juvenile facilities were minimal. Cottages located on large rural campuses usually operated by the state were modeled after prison site plans.

Several juvenile institutions were also located in older correctional facilities or state hospital sites. Examples include the Minnesota Home School in Sauk Centre, Minnesota; Greenhill School in Chehalis, Washington; Mount View School in Golden, Colorado; and Lorenzo Benn School in Atlanta, Georgia.

Federal Practices

Prior to 1938, no special provisions existed for the treatment of juvenile offenders who came to the attention of the Federal Courts. The enactment of the Federal Juvenile Delinquency Act of 1938 provided flexible procedures for the handling of boys and girls under the age of 18, and permitted Federal Courts to adopt the procedures used by state juvenile courts.

The law enabled United States attorneys to prosecute youthful offenders for delinquency, rather than charge them with a specific crime. A wider range of alternatives to incarceration (programs) and treatment options were therefore possible.

Professional Treatment

Following World War I, basic changes occurred in the care of dependent children and juvenile law offenders. These programs included a better means of identifying dependence and delinquent behavior; the professional training of social workers; the development of the social casework method; and the organization, both public and private, of social service agencies. Emphasis shifted from the authoritative and even punitive attitude of earlier reform efforts. Each child became an individual case, and the placement of juveniles in boarding homes and foster care became more widespread.

Social Services

During the Depression and World War II, the functions of government increased greatly. Local agencies provided social services to the public: welfare, health, employment, mental health, education, and services related to the needs of children. Passage of the Social Security Act of 1935 also encouraged the development of local child welfare services. The juvenile justice system philosophy expanded to include delinquency prevention and rehabilitation. Changes in the juvenile justice system altered court procedures and dispositions, and initiated the use of juvenile court referees and juvenile court probation personnel.

http://www.corrections.com/news/article ... leid=15285

The Progressive Era in the U.S. was a time of extensive social reform. The period, which formally spanned between 1900 and 1918, was preceded by nearly a century of discontent. During the Progressive Era Americans saw the growth of the women's suffrage movement, the campaign against child labor, the fight for the eight-hour workday, and the uses of journalism and cartooning to expose "big business" corruption. Prior to the Progressive Era child offenders over the age of seven were imprisoned with adults. Such had been the model historically. But the actions of political and social reformers, as well as the research of psychologists in the 18th and 19th centuries, began a shift in society's views on juvenile delinquents. Early reformers who were interested in rehabilitating rather than punishing children built the New York House of Refuge in 1824. The reformatory housed juveniles who earlier would have been placed in adult jails. Beginning in 1899, individual states took note of the problem of youth incarceration and began establishing similar youth reform homes.

Such early changes to the justice system were made under a newfound conviction that society had a responsibility to recover the lives of its young offenders before they became absorbed in the criminal activity they were taking part in. The juvenile justice system exercised its authority within a "parens patriae" (state as parent or guardian) role. The state assumed the responsibility of parenting the children until they began to exhibit positive changes, or became adults. Youth were no longer tried as adult offenders. Their cases were heard in a somewhat informal court designed for juveniles, often without the assistance of attorneys. Extenuating evidence, outside of the legal facts surrounding the crime or delinquent behavior, was taken into consideration by the judge. Early reform houses were, in many ways, similar to orphanages. Indeed, many of the youth housed in the reformatories were orphans and homeless children.

http://www.juvenilejusticefyi.com/histo ... stice.html

Houses of Refuge

In the early part of the 19th century, to the chagrin of prosecutors, jury nullification?the process by which jurors acquit an apparently guilty criminal defendant rather than impose a disproportionately severe sanction?began to play a significant role in the acquittal of children charged with crime. By creating the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, Quakers in New York City sought to establish a balance between those concerned about jury nullification and those repelled by imprisoning juvenile defendants in adult institutions or exposing them to the possibility of capital punishment. The society, which later evolved into the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, founded the first House of Refuge in New York in 1825 to "receive and take . . . all such children as shall be taken up or committed as vagrants, or convicted of criminal offenses" (Pickett, 1969). The children worked an 8-hour day at trades such as tailoring, brass-nail manufacturing, and silver plating in addition to attending school for another 4 hours. Many of them had not committed any criminal act, and a number were probably status offenders.

In an early legal assault on the involuntary incarceration of children in such institutions, a father sought a writ of habeas corpus from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declaring the commitment illegal. The court denied the writ and concluded that "it would be an act of extreme cruelty to release" the girl from the facility and refused to inquire into the procedures for commitment, the duration of her incarceration, or the conditions within the school.1 This decision is often credited with originating the use of the doctrine of parens patriae to justify informality and paternalism in dealing with children in the courts. The term, meaning literally the "father of the country," was a doctrine used by English equity courts to provide judicial protection for orphans, widows, and others.

Reformatories

The House of Refuge movement evolved into the slightly more punitive reform school, or reformatory, approach. The reformatory was created in the middle of the century to do the following (Platt, 1977):

Bullet Segregate young offenders from adult criminals.

Bullet Imprison the young "for their own good" by removing them from adverse home environments.

Bullet Minimize court proceedings.

Bullet Provide indeterminate sentences to last until the youth was reformed.

Bullet Be used as punishment if other alternatives proved futile.

Bullet Help youth avoid idleness through military drills, physical exercise, and supervision.

Bullet Be used as a cottage approach within larger institutions in rural areas.

Bullet Reform youth by focusing on education?preferably vocational and religious.

Bullet Teach sobriety, thrift, industry, and prudence.

Later in the 19th century, an occasional legal attack on the incarceration of children in such youth prisons was successful. In an 1870 case, the Illinois Supreme Court held it unconstitutional to confine in a Chicago reform school a youth who had not been convicted of criminal conduct or afforded legal due process.2 Two years later, the school closed, and juveniles convicted of crimes were sent to adult prisons or to a reformatory after criminal conviction. It was against this backdrop in the last quarter of the 19th century that the juvenile court movement began.

http://www.ncjrs.gov/html/ojjdp/jjjournal1299/2.html


The Introduction of a Separate  Juvenile Justice  System

The 1899 Illinois Juvenile Court Act was, in part, yet another response to the growing incidence of jury nullification, concerns about the dominance of sectarian industrial schools in a Chicago filling with immigrants, and reform-based opposition to confining youth with adults. While the Act did not fundamentally change procedures in the existing courts that now were sitting as juvenile courts to adjudicate cases involving children, it did reintroduce the parents patriarch philosophy to govern such cases. In addition to giving the courts jurisdiction over children charged with crimes, the Act gave them jurisdiction over a variety of behaviors and conditions, including:

    [A]ny child who for any reason is destitute or homeless or abandoned; or dependent on the public for support; or has not proper parental care or guardianship; or who habitually begs or receives alms; or who is living in any house of ill fame or with any vicious or disreputable person; or whose home, by reason of neglect, cruelty or depravity on the part of its parents, guardian or other person in whose care it may be, is an unfit place for such a child; and any child under the age of 8 who is found peddling or selling any article or singing or playing a musical instrument upon the street or giving any public entertainment.

The Act was unique in that it created a special court, or jurisdiction for an existing court, for neglected, dependent, or delinquent children under age 16; defined a rehabilitative rather than punishment purpose for that court; established the confidentiality of juveniles' court records to minimize stigma; required that juveniles be separated from adults when placed in the same institution in addition to barring altogether the detention of children under age 12 in jails; and provided for the informality of procedures within the court.

The court's procedures in Illinois were, indeed, quite brief and simple, often consisting of the judge gaining the trust of the youth through informal conversation and then asking about the offenses charged. In its initial year, the Chicago judge presiding over the first juvenile court, the Honorable Richard S. Tuthill, sent 37 boys to the grand jury for adult handling, deeming them unsuitable for the juvenile court's treatment orientation. His successor, the Honorable Julian Mack, described the court's goals as follows:

    The child who must be brought into court should, of course, be made to know that he is face to face with the power of the state, but he should at the same time, and more emphatically, be made to feel that he is the object of its care and solicitude. The ordinary trappings of the courtroom are out of place in such hearings. The judge on a bench, looking down upon the boy standing at the bar, can never evoke a proper sympathetic spirit. Seated at a desk, with the child at his side, where he can on occasion put his arm around his shoulder and draw the lad to him, the judge, while losing none of his judicial dignity, will gain immensely in the effectiveness of his work (Mack, 1909).

The Juvenile Court's Evolution

The juvenile court idea spread rapidly across the country, having been adopted by 46 States, 3 territories, and the District of Columbia by 1925. In Colorado, a parallel movement occurred under the leadership of the Honorable Benjamin B. Lindsey, who sat on the county court bench in Denver from 1901 until 1927 (Larsen, 1972). He exercised a type of juvenile jurisdiction under the authority of an obscure part of Colorado's compulsory school attendance law. He used the jurisdiction of the court not only to reform youth who appeared before the court, but to reform the city of Denver. His reforms ranged from addressing police corruption to ordering the creation of more playgrounds.

An incident that took place after Judge Lindsey left the juvenile court bench after his electoral defeat illustrates his zeal. He removed the court records, stored them in his home to keep them from his more punitive successors, and finally?accompanied by his wife, friends, and reporters?went to a vacant lot and burned them.

The Professionalization of Court Staff

In the early days of the juvenile court, volunteers on the court's own probation staff, who were largely untrained, performed many of the service functions in support of the judge. It soon became clear that professional staff were needed to serve the court and its clientele (Fox, 1970). As these professional services became more common, the role of volunteers diminished.

http://www.ncjrs.gov/html/ojjdp/jjjournal1299/2.html

Progression of Juvenile Rights in the 1960's

"In re Gault" - 1967

By the 1960s juvenile courts had jurisdiction over nearly all cases involving persons under the age of 18, and transfers into the adult criminal system were made only through a waiver of the juvenile court's authority. Juvenile courts aimed to make their 'civil proceedings' unlike adult 'criminal trials.' The civil proceedings, however, did not afford youths who were indeed facing a potential loss of liberty the due process of law rights explicated in the 5th and 14th Amendments. The right to trial by jury and the freedom against self-incrimination were guaranteed to citizens in 5th Article of the Bill of Rights (ratified 1791). This Article, the 5th Amendment to the Constitution, states that "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury?nor shall [a person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." The 14th Amendment required that all citizens of the U.S. receive equal protection under the law. The Amendment states, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.

A 1967 decision by the Supreme Court affirmed the necessity of requiring juvenile courts to respect the due process of law rights of juveniles during their proceedings. The ruling was the result of an evaluation of Arizona's decision to confine Gerald Francis Gault. Gault (age 15) had been placed in detention for making an obscene call to a neighbor while under probation. The Arizona juvenile court had decided to place him in the State Industrial School until he became an adult (age 21) or was "discharged by due process of law." The Supreme Court decision, delivered by Justice Abe Fortas, emphasized that youth had a right to receive fair treatment under the law and pointed out the following rights of minors:

    * The right to receive notice of charges
    * The right to obtain legal counsel
    * The right to "confrontation and cross-examination"
    * The "privilege against self-incrimination"
    * The right to receive a "transcript of the proceedings," and
    * The right to "appellate review"

The dissenting voice, Justice Potter Stewart, expressed concern that the court's decision would "convert a juvenile proceeding into a criminal prosecution." He held to the historical intent of the juvenile justice system, which was not to prosecute and punish young offenders, but to "correct a condition," and meet society's "responsibilities to the child."
The Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Control Act - 1968

In 1968 Congress passed the Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Control Act. The act was designed to encourage states to develop plans and programs that would work on a community level to discourage juvenile delinquency. The programs, once drafted and approved, would receive federal funding. The Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Control Act was a precursor to the extensive Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act that replaced it in 1974.
The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act - 1974

By 1974 the U.S. had developed a strong momentum toward preventing juvenile delinquency, deinstitutionalizing youth already in the system, and keeping juvenile offenders separate from adults offenders. The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 created the following entities:

    * The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP)
    * The Runaway Youth Program, and
    * The National Institute for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (NIJJDP)

In order to receive funds made available by the act, states were required to remove youth from "secure detention and correctional facilities," and separate juvenile delinquents from convicted adults. Part of the rationale behind the separation of juvenile and adult offenders was evidence that delinquent youth learned worse criminal behavior from older inmates. Such logic was voiced in the Progressive Era by the writer Morrison Swift, who commented on the practice of jailing young offenders with adults, "young and impressionable offenders were being carried off to Rutland with more hardened men, there to receive an education in lawlessness from their experienced associates." ("Humanizing the Prisons," August 1911, The Atlantic).

http://www.juvenilejusticefyi.com/histo ... stice.html

At the same time

   The Human Potential Movement bloomed in the 1950's and 1960's. Sensitivity and encounter groups spread rapidly, promising increased communication, intensified experience, and expanded consciousness. Business, educational, and other groups were sold sensitivity training programs, some conducted by psychologists, but most led by non-professionals who used the processes and techniques developed by psychologists. There soon appeared the commercially packaged large-group awareness trainings (LGATs), which combined a number of the encounter and sensitivity techniques with various sales, influence, indoctrination, and behavior control techniques. [3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Grou ... s_Training

Erhard Seminars Training or est (generally in lower-case letters), was a controversial large group awareness training (LGAT) seminar-program that became popular during the 1970s. Werner Erhard (born John Paul Rosenberg) founded est and conducted the first est seminar in San Francisco, California, in October 1971. Landmark Education bought the rights to the intellectual property contained in the Est Training in 1991.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Seminars_Training

'Get Tough on Crime' Legislation in the U.S. and the Drug War's Expansion

A steep rise in juvenile crime occurred between the late 1980s and mid-1990s. The increase in crime hit a peak in 1994 and then began to gradually decline. In response to a fear that juvenile crime would continue to rise at the rate seen between (roughly) 1987 and 1994, legislatures enacted measures designed to 'get tough on crime.' The 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act was amended to include provisions that would allow states to try juveniles as adults for some violent crime and weapons violations. Minimum detention standards were also put into place in some states. The anti-crime sentiment of the period caused changes to be implemented to the juvenile justice system that made it increasingly similar to the adult (criminal) justice system. The shift Justice Stewart had predicted in 1967, with the implementation of formal trials for youth, reflected an increasingly common view that juvenile offenders were not youth begging rehabilitation, but young criminals. Rehabilitation became a lesser priority to public safety in the aggressive campaign against crime of the 1990s.

In the late 1990s Americans faced growing concern over highly publicized and violent juvenile crime. A series of school shootings and other horrendous offenses caused the public to fear a new breed of "juvenile superpredators," defined by the OJJDP as "juveniles for whom violence was a way of life - new delinquents unlike youth of past generations." The OJJDP's February 2000 "Juvenile Justice Bulletin," acknowledged that the threat of juvenile violence and delinquency was grossly exaggerated in the 1990s; however, the fear experienced at the time resulted in significant changes to the U.S. approach to juvenile crime.

Round and round we go, not much has changed in the last two hundred years. Same ideas, same solutions, same politics even.

[Anonymous]

I posted this research because I was startled by the similarities with what we are seeing today.

The movement away from large boarding schools (prisons) popular in the latter half of the 19th century after scandals of abuse, over the next several decades they switched to smaller 'cottage' style, which we see happening right now before our eyes.

Another interesting aspect is the 'back to the earth' ideology, that permeates the Wilderness Programs. This is an interesting phenomenon, mostly because it fits in perfectly with the coastal personality types who are not Christian, and explains why the shift to a more 'earth based' savior has taken place so rapidly over the past decades.

Based on this history, and current trends I predict a similar movement as the ones described in this history, which will not abolish teenage institutionalization (since there is obviously a need at all times in history unfortunately) but tweak it slightly. We will turn away from the WWASPS style programs for the cottage sized, and wilderness programs.

What do you think?

[TheWho]

Great post !

Thanks for all the info and associated links.  As I recall prior to the 1900?s kids who were at risk or ?delinquent? as they called them would end up in prisons or living on the streets as you stated and then Charitable organizations and mostly Christian organizations would step in and get these kids out of the cities (which were thought to be the cause of these kids becoming wild and unruly) and sent them to small farms or ?Cottage style? as you stated to get a taste of nature (wilderness programs, I like that connection!).  The charitable organizations couldn?t handle the volume and pleaded for financial assistance from the government for decades until the Social Security act of 1935 was passed.  This, unfortunately, formed the juvenile justice system we have today and quickly expanded to include delinquency prevention and Rehab (RTC?s in their infancy).  The local state governments were obligated to deal with these kids, by law now.  The courts were quickly burdened and initiated the use of Juvenile court referees and probation personnel.  This all fell under the umbrella of a Foster care system.  This is considered a last resort effort to protect the child but has grown into an industry which needs to be constantly fed to survive.
I tend to agree with you that the trend is moving more towards smaller more intimate schools and the reuse of the wilderness programs which is driven by a need to stay in closer contact with the family unit (if one exists)?? we will have to see if the government is asked to step in again and fix (Ha,Ha,) things again.

[Deborah]

I posted this same info recently and some stuff on the history of wilderness. The search function is not searching the database prior to the migration. When it's working again I'll post some links.

[Anonymous]

Quote:
The Human Potential Movement bloomed in the 1950's and 1960's. Sensitivity and encounter groups spread rapidly, promising increased communication, intensified experience, and expanded consciousness. Business, educational, and other groups were sold sensitivity training programs, some conducted by psychologists, but most led by non-professionals who used the processes and techniques developed by psychologists. There soon appeared the commercially packaged large-group awareness trainings (LGATs), which combined a number of the encounter and sensitivity techniques with various sales, influence, indoctrination, and behavior control techniques. [3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Grou ... s_Training

Synanon  1958 or 1959
Hyde School  1966
The Seed  1970 or 1972
Straight, Inc.  late 1970's?
etc. etc.

[TheWho]

I posted this same info recently and some stuff on the history of wilderness. The search function is not searching the database prior to the migration. When it's working again I'll post some links.

Must have missed that.....  Thanks Deborah, I would be interested.