Shutting Down The Massachusetts Training Schools

“Forty years ago, Dr. Jerome Miller led the most dynamic juvenile justice reform effort in US history. Jerry’s work in Massachusetts offers valuable lessons for addressing today’s challenges.”

So begins the program for “Shutting Down The Massachusetts Training Schools,” an event sponsored recently by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Youth Advocate Programs. This symposium brought together some of the most prominent advocates and experts engaged in a national movement for the de-institutionalization of youth offenders. A reunion of those who led the Massachusetts reform in the 1970s reflected on how it was achieved.

What’s wrong with juvenile incarceration facilities? Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Bart Lubow declared, “These large facilities that house kids are horribly abusive. Kids get sent there for pissing adults off. They are obscenely expensive at $90k per bed per year and reflect an unrestrained hostility toward adolescents.”

The Annie E. Casey Foundation distributed a report called “No Place for Kids: The Case for Reducing Juvenile Incarceration.” The report uses stories and statistics to make the case that most youth facilities are “dangerous, ineffective, unnecessary, obsolete, wasteful, and inadequate.”

No Place for Kids asserts that nationwide “juvenile corrections systems have become the primary point of service for youth with mental health conditions and other serious disadvantages – youth who would be more appropriately and effectively served by other human service systems.”

Vincent Schiraldi, the Commissioner for NYC Department of Probation told those assembled, “I think the incarceration of young African American and Latino youth will be our Jim Crow, when judged by future generations. And the over-diagnosis of these kids as mentally ill will be a close second.”

Those gathered at the symposium were tasked with a mission: to formulate a workable strategy to depopulate youth prisons around the country. Small groups discussed ways of defeating predictable opposition, constructing – and financing – an effective continuum of community-based options.

One state held up as a success story was Missouri. Tim Decker, the Director of the Missouri Division of Youth Services, said a big part of the challenge is finding the right people to work in the system: people with heart. Decker said his staff adopted a simple mission statement to guide their work, “We believe all youth in the system can become productive citizens leading a fulfilling life.” Starting from a positive instead of punitive place results in seeing youth caught up in the criminal justice system as individuals with needs and great potential. You can learn more about that state’s system at MissouriApproach.org.

Gladys Carrión, Commissioner of NY State Office of Children and Family Services, inherited a system in which youth from Brooklyn and the Bronx were being sent to facilities hundreds of miles away from home, making it impossible for parents to monitor their treatment or stay connected to their children. Carrión has closed 18 facilities since 2007 and reduced the average length of stay to 6 months. She credited the media for its critical role, “The New York Times created a buzz, and the press in every local county published articles on the failure of the system.”

No Place for Kids is linked on JCCF’s page of resources on Juvenile detention and incarceration. Check back in January for a list of experts in the field you can contact for your own reporting on this issue.

Julie Drizin is JCCF's Center Director.