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SIX Circling the Wagons The Struggle over the Texas Youth Council, 1965–1971 On March 22, 1961, Bert Kruger Smith, a consultant with the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at the University of Texas, took a guided tour of the Gatesville State Schools for Boys training school complex. To her own surprise, Smith was generally impressed with what she saw. Although overcrowding remained a problem, seven distinct units housed and schooled boy inmates according to age, behavior, and intelligence. Modern-looking buildings with sparkling clean interiors outnumbered the (still in use) crumbling wood and brick structures built in the previous century. Teachers, guards, and administrators appeared more patient and competent than Gatesville’s prior reputation would have suggested. Daily life for the boy inmates observed by Smith seemed to be “the opposite” of the “extreme regimentation and social deprivation” that had characterized Gatesville since its inception. Most of the individual inmates encountered by Smith exhibited a disciplined but self-assured demeanor. Indeed, the scene’s tidiness was so complete that it aroused Smith’s suspicion; she was well aware that in the past, officials had orchestrated similar tours for prominent “outsiders” as a means of forestalling public criticism. Therefore, Smith speculated about what she might have been missing. After watching a classroom of seventh graders perform at only about a “third grade” level of competence, Smith wondered about the quality of schooling. Smith also noted that her tour had not included the dormitories “where the ‘others’ live, the bad boys and the Negroes,” those who comprised a plurality of Gatesville’s inmates. Smith departed Gatesville still uncertain about the extent to which the tyc had improved the substance, and not merely the appearance, of its rehabilitation program. Smith’s lingering doubts echoed those of Weldon Brewer, a tyc board member and her tour guide that day. Behind the scenes, Brewer had been a lone dissenter from the tyc’s expansion of secure institutions. Instead, Brewer advocated a “dynamic ” program that emphasized community-based prevention and rehabilitation —a return to the agency’s founding rhetoric, never truly put into practice. In a measure of how completely the tyc had abandoned its original mission, Brewer C I R C L I N G T H E W A G O N S · 151 explicitly invoked not the agency’s recent history but the national discovery of inner-city poverty. Incarceration in a training school, he warned, failed to address the “economic deprivation” of the urban areas from which most tyc commitments came and to which they most likely would return. As it had in prior periods, the renewed skepticism about juvenile justice stemmed from the desire to protect youth from prisonlike conditions. Critics in the 1960s, however, expanded substantially on their predecessors’ criticisms. They argued that the juvenile court, the detention center, and the training school undermined adolescent “adjustment” to a normal environment because they constituted abnormal environments themselves. Would-be delinquents adjusted to life in the “total institution,” which did not equip them for life in the outside world. Moreover, reformers of the 1960s were more willing to view the youth who fell within the purview of juvenile justice by the same social and cultural standards applied to “normal” teenagers. In this approach, they differed from their predecessors in important ways. First, these reformers wished to extend the protections of adolescent status to actual juvenile inmates rather than fictional images devised for public consumption. Rather than frame delinquent and at-risk youth as prematurely adult criminals or simply omit them from public discussion altogether, youth advocates of the 1960s insisted on portraying them, too, as misguided, immature, and impressionable . If adolescence was truly a universal life stage, then all children were entitled to experience it equally, along with the same generous margin of error that often was extended to more-privileged youth. Second, influenced by the youth culture, campus uprisings, and social movements of the decade, their conception of adolescent identity formation envisioned more autonomy and agency for youth than had the early postwar generation of reformers. To some critics, youth were not merely helpless victims to be defended against state abuse; they were also citizens with individual rights to be upheld. The language of rights, so prevalent in the period, charged a new effort to reform juvenile justice. Nationally, campaigns against child abuse, due process violations in juvenile courts, and imprisonment for status offenses dovetailed with compelling revelations of abused inmates in Texas’s training schools. The tyc responded at...

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