Fatherhood Arrested: Parenting from Within the Juvenile Justice System

5. Young Fatherhood, Incarceration, and Public Policy

129 5 Young Fatherhood, Incarceration, and Public Policy The juvenile correctional system began in 1825 in New York with the creation of the first reform school. Before that time, juveniles who committed serious crimes were housed alongside adults in local jails. In many cases, judges pardoned children rather than send them to jail because they feared harm would come to them. These judges, however, were increasingly criticized for this practice. The public clearly favored punishment for criminal children. From the perspective of both the judges and the public, the opening of juvenile reform schools was an ideal solution. By the 1870s, there were more than fifty in operation (Schlossman 1995). Since then, the juvenile justice system has grown exponentially, and today it bears only a slight resemblance to the original reform-school system. To understand how we have evolved to the current system and where we should go from here, it is useful to briefly place the juvenile prison in its social and political context. Since the early days of the reform schools, the public has vacillated between a desire to use the juvenile justice system to rehabilitate criminal youth and a desire to use it to punish. In The Cycle of Juvenile Justice (1992), Thomas Bernard illustrates how public opinion about the purpose of the prison cycles from punitive to 130 Fatherhood Arrested rehabilitative. A cycle begins when public fears about crime intensify . Policymakers and prison officials respond to this public fear and implement restrictive and punitive policies in the prisons. At a certain point, however, concern arises over prison conditions, and reform efforts and rehabilitative programs are put into place. The cycle returns to punitive policies when the public realizes that there is still a high level of crime. As their fear again mounts, they place blame for crime on the “lenient” rehabilitative policies and insist that they be abandoned (Bernard 1992). Many of the changes in juvenile justice policies over time can be attributed to this punitive /rehabilitative cycle. A second debate that has shaped the juvenile correctional system involves the presumed nature of children and adolescents. Central to the creation of the reform school was the idea that children were morally and behaviorally different from adults. Children were believed to be less culpable and more malleable than adults and were therefore seen as more receptive to rehabilitation efforts. This belief has persisted and has ensured that the juvenile correctional system remains separate from the adult system. It has also meant that the juvenile system is more geared toward rehabilitation than is the adult system, even during punitive periods. This is not to say, however, that opinions about the nature of children and adults remain static. The degree to which the two groups are seen as different has changed over time, and the juvenile correctional system has changed with it. At times when young people are viewed as being substantially different from adults, the two prison systems become distinct. In contrast, when juvenile offenders are seen as similar to adults, the systems more closely resemble each other (Scott and Grisso 1997). As societal ideas have shifted about the purpose of prison and the nature of young people, changes have been made to the structure of the juvenile correctional system. In the early nineteenth cen- Young Fatherhood, Incarceration, and Public Policy 131 tury, public sentiment about the purpose of the prison tended toward rehabilitation. The early reform schools, therefore, were based on the idea that criminal children were wayward and needed guidance and rehabilitation. Reform schools stressed order and hard work so that young people could be taught deference and selfdiscipline . To this end, residents of the reform schools were given jobs and required to attend school. Significantly, the reform schools were not intended for the exclusive use of criminals; they also housed poor and immigrant children, who were seen as being in need of guidance (Schlossman 1995). The rehabilitative drive of this period corresponds with a societal view of children as essentially different from adults (Scott and Grisso 1997). By the late 1800s, when prison overcrowding became widespread , many of the rehabilitative goals of the juvenile prisons were abandoned. The juvenile prisons began to adopt a much more punitive tone and to resemble adult prisons. By the end of the century , however, another cycle of rehabilitation began as reformers took note of the abysmal conditions in the reform schools. They discovered that inmates were mistreated...