Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [105]
And try them it did, in a great many cases. In 1880, more than two thousand young people in the United States were listed as inmates in prisons and jails.72 In 1895, Governor Atkinson of Georgia pardoned William Whitlock, who had been sentenced to twelve months in the chain gang; Whitlock was “about thirteen years of age,” and “a simple, weak-minded boy.” Hardy Bragg, convicted of arson and sentenced to three years, was “only twelve years of age,” and had been “induced” to commit his crime “by an adult relative”; he, too, was pardoned.73 In 1899, Cora Hicks, an eleven-year old black girl, was put on trial in Durham County, North Carolina; the charge was murder; the victim, a black infant who had been burnt to death. The jury convicted Cora Hicks of second-degree murder and she was sentenced to seven years in the state penitentiary.74
Institutional efforts to change the system of juvenile justice began in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the 1820s. New York State issued a charter in 1824 to a group of inhabitants “desirous of establishing a ... house of refuge”; the courts had the power of committing to this house “all such children, who shall be taken up or committed as vagrants, or convicted of criminal offences.”75 These houses of refuge were curious hybrid institutions; a New York visitor, James Dixon, called the New York refuge “half prison and half school.” The inmates were a mixed group—destitute and orphaned children, as well as children convicted of crime.76 De Tocqueville and Beaumont, on their tour of American penal institutions, gave the houses a hearty stamp of approval. It did not bother them that some children had committed no crime but had been sent away “by way of precaution.” Was this a violation of rights? They did not think so. It was, rather, a necessary evil. Outside the institution, the life these children led carried with it the seeds of their destruction. And these “boys and girls” were “dangerous to society and to themselves: orphans, who have been led by misery to vagrancy; children, abandoned by their parents and who lead a disordered life; all those, in one word, who ... have fallen into a state bordering on crime.” The houses “alleviated” the fate of these young unfortunates “instead of aggravating it.” The children “brought into it without being convicted” were not “victims of persecution” at all; they were merely deprived of what the authors called, in a striking phrase we noted in the introduction, “a fatal liberty.”77
Reformers were enthusiastic about the house; but we rarely hear what the customers thought. Hutchins Hapgood, who was sent to the New York House of Refuge late in the century, was blunt in his judgments: the House of Refuge was a “school for crime. Unspeakably bad habits were contracted there. The older boys wrecked the younger ones.” It was especially hard on children “confined for the crime of being orphans.” The boys, when they were not corrupting each other, slaved away making overalls; they were frequently beaten. “I say without hesitation that lads sent to an institution like the House of Refuge, the Catholic Protectory, or the Juvenile Asylum might better be taken out and shot.”78
To outsiders, however, the houses of refuge seemed like a step in the right direction. Reform schools, as alternatives to prison, were the next stage. Massachusetts passed a law in 1847 creating a State Reform School for Boys. This was for boys under sixteen who had been convicted of any offense. They could be bound out as apprentices or servants, or kept in the school, to be instructed in “piety and morality,” in “useful knowledge,” and trained in “some regular course of labor.”79 In 1855, the state created a sister institution, the State Reform School