Here is this moving article published in the "FPS" zine, put out by the Cooperative Highschool Independent Press Syndicate back in the 1970s!!!
AN INCRIMINATING EXPOSE OF THE JUVENILE JUSTICE JUGGERNAUT
Book review by Keith H.
Weeping in the playtime of others: America’s Incarcerated Children, by Ken Wooden; McGraw Hill; 1976;
Ten-year-old Emmet Player spent four-and-a-half years in an Alabama juvenile prison for the crime of not having a mother or father.
Barbara Oles served seven years in a New Jersey juvenile prison for truancy.
"No name Maddox" (so-called on his birth certificate because his father wished to remain unidentified) spent ten months at the Gibault Home for Boys in Indiana because his mother wanted to get rid of him but couldn’t find a foster home. He then spent three years (during which he made 18 escape attempts) at Indiana Boys School for a robbery committed at age thirteen. "no name Maddox" was in and out of juvenile homes and prisons, and currently [1977] sits in maximum security at San Quentin in northern California. He’s now called Charles Manson, and he’s serving a life sentence for mass murder.
WHAT IS A CRIME?
Charles Manson, like thousands of other young people, got a taste of juvenile prison long before he committed his first crime. Weeping in the Playtime of Others is an impassioned plea for justice for the 50,000 young people who have never committed a crime, yet are held in long-term detention.
Young people who haven’t committed crimes are behind bars due to the peculiar nature of the juvenile justice system. There are several categories of juvenile offender, and only one of them concerns people who violate criminal law. Children can come to the attention of the courts for three reasons:
They are "dependent" or "neglected," like Emmet Player or the young Charles Manson.
They are "incorrigible" or ungovernable, in the opinion of an adult authority, such as their parents or the schools. Barbara Oles fits into this second group.
They have violated the adult criminal laws. When Manson robbed a grocery store he fell from category one to category three, which isn’t uncommon. Many professional criminals got their start as status offenders living in juvenile homes, the minor leagues of crime.
It’s important to note that people in the first and second categories have violated no criminal laws. Those in the second group are called "status offenders" because their acts wouldn’t be crimes if it weren’t for their legal status as minors.
Status offenses were developed at the turn of the century when many reformers thought that children who skipped school, stayed out late at night, or engaged in sex, needed to be shaped up –by locking them up if necessary. These non-criminal offenders now dominate the juvenile court dockets. For example, in 1971 of 28,740 juvenile court cases in Cook County, Illinois, 9,200 were status offenders, while only 3,500 had committed serious crimes. During the same year, 56% of juvenile arrests in Florida were for "delinquent tendencies," and 62% of all children detained there were not accused of criminal acts.
Many people, including judges, lawyers, social workers and Ken Wooden would like to see status offenders removed from the jurisdiction of juvenile courts. Wooden says it is "sheer stupidity" to lock up truants and runaways in state training schools and adult jails.
He quotes Joe Rowen, Florida’s state director of youth services: "The path from dependecy/neglect to delinquency to crime is well worn." Seventy-five percent of all adults now serving time have histories in the juvenile court system.
The evidence suggests that many adult criminals were encouraged by their experiences in the juvenile justice system. But what factors contribute to the genesis of a youthful offender?
SCHOOL FAILURE AND DELINQUENCY
Wooden, once classified as a delinquent himself, is particularly concerned about the causes of juvenile crime. Status offense laws are an obvious culprit, as he points out. However, Wooden feels that the most important contributing factor is school failure.
The average juvenile prisoner is fourteen years old, but reads at the fourth grade level. Many young people, especially the poor, aren’t taught basic reading skills. They get behind in school, are tested and "proven" to be slow learners or retarded. The self-fulfilling prophecy then takes over.
Wooden charges that those who devise and promote the use of IQ tests and subsequent labeling commit "mental genocide" against the poor. The teaching of reading skills, therefore, is essential to combating delinquency.
"Wooden criticizes a $2 million federal program in southern California to identify future criminals at age five or six. The program is billed as an "early detection measuring device for the propensity of a person to riot or commit a criminal act."
Wooden is on the right track, but the problem goes deeper than inadequate reading skills. After all, many societies are almost completely illiterate and suffer little juvenile crime. The feeling of failure that non-readers are made to experience in school is closer to the root problem. That experience is inevitable as long as the schools continue to place tremendous emphasis on competition, on success and failure. If everyone learned to read, new standards of failure would emerge. People on the bottom would still be losers, and would probably continue to act out their frustrations in anti-social ways. Unfortunately, as long as schools are preparing students for a racist and hierarchical society, large numbers of students will inevitably be frustrated.
The federal and state governments aren’t sure what causes delinquency, but they are willing to spend millions of dollars on programs that are of uncertain value and dubious political intent to try and find out. Wooden criticizes a $2 million federal program in southern California to identify future criminals at age five or six. The program is billed as an "early detection measuring device for the propensity of a person to riot or commit a criminal act."
The University of Michigan received a $1.5 million grant for one study [about this?] but "they had not even agreed on their research objectives and all the money was gone," complained a justice department official. No problem though; they got bailed out with another $1 million.
Maybe the government should just pay off kids who promise to stay out of trouble. It might be cheaper.
WHAT HAPPENS TO DELINQUENTS?
It’s scandalous that thousands of young people are picked up each year for such "crimes" as stubbornness, truancy, and promiscuity. However, the treatment that juvenile offenders are subjected to after they are imprisoned is even more abominable than the laws that put them there. However, Wooden doesn’t sensationalize the violence done to children in institutions –he doesn’t have to. Day to day life in many juvenile homes is shocking enough.
Mistreatment and brutality are the supreme ironies of the juvenile justice system. Children don’t have all the legal safeguards afforded adult criminals. The rationale for abridging their rights is that they aren’t being punished. Rather, they are receiving treatment which will make them better able to function in society. The Supreme Court long ago recognized that the rhetoric of treatment did not match the brutal reality of juvenile prisons. Wooden documents it.
Prison schools are a mild example. Throughout the entire history of New Hampshire training schools, for instance, less than one percent of the juvenile inmates ever finished high school. "Vocational education" is usually just a front for exploiting child labor in the prison industry or cafeteria.
Wooden isn’t very optimistic about new forms of "treatment." Behavior modification, Positive Peer Culture and other such programs are usually superficial, if not negative in their application. They are more effective at keeping the prison population under control than they are at meaningful rehabilitation.
SEE IT PERFORMED
The Living Stage Theater of Washington, D.C., created a dramatic and moving play out of Weeping in the Playtime of Others. The Living Stage is an improvisational theater group, whose specialty is plays for children. They made an exception in performing Weeping... because they want to sensitize adults to the horrors of the juvenile justice system.
The play follows Priscilla through a typical series of events, which land her in a juvenile prison. She suffers abuse in prison, all of which is based on actual incidents from the book. In the end... Well, if you want to see the end write to the Living Stage, 6th and Maine Ave., S.W., Washington, D.C. 20024 [USA] and ask how you can get the play to your community. It would be excellent for a conference of social workers, young people, prison officials or anyone else connected with juvenile justice.
Traditional forms of "treatment" are still widespread. In Massachusetts, Wooden reports, a college student posed as a delinquent and was admitted to a juvenile prison. The student later testified that inmates were held underwater and forced to run the gauntlet as punishment. One child’s head was used to mop urine from the floor.
In other institutions inmates had their hands and feet plunged into boiling water, and were forced to sit straight and silent in a chair for eight hours a day, seven days a week. In one instance, a young person was forced to eat his own vomit. The list of abuses is long.
One poignant incident Wooden described was his being escorted by a group of young inmates to the cemetery at a Booneville, Missouri juvenile prison. He counted 51 graves.
THE EXPLOITATION OF FEMALE OFFENDERS
Juvenile prison is an unpleasant experience for any young person, but females face extra discrimination and humiliation. A national study, conducted in 1970, revealed that on the average, female offenders are incarcerated longer than males for the same offense. Additionally, a higher percentage of female prisoners are held for status offenses. Girls are most often imprisoned for sexual offenses; boys seldom are. [that’s changed, eh?]
Generally, Wooden found security to be tighter and rules stricter in girls’ facilities. He described a Colorado training school where girls are left hog-tied in the school’s "Rose Room." Boys get more food than girls, and their educational facilities, such as they are, are usually better. Examinations for venereal disease, invariably by a male doctor, are performed with "outrageous frequency" according to Wooden.
In Miami, Florida, during a trial of guards arrested for helping girls escape in exchange for sex, the grand jury said that, "We have heard...a range of incredible abuses that sound more like a prison out of the dark ages..."
BAD KIDS ARE BIG BUSINESS
How is it that such a barbaric system continues to function? What motivates people to lock up children on the flimsiest pretexts, and then to abuse them? In a word, says Wooden, profit.It’s interesting to note that the famous Boy’s Town run by Father Flannagan would have been number 372 on Fortune’s list of the top 500 corporations.
Millions of dollars are made and thousands of jobs are justified in the name of juvenile justice. For instance, young Danna Hvolboll paid $600 a month to Artesia Hall for the priviledge of having her life made so miserable that she drank roach poison. The dedicated staff of Artesia Hall accused her of faking sickness. They realized they were wrong shortly before she died.
A 1971 investigation of Oakdale, a private facility [can’t make out words here, from original text], at about $2 million which cares for wards of the state of Pennsylvania, revealed children in solitary confinement, questionable child labor, and staff stealing from patients. The Pennsylvania Director of Children and Youth, who helped expose Oakdale, commented on the general condition of the juvenile services in Pennsylvania: "...large sums of money have, for all intents and purposes, transformed a social service into a profit making industry." He was fired.
It’s interesting to note that the famous Boy’s Town run by Father Flannagan would have been number 372 on Fortune’s list of the top 500 corporations. According to Wooden, very little of that enormous wealth is reflected in the facilities of the institution.
People who might have been released by the police with a warning a few years ago are now being channeled into shelter care and other forms of "treatment." That’s a familiar refrain. Since 1900 many reforms that were supposed to benefit children have actually restricted their freedom.
Social service professionals –doctors, lawyers and other "well educated entrepreneurs" aren’t immune to making a few bucks by abusing children. Under a Connecticut system, court appointed lawyers receive $100 [a lot more in those days; tho I wonder if the original number was $1000--ed] for each child they represent. The object, says Wooden, is to see as many clients as possible in the shortest time. Lawyers who insist on due process and cite the Gault decision are rarely recalled for service [in the system].
WHAT CAN BE DONE?Unfortunately, passionate pleas and compelling evidence have, in the past, proved insufficient to change the system.
Ken Wooden spent three years traveling through 30 states researching Weeping in the Playtime of Others. He isn’t the first author moved to anger by the juvenile justice system, but he presents his arguments more forcefully than anyone else I have read. Unfortunately, passionate pleas and compelling evidence have, in the past, proved insufficient to change the system.
Despite new evidence, recent programs often repeat and compound the errors of the past instead of correcting them. The most glaring error is that juvenile justice programs are always designed to deal with symptoms rather than causes. These treatment programs are as ephemeral as sand castles; they are eroded by each new wave of delinquency.
The 1967 report of the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice is one example. The Commission declared the juvenile justice system a "failure," and reported that "The most informed and benign institutional treatment of the child...may often feed the very disorder it is designed to cure."
As a result of that study many new programs were started, but few succeeded, and the situation continued to grow worse. In 1960 one out of every 50 Americans age ten to seventeen came before a juvenile court. By 1974 it was one out of every 25.
{right around the start of Roll-back, eh.}
The bulk of federal delinquency funds now go to diversion programs –which supposedly keep young people out of juvenile homes. But, instead of accomplishing that goal they have "swept new people into the system who otherwise might have been ignored," according to Jerome Miller, Massachusetts Youth Commissioner [of 1977]. People who might have been released by the police with a warning a few years ago are now being channeled into shelter care and other forms of "treatment." That’s a familiar refrain. Since 1900 many reforms that were supposed to benefit children have actually restricted their freedom.
SHORTSIGHTED CONCLUSIONS
Wooden is an excellent investigative reporter, and he has uncovered loads of dirt about the juvenile justice system. He identifies some causes of the problem, such as poor reading skills and profiteering, yet he still tends to gloss over or ignore the root causes.
For example, there is no mention of youth unemployment as a major cause of youth crime. Also, his criticism of the schools is limited to IQ testing, when in fact, IQ tests themselves are symptoms of deeper problems in the schools. In addition, though Wooden clearly and correctly indicated that profit, rather than compassion, greases the wheels of juvenile justice, he didn’t adequately explain how that might be overcome. For instance, the definition of profiteering was wide enough to include labor unions lobbying to keep juvenile homes open to protect members’ jobs, as well as big shots like Father Flanagan. By that definition, even cooks and guards have a vested interest in the exploitation of children. If that’s the case, and it may be, the only solution is to eliminate juvenile delinquency altogether, so there will be no children to exploit, or to eliminate all adult unemployment, so that guards won’t be so protective of their jobs.
Unfortunately, the entire U.S. economy is based on the profit system and maximizing private gain, often at the expense of the public good. The juvenile justice system fits snugly into that framework, and until the entire framework is radically restructured, the problem of justice for young people can’t be solved.
Weeping in the Playtime of Others exposes the abuses and points to some of the causes of that abuse. Though the solutions [he proposes] are short-sighted, it is still an extremely valuable book.