Perspective: It’s time to get rid of reform schools
Glen Mills Schools in Glen Mills, Pa., in March. A spokeswoman for the nation's oldest reform school says they'll appeal the state's decision to revoke licenses at the suburban Philadelphia campus amid an investigation into child abuse allegations. By Amber Armstrong Amber Armstrong is a graduate student in the JD/PhD Program in legal history at the University of Pennsylvania. April 22 at 6:00 AM Glen Mills Schools, one of America’s first reform schools, should be one of its last.
Exposure of the alleged horrors at Glen Mills gives us an opportunity to discard a very broken model and allow research to inform the creation of a new one — one that actually helps troubled youth live meaningful, productive lives. This led to the creation of PHR and other reformatories, 50 years before the advent of the juvenile court system. Children sent to the PHR did not, for the most part, receive criminal sentences.
These ideas about the causes of and solutions for delinquency were then codified into law. The first 10 years of PHR’s operation culminated in habeas corpus litigation, ex parte Crouse, which came before the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1838. PHR successfully argued that it could hold delinquent children without a criminal trial or conviction. Their confinement was not about individual guilt, but about steering a general class of poor children.
Despite the failed effort to fix the reformatory model, incarceration only expanded throughout the 20th century, especially during the “tough on crime” heyday of the 1980s. But the rationale has remained the same: A confined environment can help needy youths overcome their criminal ways, in part because it gets them out of the poor communities believed to fuel delinquency.
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