Reversing the Pipeline
New Jersey advocates seek to close a juvenile prison and reinstate the all-Black boarding school that once lived on its grounds.
The quaint commuter county of Bordentown is remarkably proud of its history. Seemingly every other building holds a historical landmark flag detailing which extraordinary figure lived in, worked near, or hailed from the New Jersey town. In recent years, in particular, there’s been a more concerted effort to incorporate the oft-ignored history of the town’s Black population. In May of 2019, the Bordentown historical society sponsored a month-long series of events with that goal in mind, of which a talk hosted by Dr. Mildred Rice was one of the most highly anticipated.
In Carslake Community Center, the town’s local meeting space, Dr. Rice delivered to an audience of roughly 20 people, a presentation on the Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth, an elite all Black boarding and vocational school that thrived for 70 years in the heart of the county but had all but been forgotten by town residents who had failed to commemorate it in the over 60 years since it’s closing. As a Professor Emerita of Education at Rider University, Dr. Rice had grown interested in researching the academic philosophy of the school but her motives were also deeper and more personal: she’s the granddaughter of its founder, Reverend Walter Rice.
Among the images shared with attendees was a colorful portrait depicting an aerial view of the former campus. Upon entering the school gates, students would first pass by the school’s apple orchards before reaching a massive parade ground. Dotted around the remaining acreage were the school’s athletic field, mechanics shop, farm, tennis court, water tower, and two dozen Georgian brick buildings that served as residence and academic halls. The most impressive and captivating among them was the administrative building seated at the south end of the campus. Four columned with a round dome cap, the building overlooked the entirety of the school to its north and the Delaware River at its rear.
Throughout her talk, Dr. Rice spoke fondly of her grandfather’s tenacity and on his ability to create such an expansive place that empowered and educated generations of young Black people barely two decades out of slavery. She also spoke of the history of what the school accomplished before it came to its end. Notably absent though, was any nod to what lies on the campus today.
Almost all of the buildings across the campus’ 400 acres are now empty, defunct, and succumbing to what Bordentown Historical Society’s co-president Doug Kiovsky calls “demolition by neglect”; but a small handful of them remain operational and are now under the purview of the New Jersey Department of Corrections.
The academic halls and student dormitories which are the subject of Dr. Rice’s scholarship and were the fruits of her grandfather’s labor have now become the New Jersey Female Secure Care and Intake Facility, or Hayes, for short.
Perhaps Dr. Rice’s omission was a rejection of this less attractive part of the campus’ history or maybe it was considered an unnecessary addendum given its impending closure. In 2017, then-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced that the Hayes facility would be shuttered in response to a wave of grassroots advocacy for juvenile justice reform. In early 2019, current Governor Phil Murphy assembled a Task Force to oversee this closure.
But in the months since the announcement, a firm timeline for the closure has yet to be finalized and eight New Jersey girls continue to live behind Hayes’ barbed wire. In the meantime, New Jersey advocates have been devising a plan to use this moment as an opportunity to reimagine how the state will invest in their kids — by building a new school in the image of the Manual Training School.
New Jersey’s Juvenile Justice Commission, established in 1995, aims to “protect public safety, reduce delinquency and hold youthful offenders accountable for their delinquent actions” but the demographics of youth under the commission’s purview don’t reflect New Jersey’s overall youth population. 70% of youth incarcerated in New Jersey are Black although Black children comprise only 14% of the state’s total youth population. That grave disparity has posed concerns to criminal justice reform advocates who both worry about the punitive nature of the current system and are troubled by how that punishment is unfairly doled out based on race and class.
A report released in late 2016 by the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, an advocacy organization that has been leading the effort to close the state’s youth prisons, found that Black youth were 24 times more likely to be committed to a secure juvenile facility, like Hayes, than their white peers. Research has found that this disparity is not attributed to any higher rates of crime amongst Black youth than white youth but simply higher rates of contact with the police.
70% of youth incarcerated in New Jersey are Black although Black children comprise only 14% of the state’s total youth population.
Outside of the imbalanced racial demographics of the state’s juvenile system, advocates for reform argue that New Jersey’s youth prisons also pose serious fiscal concerns. The state’s 2019 budget allocated $122 million to the Juvenile Justice Commission, a staggering number considering that the facilities under the commission's purview are underutilized. In total, the Commission oversees roughly 210 youth inmates across the state. The Hayes facility, for example, has a capacity of 48 girls yet currently detains only 8 — all the while still employing 220 staff.
The fact that a relatively small number of young people are incarcerated is a positive for New Jerseyans who wish to see the incarcerated juvenile population shrink, but it also makes those same residents troubled by the number of funds being poured into largely vacant facilities.
While activity to permanently close youth prisons in New Jersey is relatively new (the state’s oldest juvenile facility has been in operation for 150 years), discussions around youth prison closures have been bubbling up across the nation over the past two decades.
Liz Ryan, the president and CEO of Youth First, is among the leaders in that nationwide movement. Her organization trains young leaders to run campaigns that aim to reform the juvenile justice system within their local and state communities. Ryan says that what underpins her work is the idea that the current youth prison model “isn’t fair, isn’t safe, and it doesn’t work.”
“The recidivism rates of kids who get placed in these institutions is very high and it substantially increases the likelihood that those kids will end up in the adult criminal justice system,” Ryan told me. “So what we’re doing when we’re sending kids to these places is we’re essentially sending them into a feeder system that ends with the adult criminal justice system.”
An analysis of the 39 states that track juvenile recidivism rates found that within three years of their release from juvenile detention, nearly 75% of youth are rearrested for new crimes. Advocates like Ryan argue that this failure to truly rehabilitate young people within the system is due at least in part to the levels of violence that they experience at the facilities where they are detained.
“On the safe end of it, when kids are placed in these facilities, we know that they’re at risk of abuse and harm — physical, sexual, and mental abuse,” says Ryan. In fact, a national survey from 2012 estimated that almost 8% of youth in state juvenile facilities, or over 1,700 young people, had experienced some form of sexual abuse from facility staff, with Black youth reporting higher levels of victimization than their counterparts.
These allegations of sexual abuse and isolation have already lead to the closure of some youth prisons across the country; and for many girls who are detained in these facilities, this abuse mirrors the violence they experienced prior to their arrest. Almost 80% of girls and young women in juvenile facilities report experiencing physical or sexual abuse in their lives prior to their incarceration. Offenses related to domestic violence are among the five most common offenses for which young girls are arrested nationwide.
For Andrea McChristian, Director of Criminal Justice Reform Initiatives for the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, that trauma is also reflected in many of the other offenses that young girls have been detained for — offenses like truancy, running away from home, drug use, and prostitution. And that trauma is further compounded by how the girls are treated once inside these facilities — treatment that while volatile, has largely been normalized.
“I was speaking to a young girl who had been in there for shoplifting and she had said to me ‘you know, it really wasn’t a bad place. I was able to get my educational credits’ and then she just happened to mention offhand ‘I just had to be in isolation for a few hours, it’s when they just put you in a cell and you kind of have to stay there’” McChristian told me.
When McChristian asked how long she was kept in isolation, the young girl responded that it was just a few hours for a few days in a row.
“That kind of goes to show the system where, in her mind, she was getting her educational credits but not realizing that being in a cell for a long period of time by yourself is not normal, it’s not healthy, and it’s not what should be happening to you,” McChristian told me. “It’s difficult because even with young people when you talk to them more and more about how things could be they understand it, but they’ve been programmed to think that this is the only way and this is the only option.”
In New Jersey, McChristian has been spearheading campaigns to close the state’s youth facilities and make new, alternative options a reality for young people involved in the juvenile system. As a part of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, McChristian played a pivotal role in getting the state’s former administration to commit to closing Hayes. She now sits on the Task Force responsible for overseeing how and when that closure will take place.
McChristian and her colleagues want to turn Hayes back into a school. One that harkens back to the history of the facility itself and draws on the ethos of the all-Black public boarding school that Dr. Mildred Rice’s grandfather founded in 1886.
During its 70 years in existence, The Manual Training and Industrial School, or MTIS for short, recruited students from across the state and beyond. Many of those students hailed from neighborhoods and backgrounds similar to those of the youth incarcerated in New Jersey today. Despite the similarity in their backgrounds — “which were largely shaped by poverty and racial discrimination — MTIS approached the youth in their care with structure and education as opposed to punishment and confinement.
In an effort to both recognize the full scope of their students’ interests while also preparing them to be economically self-sufficient, MTIS both conferred high school diplomas to generations of students who were often the first in their families to graduate; and trained each student in a trade of their choice. The school’s educational philosophy as well as the annual awards garnered by its agricultural program, traveling glee club, and newspaper earned the interest of scholars and luminaries including Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, both of whom paid visits to the campus.
The school’s closure then, just a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and its devolution into a juvenile prison roughly 40 years later embodies the very school-to-prison pipeline that criminal justice advocates have raised alarm about in recent years.
The realization of McChristian’s dream to use the closure of the Hayes facility as a chance to reverse course and create what she calls a “prison-to school” pipeline, will hinge upon the ability of McChristian and other advocates to first articulate the value of replacing incarceration with education, and then convince the State that the most meaningful way to do so would be resurrecting an institution that they deemed ineffective, archaic, and unconstitutional just 64 years ago.
“This educational program is primarily devoted to teaching by deed as much as by books, and to glorifying every achievement that would bring to a child a feeling of dignity and self-respect.”
When Reverend Walter Rice, a former slave from South Carolina, initially thought to start a school in the heart of New Jersey, he had already experienced for himself the benefits of an education. After serving in the Union army, Rice spent some time traveling as a cabin boy and later worked in the postal service before settling in New Jersey. When a wealthy benefactor encouraged him to attend Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, Rice took heed and earned a degree in theology. After returning to New Jersey, he became a minister in the African Methodist Episcopalian Church, first establishing smaller churches before turning his eye to building a school.
In 1886, Rice and his wife, Ella Mont, secured backing from a local industrial education association to open a small boarding school operating out of only two wooden buildings 10 miles south of Trenton. While initially designed to exclusively train Black teachers, Rice’s school soon came to focus on a different population: low-income Black youth from unstable homes. Some accounts even recall Rice touring the streets of Bordentown and soliciting homeless or orphaned Black children to attend his small, budding school.
By its tenth year, the school was having difficulty thriving off of private donations alone. After an appeal to the state of New Jersey, state officials began offering Rice small donations and eventually incorporated the school into the state’s public education system, appropriating $3,000 and later $5,000 a year to its operation. By 1897, MTIS moved from the two cabins it had once occupied and onto the 400-acre estate formerly owned by Charles Stewart Parnell, a US Naval Officer famed for commanding the USS Constitution.
The possibilities of what the school could achieve grew as it acquired more space, more buildings and, gradually, more students, enrolling over 400 at its peak in 1945.
While the majority of its students were often the first in their families to graduate from high school, the expansiveness of the campus and the access to resources it provided mimicked that of some of the most prestigious American colleges of the time. The grandeur of it was a visual manifestation of Rice’s goal for the school to become a first-class institute that would continue to recruit low-income Black youth from across New Jersey and train them in practical trades.
The large state investment made in the school that allowed for its fast growth is impressive but understandable given the important function that industrial training played in Black life at the time. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, vocational training was a prevailing educational philosophy that underpinned many Black secondary schools and colleges. These schools, most of which were boarding institutions as well, focused on training Black students in specific trades with the goal of not only preparing them for decent and steady work but also, indoctrinating them into values like industriousness, efficiency, and self-reliance.
For many white leaders at the time, industrial schooling provided a non-threatening avenue through which to engage African Americans who were now newly freed and desiring to seek an education. White educators at these institutions, such as General Samuel Armstrong, the founder of Hampton Institute, a historically Black vocational college, often viewed their students through a paternalistic mindset, convinced that the training they were providing would root out the indolence and “laziness” that they believed slavery had bred in the moral character of Blacks.
However, despite the overrepresentation of white leadership at Black training schools, the most well-known and influential leader of the educational philosophy was Booker T. Washington, a Hampton alumni and founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington crafted Tuskegee’s curriculum in a way that married vocational trades with academic study and he famously instructed the Black community to “cast down their bucket where they are” and acquire the skills needed to do for themselves. Though a controversial stance at the time, Washington’s invitation encapsulated the mission of Tuskegee and came to serve as a model for other Black vocational schools, including MTIS. In fact, in 1913, the New Jersey Board of Education invited Washington to visit the school and offer recommendations for its instruction.
“The location of the Bordentown School is one of the best and most attractive of any school in the country and from that point of view I think presents a good opportunity for the building up of a good, strong, useful institution,” wrote Washington in a report following his visit. “I find that there are in the State of New Jersey not far from 90,000 colored people… I think the occupations in which the majority of them are now employed would serve as a pretty safe basis as to the kind of instruction that ought to be most emphasized at Bordentown.”
MTIS took heed of Washington’s advice and the school emphasis, if not its entire ethos developed around self-sufficiency: both by creating a school ecosystem that could support itself and training each student in trades that would allow them to craft livelihoods for themselves post-graduation. Girls at the school prepared for careers in cosmetology or dressmaking at the campus salon and sewing shop while boys had options to study auto-mechanics, printing, woodworking, and agriculture. An on-campus farm and kitchen allowed students to herd their own cattle, farm, and prepare meals for the entire student body and faculty.
That focus on self-determination and self-sufficiency was further evidenced by the ways that students routinely articulated their future ambitions to their peers. In a 1939 edition of the campus newspaper, The Ironsides Echo, students were asked about where they would like to be in 20 years. The responses came in broad strokes (“to make something of myself”) as well as the highly specific (“becoming a dress designer in my own shop in Fifth Avenue”).
While the range of professions that students came to assume post-graduation was varied, the school’s success in securing employment was undeniable: a survey from 1929 found that three-fourths of alumni were either employed full time or pursuing further education. By 1941, the school was lauded by Howard University Professor of Education Marian Thompson Wright for placing “a larger number of Negroes in the skilled and semi-skilled trades than any other occupational unit in New Jersey.”
Among MTIS alumni whose career trajectories were shaped by their time at the school is John Medley, a member of the class of 1954 who studied auto-mechanics as a student.
“The school established responsibility and that was a great help because a lot of the inner-city students didn’t know how to fix cars, till the land or do manual labor. So we could help them and then the school didn’t even have to hire personnel,” Medley told me as we drove throughout the quiet and vast roads of Burlington County.
Medley was raised by his grandparents in the small town of Blackwood, New Jersey, a predominantly Black community in Camden county where most of his peers didn’t finish high school because “the understanding was if you can labor, you can get a job.” His time at MTIS gave him both the skills he needed to earn a formal diploma and secure employment — after serving in the military, Medley used his auto mechanics training to become a supervisor at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Vocational training might have been firmly baked into the essence of MTIS but the school’s curriculum fluctuated over its 70-year history and gradually took to emphasizing classical studies and extracurricular activities like journalism, chorus, modern dance, and sports. While the school’s agricultural program was representing New Jersey at national farming competitions, the student newspaper was being admitted to the National Scholastic Press Association. The school’s increased focus on studies that could prepare students for college began to attract more middle-class Black families who were allured by the image of an elite boarding school.
With the heightened profile of the school came nicknames like “The Tuskegee of the North,” as well as visits from luminaries such asAlbert Einstein, Nat King Cole, Mary McLeod Bethune, and W.E.B. DuBois. While students benefited from the visits of celebrities and scholars, the campus provided refuge for Black social and labor organizations, like the Black Tennis Association and the Colored Women’s Federation, which needed to host conferences and secure lodging for their members but were denied access to white-owned venues in the New Jersey area.
Despite the growing profile of the school and the eagerness with which local families wanted to enroll their children, there was an ever-present obstacle facing the institution’s leadership. It was an obstacle fueled by a pervading stereotype about Black youth and one which perhaps most directly ties the school to its present status as a youth detention facility.
Given the secluded nature of the campus as well as its status as a public boarding school at a time when institutions of its kind were rare, members of New Jersey’s white community expressed disbelief that MTIS was a school at all. Many were convinced that it must instead be an institution for juvenile delinquents.
To quell public misunderstandings, MTIS’ final and longest-standing principal William Valentine began to make the campus more accessible to the public — opening choir performances and sports games to the town’s white residents to help them see for themselves the inner working of the campus and the truth about its student body.
But Dr. Valentine’s vision for his students and his attitude towards delinquency and the prevailing public opinion about Black youth is better illustrated in an annual report for the school written in 1946. “Approximately two-thirds of the student body comes from disrupted homes or from difficult family situations, economic as well as social,” Valentine writes. “It is apparent that the activities of this school provide a most effective program of prevention of juvenile delinquency among these youngsters who are not problem children but children with problems.”
In a 1948 New York Times profile of both the school and Dr. Valentine, reporter George Streator reiterated Valentine’s philosophy. “[Valentine] asked that the public consider the injustice done to children by sitting idly by until they had committed a wrong, then branding them as social outcasts and delinquents,” Streator wrote. “This educational program is primarily devoted to teaching by deed as much as by books, and to glorifying every achievement that would bring to a child a feeling of dignity and self-respect.”
Education and character development were presented not just as alternatives to incarceration but as ways to prevent criminality in the first place. Even further though, rejecting the idea of “problem children” made real the idea that treating Black kids with care and respect need not be a buffer against the social ills that the world assumed they would eventually create. Instead, it was posed as just a natural way to treat them simply because they are children.
If MTIS’ approach to creating spaces for Black kids to be seen as whole people as opposed to delinquents sounds radical now, it was even more so at the time of Dr. Valentine’s leadership. By the late 1940s, juvenile courts had only been established in the United States for less than half a century and yet already exhibited grave racial disparities. Black youth were overrepresented in the system and yet underserved by the community-based agencies assigned to help youth offenders. Further, Black and Latinx youth at the time were overwhelmingly more likely to be labeled “feeble-minded” and thus considered irredeemable, and beyond social repair.
Now a local historian and archivist, John Medley has been collecting and curating MTIS memorabilia since his retirement in 1992, and he currently runs a small exhibit in the town’s African American History & Underground Railroad Museum that features items like photographs, diplomas, commencement programs, yearbooks, and even chairs and small tables crafted by carpentry students.
Before visiting the museum, I asked if we could stop by the school and walk through the grounds even though I knew the chances of that would be slim. Surely enough, access to what was formerly the main campus is now prohibited by New Jersey’s Department of Corrections. The only remnants outside of the gates that give a nod to the school’s history — to its presence at all — is a monument erected by a group of alumni near what was once faculty housing.
Medley is a man of relatively few words but speaks matter-of-factly about almost every element of life at the school. His speech marries the authority of a teacher with the familiarity of an older family member invested in making sure that every bit of family history gets successfully passed on to the next generation. To museum visitors and other local historians, it’s clear that he has been the go-to for information about the Manual Training School for decades and can rattle off the names of alumni and their accomplishments with little effort.
It would seem that after almost 20 years of dedicated focus on the collection and preservation of his high school memorabilia, Medley’s own interest in the project would wane, but his passion is palpable. It was witnessed during a recent summer-long series about the school that he helped coordinate alongside the Bordentown Historical Society, and it is suggested whenever he pulls away in his van whose license plate reads “MTIS 54.”
When asked about his responsibility to continue carrying on the school’s legacy, Medley is quietly confident about his ability to keep the school’s history alive and his belief that other alumni should feel compelled to do the same.
“Everybody has a responsibility to carry on the story,” he told me. After a long pause, he added, “it’s about the seriousness with which they take it.”
But the likelihood that the people who walked the Manual Training School halls will be able to continue carrying on their story is swiftly declining. Many of the prominent alumni lauded in Medley’s exhibit or interviewed in a 2010 PBS documentary made about the school have since passed away. In 2015, the MTIS alumni association hosted its 60th and final reunion, citing the old ages and dwindling numbers of alumni as their main reason for discontinuing the annual event.
With members of the school’s final graduating class in their late 80’s, MTIS alumni have far outlived the institution that helped shape their lives. As that body of alumni grows smaller, so too do the opportunities to understand not just the ways that the school thrived, but also how it met its demise.
“Manual Training School has offered shelter, activity, and opportunity to many a youth of this type who often found himself and discovered that he too had some innate ability of which he has been unaware”
Conversations around race and education have long been a part of New Jersey’s history. In 1881, the state enacted a statute that prohibited segregated schooling based on race, and while the policy was neither monitored nor enforced, it was one of the very first laws of its kind in the nation.
It was a state constitutional provision adopted in 1947, however that had a more profound impact and began to etch the writing on the wall for the Manual Training School. In addition to prohibiting segregation in military services, the provision also made unconstitutional the segregation of public schools on the basis of religion, nationality, and race. Upon the adoption of that provision, MTIS was required to open its doors to, and actively recruit, white New Jersey students as well as drop “For Colored Youth” from its official name.
Unsurprisingly, the school’s leadership found little success in recruiting white families to send their children to the predominantly African-American boarding academy. By the following 1948–1949 school year, only two white students had enrolled. This “failure” to fully integrate the school raised the eyebrows of both New Jersey legislators as well as the press who began referring to the institution as a “Jim Crow School” suggesting that it was outdated and behind the times.
In the midst of such growing controversy, the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 sealed the final nail in MTIS’ coffin. Now, New Jersey legislators who had for years opposed Manual Training’s pride in its status as a predominantly Black school had a golden opportunity to shutter its doors for good.
When discussions that the school was to be closed were made public, faculty and students petitioned against legislators. Among the more vocal was Eleanor Smythwick, a home economics teacher who taught at the school for 25 years.
In a letter sent to then-New Jersey Governor Robert Meyner in January 1955, Smythwick wrote, “Manual Training School has offered shelter, activity, and opportunity to many a youth of this type who often found himself and discovered that he too had some innate ability of which he has been unaware, [and] also furnished him with an opportunity to compete with his fellows on a basis that establishes self-confidence, makes real the meaning of a democratic society, makes real the education it provides, gives feeling for the intrinsic value to the people privileged to enjoy being a part of such a society. Has such a program outgrown its usefulness in and to the State of New Jersey?”
By contorting the spirit of desegregation laws, the New Jersey legislature successfully closed an institution that had for seven decades been providing for Black students the very opportunities that those laws were attempting to make more readily available. That success represented the realization of fears and concerns held by a handful of Black scholars and educators of the time who had openly opposed the school desegregation lawsuits that were being vigorously fought across the nation.
The community of Black teachers throughout the United States has yet to replenish itself to its size pre-Brown. Black teachers currently comprise only 7% of U.S. public and private school teachers. That, coupled with the fact that students of color still continue to learn in largely segregated school systems across the country pose a challenge for Black educators and legal scholars who understand the weight of what Brown achieved but also recognize its limits and failures.
“If the creation of the Hayes Facility in 1997 is a mirror of the societal attitudes towards youth crime in the late 90s then the current organizing effort to close the facility is also a reflection of contemporary values.”
When New Jersey’s Juvenile Justice Commission opened the Hayes Facility in 1997, it did so with little push back from community members who, had they been more familiar with the history of MTIS, may have been curious as to how a detention center could live on the site of the former school. Across the state, violent crimes committed by teenage girls had doubled between 1986 and 1996. As the only all-girls prison in New Jersey and one of the first in the nation, Hayes was constructed in direct response to these unprecedented rates of female adolescent crime and the failure of co-ed facilities to adequately respond to some of the unique needs of young female prisoners.
However, beyond those shifts in New Jersey’s crime rates, the facility’s ability to bypass public scrutiny was a reflection of broader societal attitudes and political decisions made throughout the nineties that both normalized and advocated for more incarceration and harsher sentences.
Nationwide, peaks in crime throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s stoked fears of a rising class of young people whose propensity towards lawlessness would wreak havoc on society. That fear was encapsulated in the idea of the “super predator,” a highly-racialized term popularized by Hillary Clinton but coined by criminologist John DiIulio in his 1996 book, Body Count. There, as well as in other academic papers and articles published at the time, DiIulio warned against this new generation of remorseless and wildly violent youth for whom “nothing else matters to them. So for as long as their youthful energies hold out, they will do what comes ‘naturally’: murder, rape, rob, assault, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, and get high.” By the new millennium, DiIulio predicted, juvenile crime would increase twofold.
The superpredator theory came to inform both media coverage of juvenile crime as well as legislative decisions. While the 1994 crime bill stands as the most well-known example of how public panic and “tough on crime” rhetoric concretized into policy that would accelerate mass incarceration, other policies passed on both the national and state level focused explicitly on crimes committed by youth. Between 1992 and 1997, 45 states modified or enacted provisions allowing for transfers of youth to adult court. Some states also eliminated parole options for youth offenders, effectively sentencing children to live the remainder of their lives in detention. Nationwide, new detention centers were constructed and existing youth facilities ballooned in size.
Despite the widespread adoption of the superpredator theory, DiIulio’s prediction soon proved to be a work of fiction. Immediately before the implementation of these stricter penalties for youth offenders, juvenile crime rates began to plummet. In fact, between 1994 and 2011, murders committed by those aged 10 to 17 fell by two thirds.
The harsh penalization of juvenile defendants may have failed to correlate with actual trends in youth crime, but across the nation, the damage had largely already been done. In 1996, New Jersey’s juvenile detention facilities were operating at 166% of operating capacity and by 2002 those numbers skyrocketed to anywhere between 122% and 223%. The superpredator may have never shown up but the public panic it stoked created an environment where the Hayes Facility could emerge without raising too many eyebrows.
If the creation of the Hayes Facility in 1997 is a mirror of the societal attitudes towards youth crime in the late 90s then the current organizing efforts to close the facility are also a reflection of contemporary values. The “tough on crime” rhetoric that once bonded legislators across the political aisle has now largely been replaced with a “smart on crime” approach that prioritizes varied alternatives to incarceration. The emergence, for example, of progressive district attorneys who have successfully run on platforms to end the money bail system, stop the prosecution of low-level crimes, and implement diversion programs has set a new standard and expectation that local prosecutors will use the power of their office to work towards decarceration.
In addition to the grassroots organizing efforts that have erupted throughout New Jersey in recent years, a bill introduced in 2019 by juvenile justice reform advocates and state legislators serves as a prime example of this shift in attitudes. The New Jersey Youth Justice Transformation Act would allocate $100 million annually to the creation of community-based youth programs, require in-depth research into the racial disparities within the state’s juvenile justice system, and require that youth incarceration be the final adjudication option as opposed to the default.
The bill, sponsored by Senators Ronald Rice and Sandra Cunningham, has garnered support from a handful of New Jersey assembly members and local leaders. This support holds promise but some advocates like Liz Ryan remain cautious and wary of potential challenges that might be posed by policymakers who are still “risk-averse” when it comes to completely overhauling the system as we know it.
“They don’t want to be the ones to have the alternative program and then a young person went out and committed a serious offense. They’re scared of that,” Ryan told me. “What they don’t understand is that they’re actually causing more harm by placing kids in these institutions. Like these institutions have a very high failure rate and in no other area would we continue to just pour money into something where the failure rate is really high.”
That willingness to maintain the status quo may be tied to the fact that while criminal justice reform has taken a more prominent role in political discourse over recent decades, as evidenced by the introduction of bold criminal justice platforms from the 2020 presidential candidates, that conversation has yet to fully extend to the over 40,000 kids currently in the juvenile system nationwide.
Hope, however, may lie in the emergence of unlikely juvenile justice reform coalitions — such as Youth Correctional Leaders for Justice, a new group comprised of current and former youth prison administrators who have seen the system firsthand and are organizing for its abolition — and as recently as May 2019, another victory for New Jersey advocates who held a demonstration that successfully blocked the construction of a third youth facility in Newark.
The proposed New Jersey Youth Justice Transformation Act lists January 2021 as the deadline for the Hayes closure, but advocates like Andrea McChristian are already envisioning their plan for the school that they hope to rebuild on its campus.
“Obviously not segregated, but open to a diverse swath of New Jersey’s young people, focused around issues of social justice and uplift while preparing them for college and vocational skills like the original school as well,” says McChristian. “Really turning it back into a place of learning and education rather than just this forgotten space.”
They hope to revive certain aspects of the Manual Training School, but also keep its more recent history in mind. McChristian hopes to attract students from counties that have been most impacted by the juvenile justice system.
“There definitely should be a solid recruitment effort in the areas most impacted by youth incarceration and making sure there are teachers in the school that represent those communities,” McChristian told me. “It will be for people who have been devastated by youth incarceration, or who were devastated by Hayes and who will now have access to this educational resource.”
Months after the Bordentown Historical Society’s series of events came to a close and the town buzz around the Manual Training School began to wane, I joined Dr. Rice in her Hamilton, New Jersey home. Here, in her sunroom decorated with artwork, her diplomas, news clippings on her accomplishments, and an impressive bookshelf stacked with texts on pedagogy and history, I learned more about her personal involvement with the Juvenile Justice Commission and the girls detained at Hayes.
Wearing a bright yellow headband, and dark blue wedge sandals, Rice is stylishly dressed and seems far more comfortable and at ease than she was at the Carslake Community Center where we first met. Now, she spoke candidly about the mentorship program she was asked to help pioneer at Hayes in the late 90’s.
During that time, she helped bring in adjunct professors to teach college courses on psychology and sociology, she donated a small library of mostly Black history books to the facility, and when she learned that upon their release the girls were only given a paper bag to pack up their belongings, she started buying attractive tote bags for them as a more considerate and dignified alternative. In 2001, she earned a Woman of The Year award from the Commission in recognition of those efforts.
While Dr. Rice explained to me that there were rather limited opportunities for her to speak openly with the girls, there were moments that struck her and have stayed in her mind.
“One of the girls said to me ‘Why are you doing this? Nobody has done anything for me in my whole life’ and I said, ‘Well because I wasn’t there for you when you needed someone like me,’” Rice told me as she tilted her body away from me. “Then she turned her head because she was about to cry, and then I was about to cry. And now I’m about to cry in a minute!”
I initially thought Rice was avoiding Hayes, but it became clear that not only was she aware of it but for a brief moment in its history, she had been very actively involved. The omission of it in her presentation about the school just months earlier suggested then that she considers the two entities as separate — bifurcated by historical era and institutional purpose. The school existed, its story ended in 1955, and the presence of a new group of kids on its campus under very different circumstances is an unfortunate coincidence but not necessarily related.
Choosing instead though, to see the campus as a living institution, would mean that the two must exist in the same story as one another. And perhaps that’s the only story that reveals the world of difference made when our conception of “juvenile justice” is shifted away from the individual decisions made by young people and onto the opportunities that society provides for them.
