Fresh air funds and functional families: The enduring politics of race,family and place in juvenile justice reform

Introduction

In the middle of the 19th century, Charles Loring Brace, a New York philanthropist and social reformer, became concerned about the rising numbers of poor European immigrant children in New York City. He was disconcerted by city-based institutions aimed at the care of young people; instead, he saw promise and potential in rural family life. Brace (1872: 28–29) felt that the “outcasts, vicious, reckless multitudes of New York boys, swarming … in every foul alley and low street” could only be reformed in the homes of good rural families (Grossberg, 2002). ¹ His work was bolstered by that of other social reformers like Jacob Riis, whose photographs documented what were said to be the harsh effects of urban life on children’s physical health, leading to the establishment of organizations like the Fresh Air Fund, which still exists today (Vanderbeck, 2008). Brace sent urban immigrant children to live with rural families—and they got there via his famous “orphan trains”. The trains were funded by Brace’s organization, the Children’s Aid Society. One hundred and sixty years later, the same organization now has a contract with the City of New York’s Department of Probation to provide life coaching and job training services for the overwhelmingly African-American and Latino teenagers adjudicated as delinquents and who are receiving interventions in the city through an initiative called “Close to Home”, which aims to keep them closer to their home communities. The orphan trains have technically stopped running, but child saving persists.

For many contemporary analysts, juvenile justice reforms have moved in a progressively better direction. Juvenile prisons are out of favor and many local jurisdictions are now supportive of alternatives to incarceration. Yet today, youth in the juvenile justice system continue to be “other people’s children”, and teenagers who engage in crime and their families and communities continue to be pathologized by reformers and the people who work inside the system. ² This article focuses on the enduring racial politics of juvenile justice reforms initiated during the 19th century. Using the case study of New York, it seeks to reveal the institutional racism that has been masked by reformers’ focus on family and place as the causes of delinquency and the sites of intervention.

Drawing from a qualitative study about the governance of juvenile crime in New York, I seek to answer two questions: what logics animate contemporary juvenile justice policies and interventions? What are their sources? I argue that while there have been myriad “cycles” of juvenile justice reform since the late 19th century (Bernard and Kurlychek, 2010), the present day logics of reform are connected to those of the founding period in that ideas about urban life, family and crime have remained intact. ³ These ideas are ultimately reproduced through the continued policing and removal of children who come from primarily urban families of color understood to be the incubators of crime.

The racialized submission of urban families

Interventions into the lives of young people accused of crimes in the United States were arguably always aimed primarily at the poorest children in the country, inasmuch as they have been preoccupied with the preservation of social hierarchies and the exercise of social control (Schlossman, 1977). Historians of juvenile justice interventions have identified the ways that the earliest “child savers” in our country sought out ways to remove, re-socialize, and ultimately repress the urban child in Houses of Refuge, Reformatories, and cottage-based systems modeled after rural family life (Platt, 1977 [1969]; Schlossman, 1977). There were arguably two consistent logics which reformers relied upon in justifying the removal of urban poor children from their homes: the criminogenic nature of urban life and the idea that the poor family was ill-equipped to raise a law-abiding child.

Youth crimes and vagrancy have long been attributed to the inadequacy of the poor urban family to properly nurture their children (Feld, 1999; Schlossman, 1977). Yet, it is arguable that the links between urban life, criminality, and family were made in the eastern United States during the late 19th century when criminal justice reformers sought to control the “dangerous classes” of European migrants who entered the country in large numbers. These “other people’s” children were seen in need of removal and discipline by the state. The stated logic behind the doctrine of parens patriae—the state engaging in the role as parent when the natural parent was found to be incapable of doing so—was that “public institutions could compensate for the failures and deficiencies of private families” (Feld, 1999: 53).

The story of the spatial politics of juvenile justice cannot be told without reference to the profound effects of urbanization on 19th-century American life. ⁴ Social reformers in cities across the country saw links between criminality and the environment within urban communities of racialized European immigrants, Native Americans, Spanish, and Mexican people, and particularly their children (Chávez-Garcia, 2012; Muhammad, 2010; Platt, 1977 [1969]). According to these reformers, “the city symbolically embodied all the worst features of modern industrial life. The city was no place for the innocence of a young child; it debilitated, corrupted, misled, and tarnished youth” (Platt, 1977 [1969]: 40). During the late 19th century and early 20th century, a group of white reformers addressed what they saw as these dangers of unfettered industrialization in the lives of the urban poor (Muhammad, 2010). This idea that crime emanated out of urban life would ultimately justify the relocation of large numbers of urban youth to rural facilities.

The young people in the urban areas of the eastern United States who were initially placed in orphanages, asylums, reformatories, settlement houses, and rural homes were largely white youth. In his comprehensive history of ideas about urban development and criminality as they are tied to racialized thinking, Muhammad (2010) argues that white liberal reformers in the 19th century held a largely optimistic view of reform and its possibilities in the lives of white immigrant youth; for African-Americans, he found, cultural explanations of their criminality were largely dominant among reformers, and reform was seen as a largely futile venture for them (see also Schlossman, 2012; Ward, 2012). Reformers felt that crime by white Eastern European migrants to the United States could be eliminated and prevented in these places, and they may even be able to become “whiter” there (Jacobson, 1998; Ward, 2012).

With the end of the Civil War and Emancipation, the Great Migration resulted in waves of African-Americans arriving in northern cities from the South. As this large-scale population shift occurred, so too did the racialized dynamics of law enforcement and removal (Feld, 2005; see also Chávez-Garcia, 2012 for the western story). Irish immigrants—previously the most dominant population in New York City’s juvenile reformatory—were replaced by African-Americans as the subject of scrutiny and policing (Muller, 2012; Pickett, 1969). Once they entered the courts, African-American youth were denied access to the institutions and reformatories that were designed by the child savers for the immigrant youth; they were given harsher and longer sentences and sent to adult prisons in the early part of the 20th century (Ward, 2012; Wolcott and Schlossman, 2004). ⁵

By the early 20th century, black youth in trouble with the law and who were considered to be incorrigible were removed from their homes and sent to upstate, rural residential facilities (Ward, 2012). Ella Fitzgerald was one of these youth: in 1933, when she was 15 years old, she was sentenced to three to five years in the New York State Training School for Girls. Authorities said that she was “ungovernable and will not obey the just and lawful commands of her mother” and she was adjudicated as a delinquent (Immarigeon, 2014). The training school was racially segregated and black girls were subjected to harsher conditions of confinement than White girls. These conditions were later challenged by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (Immarigeon, 2014).

In its early years, the juvenile justice system disproportionately affected urban youth whose riskiness was constructed via their positions as the urban precariat—whoever posed a particular threat to the middle and ruling classes might find themselves subject to the reforms. Through their actions, the courts began to shape the meanings and messages associated with risky urban youth: in the early part of the system they were overwhelmingly Irish, Polish, and Italian; later, they were primarily African-American. All youth had families that were constructed as dysfunctional. These young people were ultimately banished to juvenile facilities in the rural parts of the state (see also Bauman, 2000; Beckett and Herbert, 2010).

Methods

This article draws from a study focused on the governance of youth crime in New York within its residential juvenile facilities in upstate New York, in community-based alternative-to-incarceration programs, detention facilities, and in courts and jails. The research took place from 2008 until 2011, a time when there were significant reforms in New York’s system directly impacting on the relationship between urban and rural life: over 31 residential facilities located in upstate New York closed, hundreds of rurally based staff members were laid off from their jobs. The research involved ethnographic fieldwork inside of four of the state’s rural residential facilities. I examined the roles and relationships of youth and staff in the facilities. Thirty-nine young people were followed for a year-and-a-half as they made their way in, out, and through the system. Over 75 staff members were interviewed. ⁶ I engaged in participant observation at numerous policy and research meetings with key advocacy stakeholders, government officials, judges, attorneys, and lawmakers, including legislative hearings, city council meetings, and meetings convened with advocates and system administrators. I also interviewed former juvenile justice system administrators from New York. Finally, I conducted a content analysis of various policy documents, hearing and meeting transcripts and reporting on the reforms. This article draws from these data to advance broader claims about the links made by staff and reformers between space, family, and crime. As a number of recent analysts have found, it is often the moment at which the practitioner faces the policymaker or the young person and their family impacted by the system face their oppressor when the richest data might emerge about the influence of politics and ideology on human lives (Chávez-Garcia, 2012; Trost, 2013; Ward, 2012).

Contemporary laws and practice

Space and family continue to have salience in contemporary reforms. In a reverse of the logics that guided the 19th-century reformers, the critiques of the state’s current system by reformers have largely relied upon the idea that rural facility life is criminogenic and that children in trouble with the law do their best when they are located closer to their families. ⁷ In the last seven years, these critiques have been leveraged in support of a large-scale deinstitutionalization process in New York.

There have been various periods throughout New York’s history when juvenile facilities have closed in response to pressure by reformers and advocates, often in response to claims that the facilities are criminogenic in their effects. The late 19th century saw a group of reformers rejecting the Houses of Refuge in favor of reformatories; reformatories themselves were later rejected in favor of smaller cottage-based facilities (McGarrell, 1988; Schlossman, 1977). New York embarked on a deinstitutionalization process in the 1970s, closing many facilities, yet a number of them ultimately re-opened during the 1980s and 1990s (McGarrell, 1988). In recent years, New York closed many of its rurally based facilities and established smaller facilities in New York City. These facilities were run not by the state but by some of the city’s oldest child-saving organizations, such as the New York Foundling and Leake and Watts Services, both established during the 19th century. ⁸

The recent reform plan—to close upstate residential facilities in order to open smaller, urban-based facilities—in part relied upon the conflation of rural life with an outdated approach to juvenile justice. The staff in “upstate” rural residential facilities were often characterized by reformers as individuals who were intransigent, belligerent, mainly white, and out of touch with the young people’s lives. Facility cultures of control, along with the overuse of restraints and the high rates of recidivism were blamed for the death of a young man in a residential facility in 2006. Additionally, the forms of punitive management were seen to exacerbate crime as opposed to prevent it (Feldman, 2007). The US Department of Justice led an investigation of the facilities, and they were placed under federal oversight in 2010 (Confessore, 2010; King, 2009). At a statewide juvenile justice advisory group meeting, the former commissioner of the system, the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS), Gladys Carrión said, “quite frankly, in some of my facilities, I am convinced that I cannot change the culture. It is too embedded, it is a toxic environment” (field notes). The term “facility culture” became associated with the public sector unions and Republican legislators from the districts surrounding the prisons who were resistant to the closures.

Charles Loring Brace, the child saver whose orphan train project centered around the logic that fresh air and rural life would benefit urban families, argued that placing young people with rural families would be less expensive than reliance upon state-run reformatories (Schlossman, 1977: 44–45). Ironically, members of the state legislature rejected his claims, continuing their support of state reformatories. Schlossman (1977) speculated that the Democratic political machine leader known as “Boss” Tweed and his ring of political patronage may have had some role in correctional administration in New York and thus some influence on this support. In contemporary reform politics, the unions representing upstate facility workers and prison staff are said to have a similar influence on upstate legislators and their continued resistance to the closure of juvenile facilities and prisons despite claims by reformers about the costliness of the system and its negative effects. Governor Cuomo spoke directly to this concern in his state of the state address in 2011:

An incarceration program is not an employment program. If people need jobs, let’s get people jobs. Don’t put other people in prison to give some people jobs. Don’t put other people in juvenile justice facilities to give some people jobs. That’s not what this state is all about and that has to end this session.

Ironically, Cuomo’s father, Mario Cuomo, led the largest prison expansion project in New York history during his tenure. But Andrew Cuomo, a canny politician, leveraged growing sentiment, largely emanating from his downstate constituents, that not only was the criminal justice system a failure, but that rural residents possessed a greed for jobs that had no ethical boundaries—that they were dependent upon the prison economy. ⁹ Reformers also leveled critiques at the consequences of incarceration for young people of color, directly critiquing the apparent greed and willingness of upstate constituents in job preservation over the elimination of institutional racism. Carrión, the leader of the state’s system, said: “I am not running the Economic Development Agency for upstate New York … I will no longer export black and brown kids to finance the upstate economy” (Dwoskin, 2010).

These appeals worked. Together with the support of The New York Times, prominent child saving institutions, Mayor Bloomberg, and Governor Cuomo, Carrión achieved a large-scale deinstitutionalization of the state’s system. In 2008, 62 percent of young people admitted to custody in New York state’s residential juvenile facilities were from New York City. Eighty-seven percent of youth in those facilities were African-American and Latino (OCFS, 2008). By 2013, there were just 539 young people admitted to OCFS custody, down from 2116 in 2003 (OCFS, 2013).

Paralleling the space-based analysis of juvenile justice was an emphasis by reformers on the centrality of family in organizing criminality. The City of New York began a program called the Juvenile Justice Initiative, which provided social workers to families of young people involved in the system. Advocacy groups lauded these initiatives. The Citizen’s Committee for Children (2009: 5), a prominent children’s rights organization, argued:

judges often sent children to these facilities—often hundreds of miles away from home—because local communities lacked the means to help them with mental problems or family issues. These are costly decisions, both in the emotional toll they take on children and the financial toll they take on taxpayers. To institutionalize one child for a single year, the state can spend as much as $200,000.

State officials and city officials developed legislation aimed at closing facilities for juvenile delinquents and contracting with non-profit providers to provide residential care (Negredo et al., 2014). This “Close to Home” legislation was ultimately enacted by the New York State legislature in 2012. Through the legislation, Family Court judges in New York City were obligated to place young people adjudicated as delinquents in facilities based in the city. Those who developed the term “Close to Home” undoubtedly engaged in a rhetorical strategy that tapped into growing sentiments among the reformers that the removal of urban children from their homes into rural institutions was harmful; yet, as revealed below, the appeal to family-based care may have still relied upon the idea that the urban family of color remained ill-equipped to manage their child.

The alternatives developed under the Close to Home plan included an expansion of Functional Family Therapy, Multisystemic Family Therapy, and other home-based interventions into the lives of young people and their families. The New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), which operated the city’s detention facilities and later became the chief administrator for Close to Home, included the goal of increasing community and family interaction in their strategic plan. Carrión, the former commissioner of OCFS, became the commissioner of ACS; in many ways, this move symbolized the political and symbolic power of the city in the context of these reforms, as what could be considered a step down was considered by many to be her promotion. These city-based reforms focused on making the largely African-American and Latino families under the care of ACS (which is responsible for child welfare and juvenile justice) “functional”.

In many ways, the reforms obscured some of their arguably more direct intentions: cost savings in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Yet they also spoke to the enduring power of the child saving logics; urban families and their children continued to be in need of saving and cost savings were a convenient ancillary effect of that project. A report for a statewide task force on probation noted a potential total cost savings of $175 million if the state shifted to the use of Multisystemic Family Therapy, Functional Family Therapy, and Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care. The authors of the report argued: “Restrictive out-of-home placements, such as residential treatment, psychiatric hospitalization, and incarceration, fail to address the known determinants of serious antisocial behavior and fail to alter the natural ecology to which the youth will eventually return” (Task Force on the Future of Probation in New York State, 2008: 4). The language of “community” has become prevalent in discourses of reform in New York: community is emphasized via new policies focused on “community development” and community “capacity building”. It was also observed during the research study that the term “community” became shorthand for African-American and Latino “communities” in New York City.

The use of the word “community” as shorthand for communities of color was not only a euphemism; it may also have been a strategy of governance. By emphasizing the need to strengthen urban “communities” of color, reformers pointed to a shared understanding about the limits of past juvenile justice practices which were solely aimed at removal of children from their urban communities and what they believed to be the related neglect of those communities. Yet, there may have also been a strategy of governance enmeshed in this rhetoric: in many localities, there has been a shift from the state to individual and group responsibility “for the management of local risks and security” (Crawford, 1999: 6). Individuals, non-profit organizations, and private entities within cities are anointed with the responsibility for the management of impoverished and marginalized urban residents. Families themselves are expected to learn appropriate forms of social control. So, while “community” is elevated and celebrated, this may also be an effort by state and local governments at stimulating informal social control, particularly in the context of financial crises.

The invocation of “community” may also serve to build legitimacy for state and city actors who were initiating a large-scale process of reform that would necessitate public buy-in and support; acknowledging and anticipating the critiques of institutional racism by focusing on support for communities of color could serve to preempt any critiques about what they may be doing to actually impose different forms of social control over the lives of urban families—a kind of transcarceration as opposed to decarceration. For in fact as facilities closed in upstate New York, they also opened in New York City; the “Close to Home” facilities, while not prisons, are still secure environments which young people cannot leave. For those youth who remained with their families, the net of control arguably extended more broadly over them and their families, as their parents are required to take part in the functional family interventions.

Throughout, the focus of reformers has been on the ways that rural facilities perpetuate racism and urban-based care eliminates it. In a report about the reforms authored by the Vera Institute, who were commissioned by the state to manage a task force on juvenile justice, they argue:

It is important to note that the practice of institutionalizing youth in order to give them access to needed services disproportionately impacts youth of color, who often come from under-resourced, urban, and marginalized communities. In effect, the current system is punishing young people for circumstances that are beyond their control. To perpetuate a system in which young people who pose little or no threat to public safety are removed from their homes and their communities is a recipe for on-going failure. It consigns them to a future with little promise, bleak prospects for advancement, and repeated involvement in the justice system.

The Vera report—and the reformers who helped to shape it—mobilizes the claim that the uses of upstate rural facilities perpetuate the harmful racial disproportionality that exists in the system. ¹⁰ This identification of institutional racism may actually distract from an analysis of the racialized dynamics that exist at the front end of the juvenile justice system, through policing practices and actuarial assessments which often conflate riskiness with blackness (Harcourt, 2010). In his work on the history of policing and juvenile justice, Wolcott (2005) points to the ways that policing practices and ideologies often differed sharply from those of the child savers and reformers; in New York City today, it is often the very same young people receiving services in the city’s “Close to Home” facilities who have been arguably over-policed by its Stop and Frisk practices.

Facility staff

The perceptions of staff members working at the frontlines of the juvenile facilities in the parts of upstate New York which were condemned by reformers may help illuminate the logics that animate the contemporary reform practices. In this site where policy meets practice, or more precisely, where reform meets the reformed, it becomes possible to see the persistence of racial politics in juvenile justice as expressed through ideas about place and family.

Line staff in juvenile facilities were not only expected to implement facility-based changes, but they also observed the cycles of reforms. They encounter, day by day, the overwhelmingly urban young people of color who have been identified as the riskiest youth in the state by police, prosecutors, and judges; they are tasked with enacting the practices intended to control those “risky” youth, in a setting in which they are invested in, primarily for the sake of job security. They are also the individuals who possess the least amount of social and political power to enact change; no staff members were included in the Close to Home reform process.

The facility staff are overwhelmingly undereducated—many just possess a GED (high school equivalency diploma). They often work 16-hour shifts and few, if any, of the staff participants I spoke to were politically active or active in their union. These staff are often positioned in the most high risk spaces in the facility landscape, as individuals who are charged with “guarding” youth in a locked and secure environment, they are often in an oppositional role to them, and while many staff form strong bonds with the youth under their care, their primary role is defined as custodial by those above them. As such, there is little room for them to advocate for changes in the system they are charged to maintain, even if they do possess critiques of such a system.

Criminogenic spaces and families

Based on a reading of media reports alone, staff in juvenile facilities are straightforwardly opposed to reforms aimed at closing the facilities they work in. Yet a closer analysis of their expressions of resistance arguably points us to some of the reasons why the intervention and removal of “other people’s children” has endured for so many years in this country. Among the staff that I interviewed, their logics of resistance relied heavily on the links between crime, space, and family. Previous analyses have focused on the perceptions of street-level bureaucrats at the front end of the juvenile justice system, such as probation officers (Bridges and Steen, 1998; Harris, 2009; Leiber and Peck, 2012). This analysis suggests that those working at the frontlines of the historically contested sites of reforms—the reformatories themselves—reflect the complex and sometimes contradictory ways that meanings about space and family become sedimented in the very places where youth have been removed from their families.

Staff members often identified the neighborhoods that the young people in the facilities came from as anarchic places where the temptation to offend would outweigh the impacts of any forms of treatment they may have received. They were, in other words, constructed as places where the exercise of self-control was absent. This world was considered to be dysfunctional and criminogenic. As a staff member at the girls’ facility put it, “we can change the kids, but we can’t change the outside”. She noted that in contrast to the young people’s home communities, “this is the best place for them to go”. Staff presented the idea that, for the young people, “home” in the city would always remain terrible, and that it was their role to change the individual, who would have to resist the influence of the city. As one staff member said, the reason why their facility had so many parole violators was because “you are going back to the same corner”. These assessments spoke to the endurance of the messages communicated about urban communities by the child savers of the 19th century, and the powerful ways that the siting of facilities in rural communities gave those claims life.

In the face of arguments presented by reformers that it was better for young people to be placed in their home communities, staff members asserted the importance of the “structure” and accountability that the facility offered and which they said was absent on “the street”, or in the city—the site of the new Close to Home facilities. A staff psychologist at a boy’s facility said that a strong form of “accountability” needed to exist because young people came to the system from a place (the “community”) where “accountability” was meaningless. The staff would often characterize the city as a place absent of social and behavioral controls. As one staff counselor in a rural facility which faced imminent closure put it, “there’s some kids that need to be placed and learn a different way of life and they haven’t learned that. They’re gonna learn it when things break loose down in the city.” Ironically, many of the staff members came from rural and Rust Belt communities plagued by high rates of unemployment, drug addiction, and domestic violence. Thus, their claims were ones that held complex meanings and messages, as “rural” communities were no longer the pastoral idylls described by early reformers.

A number of staff members critiqued the approach by the statewide administrator, Carrión, to close the facilities, conveying their sense that the young people were ultimately ungovernable, and that their time in the cities would not help them. A staff member spoke about how Carrión is “intent on saying that all a kid needs is a little support in the community”, but that the kids were “incorrigible” to the degree that “it’s embarrassing”. During the reforms, many staff members turned to anonymous online message boards, where they could anonymously vent their frustrations about the reforms:

[W]here we failed these children is when they r (sic) released from facilities. Most of them go home to poverty drugs or no one. Carrion doesnt (sic) want to place these kids anymore but whats (sic) going to happen to them, in the case files so many of them have parents who do not want them home. U can only do so much to fix broken families. I am so sick of hearing excessive force …

Some staff members made these comments in the face of perceived criticisms that they were responsible for young people’s re-offending. Their charges of reverse racism thus perhaps grew not only out of the connections they made between criminality and blackness, but also out of a defensiveness that their expertise was being challenged.

As has been identified throughout the history of juvenile justice in New York State, young people’s families were identified by some staff as a key cause of their delinquency. Yet a number of staff members’ critiques of the young people’s families may have also emerged from a defensiveness about their own positions as actors engaging in an in loco parentis role. This in many ways was a role that could be differentiated from the paternalistic role of the judge, the lawyer, the probation officer, or even the facility social workers: as noted above, these individuals often spent up to 16 hours a day with the young people, perhaps experiencing complex feelings of transference and attachment. One staff member noted:

A lot of them have very low self-esteem. They come from disgusting houses, apartments that are dirty, filthy, poor. They’re stealing to eat, some of them, so they have very low self-esteem. So we do very little to try to do anything to build that back up.

When they learned about the facilities closing, some staff members said that the young people they worked with would be sent to places where their troubles would grow worse. One staff member felt that when the facilities sent children home, “it’s like sending an alcoholic to a bar to work”. Several staff members used animal metaphors to describe the kinds of behaviors that the young people engaged in and the behavioral conditioning that was necessary to teach them to abide by the standards of the institution. One staff member said “you take a lion from the jungle” and “he’ll conform”, and you put them back “out there” and “they’ve gotta survive”. These animal metaphors were most often used to describe the young people of color in the facilities. These assessments of young people of color as disrespectful of authority and unmanageable have been identified by other scholars (Bridges and Steen, 1998; Cicourel, 1968). The staff’s language also illustrates and supports Frohmann’s (1997: 553, emphasis in original) argument that “place and person descriptions work together in legal settings to construct moral character”.

Bridges and Steen (1998: 567) found that probation officers would often attribute white youths’ offending to their social environments and Black youths’ offending to their “negative attitudinal and personality traits”. Harris (2009) too found that attributions of dangerousness and blameworthiness were more often given to African-American youth, and that these had real consequences for juvenile justice decision making. In juvenile facilities, staff members’ invocation of the moral depravity of youth as connected to place and family arguably reflects their focal concerns in this context: job preservation and their investment in the utility of their task, which is focused on the treatment and control of primarily urban youth of color in a facility far from their homes.

In New York, as is increasingly common in many other states, 51 percent of the facility line staff are African-Americans (Cox, 2013). Thus, these condemnations of urban youth and their behavior are not clear expressions of a white–black binary of racialized social control. They are complex mobilizations of narratives about urbanity and family life that are expressed by individuals who often grew up confronting racism and marginality and who struggle to balance support and punishment in intra-race dynamics that are infused by histories of marginalization (see also Watkins-Hayes, 2009). Thus, it is arguable that staff members deploy these narratives about city and family life not only as an expression of resistance to reforms which will jeopardize their livelihood, but also as a means of underscoring the logic which they have been trained to uphold: removal means reform.

Upstate vs downstate

In New York, many prisons and juvenile facilities are located “upstate”. To be “sent upstate” is often shorthand for incarceration, even for individuals from “upstate” Rustbelt cities such as Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, and Rochester. The facility closures—although initiated in Albany (upstate)—were perceived by a number of staff members to be a part of a larger agenda to shift resources away from upstate New York and toward New York City. As one staff member put it, in referring to the leader of the state’s juvenile justice system, “Her goal is to have all the money down in the city—no money upstate.” Another said “That’s where our money’s going. That’s where our jobs are going. They hate us down there.” There were often implicit messages about race embedded within the discourses about upstate and downstate (see also Frohmann, 1997). More frequently, staff, as opposed to reformers, would invoke these differences, which is perhaps suggestive of the symbolic power that “the city” and downstate played in the staff members’ minds—it was the base of both the reformers and the children under their care, in much the same way that “community” became a shorthand used by reformers to describe neighborhoods occupied primarily by people of color.

Over time, juvenile facilities have become a source of stable employment in rural areas hard-hit by deindustrialization. In the post-World War II years, many of New York’s cities along the Hudson and Mohawk rivers had thriving automobile, steel, heavy equipment, consumer and industrial electronic industries, apparel and printing disappeared (Castellani, 2005). Displaced workers found help in the growth of public sector jobs. Government employment grew by more than a third from 1965 to 1972 in upstate New York, while manufacturing jobs declined significantly (Castellani, 2005). Public sector positions, particularly those in the criminal justice system, were considered to be a salve for rural economic deprivation (King et al., 2003).

The dynamics of “upstate” and “downstate” jobs and reforms were complicated by a lack of a clear binary. Many of the places that the original facilities were located were formerly industrial urban locations themselves. The New York Training School for Girls (now closed), was built in a formerly industrial city, Hudson. The Tryon facility was on the outskirts of Amsterdam, New York, once a thriving industrial city located on the banks of the Mohawk river. As these cities declined, they became metonyms for “rural” despite continuing to be, in fact, cities, but ones plagued by deep social isolation, segregation, and unemployment.

Conclusion

Early interventions into the lives of white European youth were justified by reference to the allegedly damaging effects of urbanization and harmful “social ecologies” of poor families, who were seen to be incapable of inculcating white middle-class values in their children in the midst of their own pressures to work in the rapidly expanding capitalist economy. The “streets” themselves were considered to be incubators of incorrigibility—exposing young people to environmental and social pollutants. Interventions and reforms today on their face identify rural institutions as toxic influences in the lives of urban children. They promote the idea that children should stay at home as opposed to being placed in institutions. But a closer look at the contemporary interventions reveals that they are in fact reliant upon many of the same logics that guided the older reforms—that impoverished children of color from the city live in families which do not embrace middle class white ideals of behavior. In their sometimes very plain language, the staff in the juvenile facilities arguably expose the enduring role and effects of these logics. Their language, and the language of that of reformers, also speaks to the ways that language and descriptions can be mobilized in support of clear outcomes for youth (Maynard, 1982). In this case, impoverished urban youth of color arguably continue to receive interventions aimed at establishing their—and now their family’s—self-control and behavioral control. These practices simply take place more often within geographic reach of their own homes.

As the geographer David Harvey (2000: 546) has argued, the myths about the USA’s humanitarian, all-embracing and democratic ethos are in part sustained by the “emphatic denunciations and demonizations” of evil spaces, such as threatening world orders (Iran, Iraq, the Taliban, for example) and the “inner city”. In this article, I suggest that the space–crime–family logics formed the underpinnings of this nation’s juvenile justice system and have sustained its focus on interventionism. The staff members’ reflections and reactions are not only indicative of their power to fight facility closures, but also of the embeddedness of such discourses. Despite significant processes of downsizing and reform that have occurred across the United States, there are greater numbers of youth of color in institutions than ever before (Davis et al., 2014). Thus, the strategies of reformers—to keep young people closer to their homes and families—have not necessarily resulted in changes in the patterns of criminalization that led these youth into the system in the first place. This confirms what researchers have shown us—that there is a relationship between concentrated disadvantage in urban life and the likelihood not only of offending, but also of incarceration (Rodriguez, 2013; Sampson and Loeffler, 2010).

The discourses of facility staff members and reformers in the contemporary juvenile justice reform landscape in New York were seemingly misaligned—they fought on two different “sides” of the issue, upstate vs downstate, city vs rural, white vs black. Yet this seeming misalignment actually obscured some common underlying logics. Both groups tapped into longstanding narratives about urban life and crime in their processes of reform. Both groups mobilized ideas about dysfunctional families in their articulation of the need for intervention in family life. And both groups mobilized ideas about African-American and Latino youth that are ultimately far more complicated than can be captured by reforms, as seen by the deepening racial disparities of young people involved in the system and the expanding presence of African-Americans among facility staff.

It is argued here that ideas about family and space have been symbolically powerful in mobilizing transformations in the penal field in New York. The narratives of progress that have been used in recent years may fail to fully address the role that these enduring ideas play in continuing efforts at punishing the poor.