Synopsis
Offers an in-depth study of a 1973 case in which thirteen-year-old Shirley Wilder, an abused runaway, became the focus of a class-action lawsuit in regard to the inequities of New York City's foster care system, providing a full-history of the case and the long-term consequences of foster care for Shirley, her son Lamont, and Lamont's son, all victims of the system. 30,000 first printing.
Extrait
Chapter 3
There was still snow on the ground the day Shirley Wilder and another girl followed a dirt road at the upper end of the grounds into the woods, hunting for a way out. The road soon vanished among the drifts and wet black tree trunks. Moving through the shadows of a grove of cedars, they suddenly found themselves in a clearing at the edge of a steep, wooded ravine.
It was a small cemetery. The old gravestones had been so tilted by spring frosts and winter thaws that they looked almost scattered. There were no dates on the weathered markers, and no epitaphs—only girls' names, fading from bare limestone.
Lizzie French. Nellie McGovern. Anna Schabesberger. Julia Coon. Mary O'Brien. Louella Roarack. Lydia Althouser. Jennie Fuller. Barbara Decker. Anne Withey. Helen Peer.
Shirley remembered the stories she had heard from a housemother and some of the girls. They said a secret graveyard lay hidden in the woods on the Hudson grounds. Years ago, dead babies born to inmates were buried there, and bad girls, too—girls caught trying to escape who later died inside the institution. Other bodies were sent home to their folks for burial, but even after death, runaways were punished. This was their solitary confinement: a cold, dark grave lost in the woods forever.
Shirley began to tremble, and the other girl cried out in fright. They turned and ran away as fast as they could.
At the other end of the Hudson grounds they climbed over the fence together and slid down a slope into a stubble of cattails and frozen loosestrife. For hours they stumbled through the big swamp that bordered the institution, looking for a road out. Pockets of ice cracked underfoot and gave way to marshy ground. They fell and scrambled upright again, foul-smelling muck soaking their shoes and clothes. Running, trudging, running again, they couldn't escape the icy wind that whipped in off the river. They clutched at stiff weeds with raw fingers to keep from slipping. Shirley's feet swelled, and her ears went numb with cold.
They were lost, lost in the vast wetland that had once been the South Bay.
Whaling ships were moored here in another century. The first ones carried the town's founders, prosperous whalers from Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard who came seeking a safer harbor in the revolutionary world of 1783. The Proprieters, as later generations would call them, sailed up the Hudson with all their goods lashed to the decks of their ships, even their disassembled houses. In later years, tugboats idled in the South Bay after guiding great shipping vessels to the deep-water wharves on Hudson's Front Street. In the 1840s, when impoverished tenant farmers rebelled against their vassalage under Hudson Valley landowners, troopships sailed here, too, bringing soldiers to crush the revolt.
Then the railroad arrived. The New York-to-Albany line was laid on causeways right across the mouth of the South Bay, cutting it off from the river in 1851. An iron factory spewed its wastes into the stranded bay. The bay became a putrid swamp. And on a promontory above this swamp, the House of Refuge for Women was built. The word Refuge was misleading: from the moment the stone and wrought iron gates of the institution first swung open on May 7, 1887, solitary confinement was the preferred mode of treatment.
"Though I have been very much impeded by the newness of the institution in my desire to enforce rigorous discipline," Sarah V. Coon, the first superintendent, reported in November 1888, "still so far as it has been possible in our overcrowded prison, I have tried to isolate each girl, upon her arrival, from the older inmates. . . . Sometimes, upon detecting a developing tendency to misbehave, I still keep her in solitary confinement until I see a change in this respect. . . . Besides solitary confinement, confinement in dark cells, with disciplinary diet and handcuffs, is in vogue."
Shirley, scrambling through the marsh in the slanting winter light of 1973, was one in a long line of girls who had tried to escape this form of education. Most were quickly apprehended. The very first inmate committed to the institution after it was dubbed the New York State Training School for Girls in 1904 was a thirteen-year-old named Rose Conte who ran away at four o'clock that July day and was caught by nine p.m.
A few got away. "Twenty-five Dollars Reward," announced the Hudson Gazette on November 14, 1895. "Saturday last a reward of $25 was offered for the return of Catharine Burns, who escaped from the House of Refuge for Women in this city on the night of October 23. The woman is described as being 23 years of age, 5 feet 71/2 inches tall, very dark hair, large, dark blue eyes, strongly marked dark eyebrows, pale complexion, well proportioned and rather striking in appearance."
Catharine Burns was never found. Perhaps she melted into one of the lost colonies of runaways that people the legends of the Hudson River Valley. But to Shirley, a city child lost in a tangle of scrub oak and swamp hickory, the wilderness held no promise of refuge. At last, through thickening woods and gathering dusk, she saw the lights of a house and ran to it.
A fire was blazing in the grate. A woman was at home. When she answered the door, Shirley begged her for help. Would she please call a taxi to take them to the city? The woman agreed and invited the two shivering girls inside to warm themselves at her hearth. They were so grateful. They were still huddled there, holding their hands out to the flames, when the Hudson security guard walked in to take them back.
Shirley spent three days in solitary confinement as punishment for running away. When she emerged from isolation, she was transferred into the new Behavior Modification Unit in Cottage E.
Cottage E was the last building in the far quadrangle, the closest to the woods that hid the old cemetery. Beyond the graves, blocked from view by trees, stood the superintendent's house. It was a mansion, really, built in the Federal style when the rolling grounds were still a rich man's estate. Embellished in the mid–nineteenth century, it boasted an Italianate tower, octagonal halls with big bay windows, and a stone veranda with a commanding view over the trees to the mountains.
One after another the institution's superintendents had lived there. Tom Tunney, arriving with his wife and four children in 1965, was the last. The state provided the residence free of charge and supplied a staff to match: a uniformed chauffeur, maintenance men to tend the temperamental furnace, a gardener, a cook, and a full-time housekeeper. Traditionally, ten girls worked under the housekeeper's direction. They kept the marble fireplaces clean and dusted the grand circular staircase; they washed and ironed the family laundry in the basement; they peeled and chopped and scoured in the kitchen. Some served at table, answering the summons of a peremptory bell. The girls were not paid, of course. This was "vocational training."
Gale Smith, Tunney's right-hand man, knew it was typical throughout the training-school system. "There were always kids who worked in the superintendent's home. It was patterned after the old system of county sheriffs who had control in their bailiwick and prison inmates working for them. It was all part of English tradition. Some of the training schools had a tailor who would actually tend to the family's needs. Most of them managed their own storehouse, and the superintendent's house got the choice cuts from the meat. They were little fiefdoms."
For Tunney, a white liberal who had spent the summer of 1964 in Mississippi agitating for Negro civil rights, what came to mind was not England but the antebellum South. His first week at the institution he said to his wife, "My God, Patty, I've got a plantation here to run."
By then, most of the girls at Hudson were black. Perhaps 35 percent of the staff was, too; many came from black families that had lived for generations in the town of Hudson. Tunney's first proclamation put a halt to the unpaid labor of inmates in the mansion. When he learned that many staff members were taking girls to their own homes to do laundry and cleaning under the guise of "vocational training," he decreed that the inmates would have to be paid two dollars an hour. "Suddenly not too many people wanted to take the girls," he would remember.
But the institution itself remained dependent on the inmates' unpaid work. Not only were society's narrowest expectations for young women embodied in the vocational-education courses—homemaking, cooking, and beauty culture topped the list—but all "vocational assignments" had to be fitted into the maintenance needs of the institution. There were, for example, no janitors at Hudson because the girls did all the cleaning—in the academic school, the chapel, and the administration building as well as the cottages. They also did the laundry, including linens for several other state facilities, on equipment rated "altogether obsolete" by inspectors. To accommodate the workload, many of the girls went to school only in the morning or the afternoon, or two to three days a week. No girl's room had a desk, no cottage a space for study; the school's sparsely supplied library was open to inmates for forty minutes, once a week. Most inmates would be at a serious disadvantage when they returned to their community schools. The irony was that many had been committed to Hudson as truants.
In 1972, after Tunney's own children went off to college, he moved out of the big house into a more modest farmhouse on the grounds. In 1973, when Shirley Wilder arrived at Hudson, the superintendent's mansion stood unused and overgrown, like the old cemetery below it.
Tunney thought he had broken with his predecessors. A Korean War air force veteran turned registered Socialist and student of Buddhism, he saw himself as a radical reformer unafraid of controversy. "When I came here there were 350 kids and the place was a mess," he would say. "My idea was to close it down. I wanted to close them all down."
In his first years at Hudson, Tunney did close Cottage A, the punishment cottage that had operated since the 1920s; but then he built isolation cells into the old hospital building instead. Few if any of his supporters knew the institution's history well enough to appreciate the irony: the hospital, remodeled several times, had started out as the prison building at the House of Refuge. Its prison cells had been superseded at the turn of the century by a "guard-house . . . where girls may be put into solitary confinement." The guardhouse in turn had been replaced by a disciplinary cottage—Cottage A. Now the site of punishment had come full circle.
The hospital cells were backed up, of course, by the Brookwood Annex. "Annex units of this type are common in several states and they are in every sense disciplinary cottages ‘away from home,' " Giallombardo, the sociologist, noted in 1973. "Held as a threat to any inmate who resists outward conformity to institutional rules, the units provide the same function as would a maximum security cottage located on the grounds. In addition, its location elsewhere makes it possible to present a public image of the institution that is less than the whole truth, if not altogether false."
Mindful of the harshness of Brookwood's regime, Tunney decided to create an experimental alternative—a behavior-modification unit. It was to be an enlightened version of the annex, a state-of-the-art application of B. F. Skinner's work to the treatment of juvenile delinquency. Instead, it would become another place of punishment reverberating with echoes of a forgotten past. like tunney, josephine shaw lowell, the nineteenth-century social reformer whose tough-minded campaign first established the Hudson House of Refuge for Women, saw herself as a radical. She came from a distinguished family of abolitionists. Her brother, Robert Gould Shaw, had died leading the first Negro regiment in the Civil War; her father had organized the Freedmen's Bureau; and she began her lifelong charitable work by inspecting black schools in the South and raising relief funds for freed slaves. Appalled by conditions in New York's poorhouses and jails, where the Irish had predominated since the great migration of the Irish Famine, she fought for policies that she thought would eliminate poverty, not just cope with its consequences. She became a leader among the new "scientific" social reformers who focused on family patterns as the primary source of poverty and social disorder, and on the role they believed indiscriminate charity played in perpetuating those patterns.
Nineteenth-century ideology had cast the "true woman" as the guardian of social morality, and her home as a haven from the marketplace, where the next generation would learn industriousness and Christian virtue. But by the 1870s, fears about the formation of a permanent class of paupers and criminals had turned the cult of true womanhood on its head: the "fallen woman" was seen as the progenitor of idle and vicious generations that drained the resources of the republic and threatened its stability.
"One of the most important and most dangerous causes of the increase of crime, pauperism and insanity, is the unrestrained liberty allowed to vagrant and degraded women," Lowell told New York's state legislature in 1879, in arguing for the creation of a reformatory for women under the management of women. "There are two distinct and separate objects to be aimed at in dealing with these women: To reform them if possible, but if that cannot be done, at least to cut off the line of hereditary pauperism, crime and insanity, now transmitted mainly through them."
The hybrid reformatories that Lowell envisioned for female offenders and young mothers of illegitimate children were to provide a kind of reprogramming in "true womanhood" through an institutional replication of family life, isolated from the outer world. When the state finally opened the House of Refuge in 1887, "as an experiment," it embodied most of Lowell's plan and all its contradictions.
The targets, typically convicted of prostitution or vagrancy, had been subject in the past to terms of ten days to half a year in jail or the county poorhouse. Now they were sentenced to Hudson for five years, with earlier release only at the discretion of their keepers. In the shadow of the ninety-six-cell prison building where inmates spent at least the first two months, cottages housing fifteen to twenty young women were "fitted up as nearly as possible like an average family home for the purpose of teaching inmates all manner of domestic work." They were at times allowed to talk to each other in "a low, pleasant voice," but only under the eyes of the supervisor, "who checks any boisterousness or unladylike manner," as Coon, the first superintendent, reported. Even unhappiness was cause for reproof. A complicated point scale was used to grade inmate behavior, backed by a system of surveillance, denunciation, and self-confession for such small faults as tilting a chair or sitting on a bed. "So much attention is given to these minute points that a girl, it is considered, can not attain 100 as an average at any time." Room confinement on bread and water was standard punishment for breaking rules designed as much to ensure the smooth functioning of the institution as to remake a "bad" girl into a "respectable" woman.
But the results were often disappointing, to judge from the oversized parole ledgers stacked and forgotten in the basement of a Hudson administration building. To be sure, sometimes a young girl or woman was reported to be "doing well" after discharge—married, employed as a servant by a "respect...
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