Community Standards Set Those for Institutions : Juveniles: The tolerance for certain discipline measures determines how children’s homes and detention centers treat their charges.

In 1972, the commissioner of the Department of Youth Services in Massachusetts, with the active support of the governor, closed all of that state’s juvenile reformatories. Except for about 50 youths considered dangerous or severely disturbed, the youths who had occupied those reformatories were set free or placed in non-secure homes.

The commissioner was stirred to action by the staff members of institutions who opposed changes he introduced, such as allowing the youths to keep their hair at whatever lengths they chose and forbidding harsh sanctions. The governor was “repulsed” by the thought of “paying something like $10,000 a year just to keep a kid in a cage.”

The use of separate correctional institutions for children in the United States began in 1825 with founding of the New York House of Refuge. It was started by people concerned about the practice earlier in that century of sentencing youths, some as young as 8, to state prisons.

But life in the House of Refuge (which housed abandoned and neglected children as well as criminal offenders) was based on a rigid schedule of activities. Failure to follow the schedule in an orderly manner could result in substantial punishments, among them a diet of bread and water for days on end and being forced to wear shackles. Moreover, in that house and the others founded later, including one in Boston, severe corporal punishment would be used when other measures failed. One employee of a house of refuge, for example, reported: “Corporal punishments are usually inflicted with the cat or a rattan. The latter punishment is applied to a great variety of places such as the palm and back of the hands, top and bottom of the feet, and lastly, but not rarely or sparingly, to the posteriors over the clothes, and also on the naked skin.”

Putting the bases for closing juvenile institutions in the modern era alongside the accepted means of disciplining institutionalized youths in the 18th Century emphasizes the importance of changing community standards in the evaluation and acceptance of varying disciplinary practices in custodial institutions.

The levels of community tolerance for discipline and restraint determine institutional practices. Examples are the extreme response of closing institutions in Massachusetts and the present public scrutiny here of the practices at Juvenile Hall and the Orangewood Children’s Home.

In the case of Juvenile Hall, scrutiny is taking the form of a class-action suit based principally on allegations of excessive restraint and of invasion of the privacy of residents. In the Orangewood case, the scrutiny is by the Juvenile Justice Commission, on the basis, initially, of allegations that a male counselor mistreated children by the use of force and was insensitive to certain restrictions placed on men in dealing with females in their charge. (In my experience, women dealing with males in similar circumstances are never accused of this.)

Juvenile Hall is a residential facility for criminal-type offenders operated by the county Probation Department, whereas Orangewood houses abused and neglected dependent children under the authority of the Social Services Agency. Although children in the latter facility can be every bit as difficult as children in the former, the community has a much more protective attitude toward them because of their status as victims rather than offenders; accordingly, it is less tolerant of deviations from compassionate treatment.

Beyond the community expectations for appropriate modes of handling youths in homes and custodial institutions, there are the variations among them that are determined by the professional approach of the administrators and the day-to-day working personalities of the staff who maintain the contact with the residents.

It has been pointed out by the Probation Department that the use of “rubber” and “tie-down rooms” is within national norms. It is true that the procedures are widely used, but it is also true that many administrators, including several in California, will not allow their use. (The former commissioner of Youth Services in Massachusetts was an extreme example of this.)

Despite the setting of accepted administrative regulations, and despite the most careful screening of candidates for positions in homes and institutions, there are substantial differences among staff members in manner of approach to their charges. Some will be warm and sensitive; some will be less so; some will be considerably less so, and a few may even be abusive. Some will follow administrative regulations in a rigid way (perhaps because of a fear of community or administrative censure); some will show considerable flexibility in their application, and some will completely disregard inconvenient regulations.

Organizations such as Juvenile Hall and Orangewood have procedures for dealing with employees who are abusive or ineffective, and these may lead to dismissal if remediation is not possible. But those procedures can only be put into operation if administrators are aware of their employees’ behavior. The awareness can come from direct observation or from the allegations of the resident children, of parents or others such as former employees.

Allegations of that sort must be evaluated with the greatest delicacy because of the need to balance the danger of precipitous action on the basis of exaggeration or even distortion by the informer against the danger of reaction from the community if the message gets out, whether accurate, exaggerated or a product of distortion. Clearly, the reporting of events by one of the participants is a product of inherent interpersonal dynamics, and thus may differ considerably from the reporting of those events by a detached observer.

Similarly, the public expects its investigatory and judgmental agencies to respond when significant allegations are brought to their attention, as is the case in Orange County today. And, like competent administrators, the public must await and accept the decisions of those agencies with the mind-set of “where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” especially since the agencies in these particular investigations warrant a great deal of confidence.

The great concern for children and their role as the focus of family life are of course key aspects of our culture, but one should remember that counselors, just as parents, must make many decisions in dealing with them in a daily fashion that are based on complexities that no rule, regulation or child-rearing guide can delineate.