Juvenile Detention of Black Girls and Young Women

Girls posing on steps of the Virginia Cottage at the Industrial Home School for Colored Girls in Hanover County, Virginia, 1920

Although intended to serve as an asylum that provided care, shelter, and education for all youth, houses of refuge, reformatories, and industrial homes were complicit in the subjugation of black girls. Due to the gendered vocational training and manipulative moral suasion by the staff, black girls were conditioned to believe they were nuisances in society that needed to be made useful. By preparing Black youth for menial labor, specifically domestic work, juvenile detention institutions reinforced that debilitating social position.

During the early nineteenth century, social conditions such as overcrowding, pollution, dangerous working conditions, and crime inspired a range of reform movements that spearheaded social change in the United States. The uptick in crime in particular inspired innovative ideas and techniques to ensure efficient and effectives ways of punishing and rehabilitating criminal offenders. Yet, these techniques and institutions did not sufficiently include the well-being of children. One of these reform movements called the Child Saving Movement influenced the development of the juvenile justice system by imploring communities to resolve, or “cure,” issues of child poverty, child neglect, overcrowding, the confinement of youth with adult criminals, and dilapidating conditions of jails and penitentiaries. “Child Savers” also advocated for reformation through kindness, moral and religious teachings, and “useful”, industrious labor:

“Bolts and bars and whips may suppress the manifestation of evil, but the heart can only be changed so that its spontaneous product shall be good fruit, by the application of the law of kindness.” [1]

"How deeply does it concern the community, to take these
little creatures by the hand, when they shall have committed the
first offence—withdraw them from contamination and guilt—provide the means of industry and education —soften their minds to the reception of moral and religious truth—and gradually, by gentle treatment and wholesome discipline, lure them into habits of order, truth, and honesty.” [2]

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[1] "REPORT OF THE TEACHER OF THE GIRLS' SCHOOL, HOUSE OF REFUGE, COLORED DEPARTMENT," The Irish Quarterly Review, 1851-1859 (1860): 23, http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/historical-periodicals/report-teacher-girls-school-house-refuge-colored/docview/4446760/se-2?accountid=10226.

[2] The House of Refuge, The design and advantages of the House of Refuge (Philadelphia: Brown, Bicking and Guilbert, 1840), 5.