PYM: Child Abuse at Taxpayers' Expense: V. Are There Other Ways?

This is a segment from a collaborative work by the Friends Suburban Project, the Pennsylvania Program for Woman and Girl Offenders, and Youth Advocates, Inc., supported by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, published in 1974.

The entire piece, entitled "Child Abuse at Taxpayers' Expense: A Citizen's Report on Training Schools in Southeastern Pennsylvania," attacks the juvenile delinquency program in southeastern PA, focusing especially on the fact that the rate of incarceration of juveniles was at the time increasing in PA. It bases its information on what seems to be a hearing, or a series of hearings, including lengthy segments of transcribed testimony from people who had been in "training schools" or "institutions," in addition to various other critics.

The chapter self-consciously points out that while throughout the rest of the piece it is obvious that the institution system is flawed and needs to be changed, actual imagined alternatives are still limited in their scope and variety.

For example, many people take foe granted that juvenile rehabilitation needs to occur in a residential setting, a fact which the anonymous narrator states with subtle criticism. Group homes, or homes for delinquents in their own community, where they would live together under the eye of a guiding adult (in the example given, this person is a priest), are praised. However, they already exist and do not serve as the innovative the authors seek.

One significant roadblock to group homes is rejection from the community. In many cases a community objects to the placement of a house full of juvenile delinquents on their doorstep. The narrators, and people quoted in the chapter, advocate for a kind of political force in this regard, pointing out that while no community is going to be excited at this prospect, sending delinquents away and ignoring their existence is beneficial neither to the delinquents nor the community itself, which is framed in this argument as "taking the easy way out," to a degree.

I think this is a particularly interesting conundrum, especially given that at no point do the writers explicitly state where these homes would exist. How beneficial is reintroducing delinquent minors into a community that rejects them? How could this hurt an already suffering community?

Other suggestions in this chapter are reimbursement programs, directed either at counties who keep minors out of institutions, or at families who take delinquent minors back into their homes. I feel that this could easily lead to a fraudulent use of funds intended to help the minors, both at an individual and bureaucratic level.

While I think this paper carries a patronizing tone, I also think it serves as a thoughtful look into alternatives, to fit in the section discussed in the previous post.