THE WAY OF THE TRANSGRESSOR IS HARD

“…the demand for social control of a rapidly growing population and an ideology of moral stewardship increasingly comprised humanitarian fervor.”- Raymond A. Mohl, Humanitarianism in the Preindustrial City: The New York Society for the Prevention of Pauperism

     

    Brilliant academics, ethno-historians, linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, archeologists, and mere buffs (such as myself) have been digging through these histories since they unfolded, “cutlass in hand and baby in lap.” Attempts at understanding just why things went down they way they did is a never-ending game of supposition, speculation and theory. We can’t even determine (with any degree of accuracy) exactly what happened yesterday, let alone come up with concrete causation of realities long forgotten. The past, present and future are constantly colliding, locked, jigging and jiving in a fluid dance of cause and effect, that always seems to remain just out of reach. Social scientists and even theologians digest and offer a degree of explanation, but in the end defer to the predictably insufficient, “human nature.” Deep down, we are no more than the animals we hunt, raise and eat, ofttimes, following our darkest instincts into the future. We just dip the quill in the ink well and complain about the weather, watching in horror, as the neighbors erect another chainlink fence.

  

    When the constable and his family went off to bed, Austin Reed realized he had one last chance for revenge. The boy escaped through the window, went back to the Ladd house, climbed the back kitchen roof and set the place ablaze. He then shimmied down the post, returned to the scene of his whipping in the barn and also set the hay-loft and barn on fire; supposedly burning both structures to the ground. This is obviously poetic license on Reed’s part. The Ladd house, built in 1806, remains intact today. I don’t know about the whipping barn.  

    As Austin Reed watched, his face lit by the flickering flames in rapt amazement, he was quickly recaptured and remanded to the Genoese Jail. There (according to his memoir) he met a horse thief who taught him how to play cards, and wiled away his time in custody, amusing himself as a new student of criminality. Ultimately the fearless, precocious ten year old was “sentenced in September 1833 by the Livingston County court, to The House of Refuge,” until he turned “one and twenty.”    

     Austin Reed documents a lifetime of loneliness, criminality, wanton government sanctioned atrocity and ultimate survival, in what, for lack of a better term was, “state captivity.”  He watched silently, as his mother and siblings waved goodbye, before being placed inside a black mariah bound for the juvenile detention center in New York City. With a kiss on her ten year old’s cheek and a bible thrust into his hand, his mother bid adieu to her youngest. Austin Reed was left to make his way alone in the world. Five days later the mariah bumped to a halt on the Bowery in New York City. This House would not be a Home.

        The sudden appearance of juvenile delinquency and do-gooder societies  set up among the eastern Christian elite to address it, was the result of three very new and distinct manifestations on the seaboard—the “disappearance” of the Indian, freeing up massive tracts of property, increased disposable income and the rapidly spreading evangelism of the Protestant Church. A “nits make lice” approach had softened, transforming into a more benign program of confinement and exploitation of America’s youth. Now you could catch the “nits,” raise them to do your bidding and release them back into society, as productive members of society, earning you a healthy commission in the process.  

    Paternalism was nothing new for the rich, but at the end of the “era of good feelings” (which dated at exactly the same time Richard Jennings drew his last breath) attitudes towards the young and the poor, shifted with the new economy. Wardens of adult prisons recognized that they couldn’t confine and exploit the potential of the fragile child under such harsh adult stewardships. These grown man warehouses were mutating into state sanctioned slave labor camps, with little patience or sympathy for the young. Kids were quick studies, but also easy prey. As William Coffey wrote, at Newgate, “It is a common thing to hear a boy who can scarcely reach the top of a man’s pocket, talk openly of divesting it of its valuable contents.”  If not looked after, the perishable, youthful offenders who couldn’t compete, just broke down or were raped, tortured or killed off. A new paradigm had to be developed.

    The formation of progressive “societies,” many times by Presbyterian and Quaker reformers, gave the illusion of compassion, while in reality, were merely re-tuned versions of the same penal institutions. Entrenched in corporate greed, now disguised (with the help of the rich and the clergy) as altruism, the House of Refuge was a legally functioning human trafficking operation, disguised as a state sanctioned reformatory.

     Under the supervision of the juvenile facility wardens Samuel Wood, Nathaniel Heart [Hart] and David Terry, The New York House of Refuge was overseen by the umbrella organization, The Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents. Reformers, like Cadwallader D. Colden, John Stanford and Thomas Eddy, hoped this modern approach to juvenile detention would make them all richer and up their status among fellow urban elites. The lessons Thomas Eddy had learned at the now leveled Newgate Prison, were being applied at the upstate prisons at Sing-Sing and Auburn and this radical new juvenile facility on the Bowery. And just like the state run penitentiaries, congregate labor and a strictly enforced silence policy were at the Refuge’s core.

     Opened on New Years Day 1825, The New York House of Refuge took advantage of the exploding population of free black, Irish, German and Italian immigrant families and their children. Destitute and constantly in search of work, these dispossessed families flooded New York City in greater and greater numbers in the 1820’s, touching off a panic amongst the upper echelons of white society. Young German, Irish or black, pick-pockets and “swarthy Italian rapists” were imagined lurking around every corner and down every dark alleyway. The reformatory, with the help of truant officers, like the notorious Jacob Hays, could snatch the wild youth right off the downtown streets, confine, refine, and indenture, leaving the parents wondering where their kids went?