Reforming Reform Schools (From Last One Over the Wall; The Massachusetts Experiment in Closing Reform Schools P-81-150, 1991, Jerome G. Miller -- See NCJ-134645)

• NCJ Number: 134648
• Author(s): J G Miller
• Date Published: 1991
• Length: 70 pages
• Sale Source: Ohio State University Press
• Publication Type: Program Description (Demonstrative)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

These four chapters describe the efforts of Jerome Miller, former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, to make the State's reform schools into humane, safe, secure, and lawful facilities.

Abstract

At first, Miller's approach was to establish modest goals through which he could stop the brutality many juvenile offenders were experiencing at the reform schools. In the end, he found these incremental changes harder to implement than the radical step he eventually took of closing all the reform schools and returning the offenders to community supervision. Miller hoped to bring about changes that would carry wider repercussions without demanding total change of the system. In these chapters, Miller discusses staff sabotage of reform plans, escapes from juvenile reform schools, and the silence rule at the Shirley Industrial Rule. To make the reform institutions more humane, Miller implemented policies regulating accountability, staff training, and alternative programs. However, these reforms were still vulnerable to the attitudes of the next Commission, and Miller and his staff decided to abandon the model educational, clinical, and therapeutic programs they had installed and instead close down the whole institutional system.