The Ethan Allen School for Boys attempts to reform young criminals by educating them and teaching them new skills. The boys are in danger of returning to their previous behavior patterns unless they have community support.
Short of prison, the last stop for young males who commit serious crimes in Wisconsin is the Ethan Allen School for Boys. Set in the pretty, rolling countryside outside the town of Wales, it was originally built as a tuberculosis sanitarium. Ethan Allen, or Wales, as it's commonly called, could easily be mistaken for a prep school, except that the grounds are surrounded by tall, chain-link fences and razor wire.
At the most remote end of campus, a new, maximum-security building has coils of razor wire wrapped around the roof, on top of the fence outside, and above the basketball courts in the backyard. A guard in a riot-proof central control booth monitors the building and opens the automatic doors so kids who become violent or suicidal can be hustled in here. During my visit, three men arrive with one such kid - a short, black teenager with cornrows - and take him into a chamber to be stripped and showered, then into a holding cell across the hall, where a heavy door closes behind him.
Hoots and wails emanate from other cells along the hallway. A couple of kids are lying limply on mats on the floor. One pudgy white boy is placidly brushing his teeth and staring into space. "He's doing real well," the guard in the control booth tells me. "He's just waiting here while his room is cleaned. Pretty soon they'll come and take him back to his cottage."
Ethan Allen has a capacity of 340. Right now there are 505 boys in the facility. The boys live in residential cottages, where they sleep in bunk beds or, because of overcrowding, on extra mats on the floor. During the day they attend school, go to therapy sessions, and hold down campus jobs.
"In the adult system, prisoners are just there to do time - to pay a price," says superintendent Jean Schneider. "That's not true here." Education, treatment, and skills development are a big part of the program, he tells me. "We're still trying to raise kids. We believe that people can change."
Nobody believes that adult criminals change for the better in prison. And given the increasingly punitive tone of public policy toward juvenile offenders, it's hard not to be cynical about the concept of juvenile reform. Ethan Allen has a particularly forbidding aura. The whole place is currently being transferred out of the Department of Health and Human Services and into the Department of Corrections. School kids and teachers around the state will tell you the worst boys in Wisconsin go to Wales. I wanted to meet some of these kids and find out what they were like. I was prepared to see some disturbing sights. What I wasn't prepared for was that many of these kids would share Schneider's belief in changing their lives.
Beyond the maximum-security facility - "the hole" as the kids here call it - I meet a lot of very polite young men in the school's classrooms, wearing white shirts and ties. They shake my hand when we're introduced, and seem eager to talk. Boosterism for the school, and for the whole concept of reform, is a common theme.
One young man named Gordy greets me shyly and explains that he is working on a video about sports at Ethan Allen, which might be used to promote continued funding for the athletic programs. He shows me the script he wrote, called "Champions of Change," extolling the virtues of discipline and teamwork: "It starts with determination, and determination is usually connected to a goal. The sports programs offer several goals you can achieve ... developing leadership skills ... developing a positive attitude ... learning to take instructions from authority figures. Each of these goals can help you focus your determination. You must be determined to be a champion of change."
Kids who come to Wales are all considered a danger to their communities. They've committed crimes like battery, armed robbery, and aggravated assault. There is a special cottage for the serious sex offenders, who are kept separate from the general population. With some trepidation, I visit a group-therapy session in this cottage. Ten young men, eight of them African-American, one white, and one Hispanic, are sitting around the room with a counselor. Gordy, it turns out, is one of these kids. They listen intently to my introduction, and are quick to warm up and tell me about themselves.
"Nobody wants to be in here. Everybody misses their mom," one lanky seventeen-year-old says. "But this has helped me. You learn you can change. When I first came here, I went in the hole three or four times. But now I've got my anger under control. You learn there's consequences for your actions, and you get more freedoms as you progress."
"We talk about what we did, and the pain and fear we put our victims through, about putting yourself in the other person's shoes," another kid explains. "We can say anything we want to in here. It gives you an opportunity to find out who you really are."
A fifteen-year-old with a frizzy Afro and athletic socks pulled up to his knees raises his hand anxiously. "He said nobody wants to be in here," he says, indicating the first kid who spoke. "But around here people know me. I'm recognized. People see me and they tell me I did a good job."
It's startling to think that this environment could look good compared to where some of these kids come from. But it appears to be true.
"When I leave, this place will never leave my head. The staff have become like a family," one kid says.
"They say this place takes you away from your family," another kid chimes in, "but it's brought me closer to my mom. She comes to visit, and she never hugged me on the outside. Now, before she leaves she wants to hug me three or four times."
The young man who is happy to be recognized around campus tells me he was dealing drugs in his old neighborhood, starting when he was twelve years old. Now he is taking vocational classes to learn to become a welder. "I got something to live for, too. I got a little daughter, and I'm going to dedicate my life to her."
His own father has been in prison since he was eight years old, he says. But his life is going to be different. Like a lot of kids here, he has some pretty conservative ideas about fighting juvenile crime. Scared-straight programs, prison tours for teens, and fewer chances for parole are some of the ideas the kids come up with when I ask what can be done to stem delinquency. The common thread, though, is self-improvement. "If I would have known on the out that I could be a welder, I would have had goals," the former child drug dealer says.
An a handbook describing Ethan Allen's programs and philosophy, the following statement appears: "We believe that delinquency can be overcome through strength of will, positive human relationships, effective programs, education, and economic opportunity."
Of all these factors, strength of will is the most visible among the kids in the serious sex-offenders group. They all talk about learning to follow the rules. Clearly the idea of discipline and structure strikes a chord with them. But the other factors are pitifully lacking once they get out of this structured environment. This is one major criticism of the growth of locked institutions as a response to juvenile crime.
"Lots of times you'll see kids who function really well in a secure setting," says Andre Johnson, who supervises delinquent youth in Dane County's Community Adolescent Program. "But half the reason they're functioning well is because everything is decided for them. Then they come back to the same environment they left behind, and nothing has changed, and they slip back into their old patterns." In fact, recidivism among kids released from locked institutions like Ethan Allen is quite high. The Department of Youth Services reports that 52.6 percent of youth released from juvenile correctional institutions during 1989 went back to a juvenile lockup or to prison within four years.
Jean Schneider gets defensive when I bring up the issue of recidivism. "How do you define success?" he says. "If we raise these kids' performance in school a couple of grade levels, get their behavior under control, and give them their first positive learning experience, and then they go out and in a few years they reoffend, have we failed?"
The missing piece, according to Schneider and just about everyone else in the juvenile-justice system, is adequate community support for kids. Schneider describes an eighteen-year-old who sat in his office and wept when he was released from Ethan Allen because he didn't want to go back to his old neighborhood on 27th and Vine in Milwaukee's inner city.
"If we could put every one of those kids in a small, middle-class town with no gangs, we'd look like miracle workers," Schneider says.
The principal of Ethan Allen, Richard Winz, throws up his hands, talking about the violence and deprivation many kids are sent back into: "I tell them, if things are that bad, you have to get out of there. Borrow five bucks, catch a bus, just get away from there."
Not exactly a structured reintegration plan.
There is a program called aftercare available for kids who get out of locked institutions in Wisconsin. But the length of care depends on the sentence handed out by juvenile court. If a kid serves six months of an eight-month sentence in a juvenile lockup, that leaves two months of follow-up therapy, community service, and supervision. Kids in the state's aftercare program get one face-to-face visit with a counselor each week.
"We could do a better job," admits Laura Flood, who runs the state's aftercare program. "If you read the literature, there are effective models for dealing with youth who are released from institutions." These models generally involve intensive supervision and daily contact with counselors. "You need to get the kid to engage in the community in a productive way," says Flood.
Unfortunately, getting juvenile offenders more engaged with the community is exactly the opposite of what most state politicians have in mind. The Wisconsin legislature recently launched a crackdown on juvenile offenders. It passed a bill that will automatically send seventeen-year-olds to adult court, and will make it possible to waive kids as young as ten years old who commit murder into the adult system. It also is allocating millions of dollars to build new secure facilities for juveniles.
"Five percent of the kids are responsible for most of the juvenile crime," says State Representative David Brandemuehl, Republican of Fennimore. "We have to take that 5 percent out."
Of course, it's not so simple to just "take out" the bad kids. As Jim Moeser, the administrator of the Dane County juvenile court in Madison, Wisconsin, points out, "People have to understand that kids who go to correctional facilities do come back."
And for those kids there is currently precious little supervision or help.
There is no shortage of good ideas for dealing with kids who commit crimes. Wisconsin pioneered a progressive, community-based program called the "Balanced Approach," which combines the principles of protecting the community, teaching juvenile offenders to be accountable for their crimes, and helping them develop skills. The inventor of the Balanced Approach, Dennis Malone, who now lives in Oregon, is something of a celebrity among juvenile-corrections professionals. Bits and pieces of his theory are practiced in a number of places around the nation. One of those places is the Community Adolescent Program in Dane County.
If public defenders can make a case that it is safe to release a juvenile offender into the community, he or she may go to the Community Adolescent Program, instead of to a locked institution. Some have been released from juvenile institutions early in order to be in the program.
"I don't think people in the community realize that it costs $50,000 a year to send a kid to Wales," says counselor Andre Johnson. "One month here costs the same as four months in corrections, and in many ways it's more effective."
Restitution is a major component of the Balanced Approach. And a big part of the Community Adolescent Program philosophy is getting kids to empathize, and to see their offenses not as crimes against the state, but as specific harm done to other individuals. It's much like what the serious sex offenders at Ethan Allen talk about in therapy. But here the experience is more concrete. The thirty-five kids in the Dane County program work off their debt to their victims at jobs in the community. Since 1978, kids in the program have paid back $600,000 directly to victims of juvenile crime.
Counselors in the Community Adolescent Program develop one-on-one relationships with juvenile offenders, and keep track of their problems in school, at home, and with the law. "You really get to know the kid," says Johnson. "And we talk with parents a lot. Half of our job is to work with families."
I meet four kids at a Community Adolescent Program session, all of whom have been released from residential treatment centers. Like the kids at Ethan Allen, they strike me mainly as remarkably young, goofy boys. The topic of the day is risk-taking, and the teacher starts class asking them to take a risk by meeting me, shaking my hand, and saying something positive about themselves. A kid with glasses raises his hand and asks to go first. He bounds up and grabs my hand: "Hi, I'm Carl, and I'm good at math!" The other kids smile and glance away when they take my hand. A couple of them are good at basketball. One is good at cutting hair.
At the end of class the teacher holds a contest to see who can make the silliest face. The kids participate eagerly, hamming it up for each other. All of them have committed serious crimes. But they don't exactly seem like hardened criminals. (When I ask Carl what he did wrong, he looks embarrassed and says he'd rather not tell me.)
I get the impression from these kids, and from the kids at Wales, that reform just might work.
Certainly the boys themselves seem to think so.
Wisconsin is at a turning point. It still has a low youth incarceration rate, compared to states like California. But even as people within the system become more interested in concepts like the Balanced Approach and reintegrating youth into the community, the governor and legislators, along with the rest of the country, are moving in the opposite direction. The huge majority of government funding goes into what juvenile-justice professionals call "the deep end" of the system - locked institutions and prisons.
"This is just a dramatic mind shift in how we treat our youngsters," says Dane County circuit court judge Moria Krueger, an outspoken critic of the new juvenile-crime legislation. "I've been crying out for prevention, and now we can't even talk about rehabilitation. I think people are forgetting a lot of what we have learned about what makes a delinquent."
Everyone agrees that kids need support and love early in their lives if they're going to thrive. "One of the saddest things I ever saw," Jean Schneider tells me, "was when I got to work one day and a woman was taking her little five-year-old son on a walk around the fence outside, to scare him, and telling him, `This is where you're going to end up.'"
Kids who are treated harshly, and who grow up in an atmosphere of deprivation and abuse, are Ethan Allen's future clients, Schneider points out. "Ask the foster mothers in Milwaukee, and they can tell you now which eighteen-month-olds will end up here."
Even later on, after they get in trouble, many of the same teenaged boys who are so often portrayed as the scourge of society are a lot like other kids. They are hungry for adult attention, and for the kind of direction that could help them function better in the community.
But politicians' attention wanders when talk turns to prevention and rehabilitation. This is starkly visible at Ethan Allen, where the biggest improvement on campus is the brand-new, state-of-the-art maximum-security building, touted repeatedly in flyers about the school. After taking a tour of the school, meeting the kids, and looking over the grounds, Governor Tommy Thompson noted that the facilities were inadequate and offered to do something about it. He dedicated the maximum-security unit in 1994.
Ruth Conniff is the Managing Editor of the Progressive. Some of the names in this article have been changed.