Reformatory closes; ends cycle of abuse

BELOIT, Kan.

Many were broken, many were saved here. Beloit’s name became synonymous with its girls’ reformatory, one of the longest-operating in the country, which for more than a century mirrored the most enlightened reforms but also the cruelest horrors of such places. Now, at its closing, residents and staff members are wrestling with the contradictions.

Beloit was where “bad girls” were sent: That’s what Diane Roles heard as a child.

Growing up in the 1960s, Mrs. Roles endured a seriously dysfunctional family, a chronically violent father and a fearful mother. Once, she said, her father kicked her with his steel-toed boot, leaving her jaw swollen. Another time, her bruised legs prompted a girlfriend’s mother and a neighbor to call her family. But nothing changed.

“I got to the place where I didn’t even cry anymore,” she said.

The offense that landed Mrs. Roles in the juvenile court system was taking her brother’s car for a joy ride. After fleeing a foster home, she was offered placement in a “trade school,” and she grabbed it.

It wasn’t until the frightened 13-year-old was riding across the wind-swept prairie of rural north-central Kansas that it dawned on her the school was Beloit. But looking back now, she sees it differently. “Going to Beloit was a safe haven for me,” she said.

There is no fence surrounding the complex of limestone and brick buildings that came to be known as Beloit Juvenile Correctional Facility. The institution is typical of the ones that began opening in the middle of the 19th century as rehabilitation-focused reformers sought to end the practice of housing juveniles alongside adults in deplorable conditions.

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a suffragist group that fought for prohibition, lobbied for the girls’ facility in Kansas, soliciting donations of land and money and operating it for its first couple of years before the state took it over in 1890.

With the high-minded ideals of the reformers, there was a dark side, said Ned Loughran, executive director of the Council for Juvenile Correctional Administrators, in Braintree, Mass.

“These kids were an eyesore for the upper classes of society,” he said. “The solution wasn’t to change the conditions they were growing up in, the poverty and lack of parental supervision. The view was to get them out of sight. Then people forgot they were there, and abuses crept into the system.”

Under some administrations, girls were punished with huge doses of vomit- and diarrhea-inducing castor oil, humiliated with forced hair clipping. In the darkest period, dozens underwent involuntary sterilizations.

When the reformatory was founded, girls “were really viewed in our society much more as property,” said J. Russell Jennings, commissioner of the Kansas Juvenile Justice Authority. “And the expectation for behavior of girls and what occurred with them when they didn’t meet those expectations really provided an open door for young girls to be institutionalized for non-crime events. Not even running away, but just kind of being a pain in the neck.”

The treatment they received varied, as it was not uncommon in the early days for entire staffs to change after elections. Some administrations taught the girls to play musical instruments and barred corporal punishment, while others relied on draconian forms of discipline.

The most infamous superintendent was Lula Coyner, whose cruelty caused the girls to march to the sheriff’s office and demand an investigation.

In 1935 and 1936, Ms. Coyner undertook a campaign of forced sterilization after becoming enamored of an international movement known as eugenics, a philosophy also popular among the Nazis that sought to prevent those deemed mentally disabled or otherwise genetically inferior from having children.

During her tenure, 62 girls were transported to the Women’s Prison Hospital in Lansing to have their fallopian tubes removed.

Ms. Coyner wrote in a 1936 report that girls who “asked to be sterilized” had “serious physical or family handicaps,” such as venereal diseases, insanity, epilepsy and illegitimacy. She later defended her action, writing that it was “the finest service to society the Girls’ Industrial School has ever contributed.”

By the time Mrs. Roles arrived, Beloit had become a training ground for workers from the Topeka-based Menninger Clinic, which became known internationally for humanizing treatment of the mentally ill.

The therapy provided a means for the girls to talk openly about the abuse many of them experienced. There was usually at least one young killer at Beloit, generally sent there for murdering an abuser. But runaways like Mrs. Roles were much more common.

Mrs. Roles met often with staff to discuss her situation. She recalls softball games with the staff and cooking meals with her housemates. The school had a cosmetology program, and Mrs. Roles chose to receive training as a nurse’s aide. Well-behaved girls were permitted to have jobs in town. Later, girls briefly participated in mixers with boys from a Topeka facility, a practice that ended when one girl became pregnant.

The environment began to change because of a federal law passed in the mid-1970s that sought to end the incarceration of status offenders — those whose offenses wouldn’t be a crime if committed by an adult. The practice wasn’t fully eliminated in Kansas until 1983. Over the past decade, more low-level offenders were placed in less-expensive and, research suggests, more appropriate community-based programs.

The Beloit facility averaged just 21 girls in the just-ended 2009 fiscal year, down from 103 in 1999. Because of the low numbers, the state was spending an average of $200,000 a year on each girl. In the midst of a deep recession that has caused massive budget cuts in Kansas, the expenses for Beloit became just too high. After more than 120 years, it closed in August.

“We don’t raise orphans and we don’t raise wayward youth and incorrigible youth at state institutions anymore,” said Mr. Jennings, the juvenile justice commissioner. “We reserve those institutions only for the most serious offenders to ensure public safety. It really reflects a system that is maturing, and it’s becoming more aligned with current research on how we can be most effective with adolescent behaviors.”

Mrs. Roles, who married, had three children and worked as a mental health aide, stayed in touch with one of her housemothers and with former Superintendent Dennis Shumate. “They were great role models,” she said. “They were like family.”