The good, the bad and the end of a girls reformatory

BELOIT, Kan. — Many were broken, many were saved.

Beloit’s name became synonymous with the town’s girls reformatory, one of the longest-operating in the country. For more than a century it mirrored the most enlightened reforms but also the cruelest horrors of such places. Now that it’s closed, former residents and staff members are wrestling with the contradictions.

Beloit was where “bad girls” were sent: That’s what Diane Roles had heard as a child in the 1960s while enduring with a violent father. People didn’t talk about child abuse then. Her solution was to run away to escape beatings.

“I got to the place where I didn’t even cry anymore,” she said. “The more they hit me, the more I laughed.”

She was sent to a foster home after taking a car for a joy ride. She fled the home, then was offered placement in a “trade school” that turned out to be Beloit. “I mean to tell you my heart dropped clear down to my toes,” she said of realizing her destination.

But looking back, she sees it differently. “Going to Beloit was a safe haven for me,” she said.
The Beloit Juvenile Correctional Facility, down to its rural setting and lack of fence, is typical of ones that began opening in the mid-19th century to end the housing of juveniles alongside adults in deplorable conditions.

Reform’s ‘dark side’

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a suffragist group that fought for prohibition, lobbied for and then ran the facility for two years, until the state took it over in 1890. Girls as young as 8 spent long days toiling in gardens and caring for animals that supplied their food. Some were indentured to farm families.

But despite the high-minded ideals of 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 explained. “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. In the darkest period, dozens underwent involuntary sterilizations.

Punishing the victims

One file from the 1930s noted a girl’s offense as being “immoral (with father).” She was treated for venereal warts. It was common to lock up young abuse victims rather than their abusers.

Girls then “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 harsh treatment had ended by the time Diane Roles arrived. Beloit became a training ground for workers from the Topeka-based Menninger Clinic, known internationally for humanizing treatment of the mentally ill. The therapy provided a means for girls to talk openly about the abuse many had experienced.

Roles met often with staff members to discuss her situation, but she was insistent on one point: “I didn’t even want to discuss going home.”

Others felt the same. A young woman who arrived a decade later said she and her sister had suffered incessant sexual abuse at home, but no one believed them. “I wasn’t really running to something,” said the 50-year-old, who now lives in Fayetteville, Ark. “I was running from something.”

End of an era

A federal law passed in the mid-1970s sought to end the incarceration of status offenders — those whose offenses wouldn’t be a crime if committed by an adult. Research suggests that placing low-level offenders in less-expensive community-based programs works.

The Beloit facility averaged just 21 girls in the just-ended 2009 fiscal year, at a cost of $200,000 per girl. Amid massive state budget cuts, the expense was just too high. It closed in August.

“It totally infuriates me,” said the last superintendent, Katrina Pollet. “It’s so important to me because I could have easily been here,” said Pollet, who was once a pregnant high school dropout.

Residents became misty-eyed when they talked the transfer of Beloit’s last occupants to a Topeka facility. Bobbie Stillman said the announcement caused her to hyperventilate. She felt “overwhelmed and let down.”

Over the years, staff members raised money to buy the girls Christmas presents. Some corresponded with their former charges, following them as they pursued careers in nursing, social work and criminal justice. Few became adult offenders.

Roles, who married, had three children and worked as a mental health aide, stayed in touch with a housemother and a former superintendent. “They were great role models,” she said. “They were like family.”