55 YEARS AGO CAME TO OPEN AS NYC’s 'INTERIM' CENTRALIZED ADOLESCENT REMAND SHELTER. 'INTERIM' LASTED NEARLY 12 YEARS. |
FEBRUARY, 2012 (Continued) --The annual report for 1954 which Kross submitted to Mayor Wagner on Jan. 1, 1955, covered her first full year as commissioner. Her letter of transmittal called attention to that fact:
The physical facilities of the Department had been permitted to deteriorate to a dangerous stage . . . . there must be . . . provision of adequate and proper facilities for detention and rehabilitation. [1954 DOC annual report digest, Page 3.]
Adolescents a Top Priority with AMK
Two of the five numbered priority goals -- Numbers 2 and 3 -- that her 1954 report listed under “New Program Services” envisioned the agency having new centralized facilities for adolescent inmates:
2. The need of a separate remand shelter for
detained adolescents, to obviate the necessity of
detaining them in inadequate adult city prisons.
and to provide for their diagnostic study.
classification and constructive activity while
awaiting court action.
3. The need of a new training school for adolescents
to be located in the metropolitan area, in place
of the separation of adolescent programs between
the Reformatory at Hampton Farms. N. Y. and
the Penitentiary. [1954 DOC annual report digest, Page 8.] Below: 1956 annual report Page 43 photo of gym. Click to access full image and original caption. Once accessed, use "+" option to enlarge. Use "back" button to return. He wrote in the December 28th article:
She also has asked the city to provide funds for a new remand shelter for all adolescents from all courts and all boroughs of the city. Her plan here is to separate all adolescents from the adult detention prisons and their danger of moral contamination and further education in crime. The remand shelter also would be in an area with sufficient indoor and outdoor space to provide rehabilitation for adolescents from the beginning of their incarceration. Petty casual offenders and first offenders among adolescents would also be kept separate from teenage criminals and repeaters.
Removal of the adolescents would relieve some of the pressure on the detention prisons where inmates are held to await court action, such as indictment, trial and sentence. Little has been done to solve the overcrowding problem among these prisoners except to pack them in tighter and tighter.
“About all we can do now,” Commissioner Kross has said, “is to make a daily check of the census, and when the overcrowding is bad, send adolescents to Rikers Island. No inmates under 21 years of age are doubled up in cells. But we have to double up adults at Rikers Island to provide a special cell block for adolescents.”
The Commissioner is pressing for completion of the new City Prison, Brooklyn, now under construction and scheduled to open in 1956. It will have a capacity of 817, compared with 465 in the old Raymond Street Jail it will replace. [1954 DOC annual report digest, Pages vi & vii.]
But his story (and therefore presumably her comments to him also) stopped short of connecting (a) her goal of opening a centralized adolescent detention center with (b) the Brooklyn facility under construction.
The two -- the BkHDM project and the goal of having citywide teen detainee facility -- also remained unconnected in her 1954 report. The report’s reference to jail’s construction taking place was relatively brief:
NEW INSTITUTION: Scheduled to replace the old Raymond Street Jail is the new City Prison and Remand Shelter now in process of construction. The new facility, estimated to cost $10,848,000, should be completed during the early part of 1956.
MODIFICATION OF PLANS: The letting of contracts and actual construction were well under way when this [administration] took office in January 1954.
Quarters, originally set aside for a warden's residence, have been designated as office space for borough social service agencies serving prisoners and their families.
A laundry, originally omitted from the plans was restored. [1954 DOC annual report digest, Page 39.]
With regard to the BkHDM project and the goal of a single remand shelter for the city’s adolescent detainees, Kross’ 1955 annual report, submitted to Wagner Jan. 1, 1956, followed in some respects the same pattern as the previous year’s report.
BkHDM, Central Remand Shelter Still Unconnected
AMK again bemoaned the planning that the prior administration had done on the design of the new facility being built to replace the ancient Raymond Street Jail, her contention being that it had neither sufficient inmate housing capacity nor sufficient inmate rehabilitation programs space.
Below: 1957 annual report Page 61 photo of BkHDM/ Interim Adolescent Remand Shelter inmates playing chess. Click to access full image and original caption. Once accessed, use "+" option to enlarge. Use "back" button to return. Kross again had the annual report reprint a series of articles by a major daily newspaper about the lack of adequate and appropriate facilities and programs for the city’s jailed population, particularly women and adolescents.
This time the publication was the World Telegram & Sun, the bylined writer was Alan Keller, and the five articles ran Feb. 7 through Feb. 11, 1955. In the last article of the series, Keller noted that a few weeks earlier Mrs. Kross had obtained funding
. . . . from the Board of Estimate for initial planning for the building of a new facility for adolescents.
Later she was given $109,000 from the regular expense budget to hire personnel and initiate better rehabilitation work. [1955 DOC annual report, Page xxii.]
Kross’ 1955 report showed, under Capital Outlay Budget, some $310,000 allocated to “Project C-74 Adolescent Remand Shelters, including sites,” with an overall projected price tag of $9,970,000. The Commissioner explained:
Project C-74: It is planned to build a new Adolescent Remand in the Bronx. The major portion of land for this Shelter has been acquired and the Department of Public Works has asked this department to submit its recommendations for planning . . . . .
Below: 1957 annual report Page 61 photo of BkHDM/ Interim Adolescent Remand Shelter pastoral counseling services. Click to access full image and original caption. Once accessed, use "+" option to enlarge. Use "back" button to return. At the present time, rehabilitative assistance for young people in detention is inadequate largely because of limitations of physical facilities . . . . The plan for a remand shelter for young offenders is a major plank in our program for prison rehabilitation and treatment. [1955 DOC annual report, Page 16.]
AMK’s Fascinating Kross’ 1956 annual report, submitted to Wagner on Jan. 1, 1957, is a fascinating bifurcated document in the way it treats separately the completion of BkHDM construction and the pending opening of it as the city’s centralized Adolescent Remand Shelter: one section totally compartmentalized from the other.
A person can read the entire 12-page section (Pages 34 through 45) devoted to the completion of its construction, the history of Brooklyn detention facilities that preceded it, a virtual tour of its various floors via text, drawings and photos but find none of the sharp criticisms that Kross had aired in annual reports 1953, 1954 and 1955 about the prior administration’s poor planning of it.
Nor can the reader detect in those dozen pages that the building constructed to be the Brooklyn House of Detention for Men would not open as such.
Below: 1957 annual report Page 65 photo of BkHDM/ Interim Adolescent Remand Shelter drama class. Click to access full image and original caption. Once accessed, use "+" option to enlarge. Use "back" button to return. All 17 pages just mentioned appear as part of this New York Correction History Society (NYCHS) presentation. The reader can peruse them at his or her leisure to review the reasonable and appealing arguments advanced for the turn-around in the new jail’s use: as a teen detention center, not a holding facility for unbailed adult male detainees.
A shorter version of the justification appears on page 52 of the 1956 report under “1957 Departmental Capital Budget Projects:”
Capital Budget Project C-58 The new Brooklyn House of Detention for Men at 275 Atlantic Avenue is the first project to be completed under this ten year plan. The actual construction of this institution was well under way when this administration took office in January 1954. It was dedicated on December 4, 1956. and is scheduled to be opened at the beginning of 1957.
Below: 1958 annual report photo of BkHDM/ Interim Adolescent Remand Shelter inmates taking battery of IQ and personality tests. Click to access full image and original caption. Once accessed, use "+" option to enlarge. Use "back" button to return.
Total Estimated Cost . . . . $10.641.722.75
The new Bronx Adolescent Remand Shelter (Capital Budget Project C-74), which is still in the formative stage, will not be available for use by this department for several years.
In the interim, in view of the prevailing adolescent problem throughout our various institutions, the department proposes to centralize the rehabilitation activities of the various city detention institutions under one roof at the new Brooklyn House of Detention for Men.
This centralization of rehabilitation activities for adolescents in detention will enable us to make more effective use of our existing professional staff and will permit us to take advantage of the modern facilities 28 day rooms, 2 gymnasiums, a library, study hall, 2 recreation roofs, and an auditorium with chapel accoutrements.
A detailed description of the new Brooklyn House of Detention for Men and an account of the program activities planned there will be found in another section of this report specifically referring to this institution. [1956 DOC annual report, Page 52.]
Kross’ 1957 annual report, submitted to the mayor Jan. 1, 1958, devoted seven pages (59 through 65) to “The Brooklyn House of Detention for Men; Interim Remand Shelter for Adolescents (16-21).” The section began with an NYT aerial photo whose DOC report caption included the information that “it received its first prisoners Jan. 21, 1957.”
That seven-page section from the 1957 annual report is also included in this special NYCHS presentation.
‘Interim’ Period Lasted Nearly a Dozen Years
Below: 1959 annual report Page 16 photo of BkHDM/ Interim Adolescent Remand Shelter inmates being double-bunked in one of the flats as jail population rose as high as 216 over rated capacity little more than 2 years after it opened.
Click to access full images and original captions. Once accessed, use "+" option to enlarge. Use "back" button to return. AMK cited the overcrowding in arguing for accelerating the building of a larger permanent centralized adolescent facility. But that argument only begs the question whether the overcrowding of BkHDM was not foreseeable when DOC ended the decentralized adolescent remand system previously in place and instead switched BkHDM to serve as an interim centralized teen jail. The story of that ending has been on the NYCHS web site for more than a decade as part of the history of C-76, now known as the Eric M. Taylor Center. Here are excerpts from that web page:
The late 1968 issue of Correction Sidelights, the DOC newsletter, carried a full-page story on the name and mission change that was part of a much larger reshuffling of facility functions and populations . . . . Here are excerpts from the 1968 newsletter story: 4,180 Prisoners Transferred The largest transfer of prisoners in the City's history occurred over the weekend of September 20 to September 23 [1968] when 4,180 prisoners were transported by prison vans, buses and cars between and among 8 of the 9 major correctional institutions. No advance announcement of the mass transfer was made for security reasons. The Commissioner [George F. McGrath] designated the New York City Correctional Institution for Men as the Adolescent Remand Shelter pending the construction of this institution on Rikers Island in approximately three years. With the unprecedented overcrowding in the detention institutions, the Department felt it expedient to house the adolescent (16 - 21) inmate population all in one central location: The detention adolescent at the New York City Correctional Institution for Men and the sentenced adolescent at the New York City Reformatory, both on Rikers Island. The adult Brooklyn detention cases, which had been scattered throughout the City of New York creating a departmental transportation problem, were returned to the Brooklyn House of Detention for Men in the County of original jurisdiction of their cases. The scattering of these prisoners throughout the City in the past 11 years has occasioned much complaint from visiting relatives and friends, attorneys and the courts. Another distinctive advantage is the fact that the Rikers Island institution is much better suited for the custody, care and rehabilitation of the adolescent accused of crime, than is the Brooklyn House of Detention for Men.
What becomes readily apparent from this very cursory study of documents associated with the BkHDM project is that different municipal administrations and different DOC commissioners often revise and even reverse facility use plans of their predecessors as they devise different responses to much the same challenges that continue from one year to the next, one decade to the next. A passing observer might argue that Commissioner McGrath’s restoration of BkHDM to its originally intended mission and his centralizing adolescent detention in one of Rikers’ existing facilities while a permanent adolescent detention center was being built on the island made more sense than Kross’ scattering Brooklyn’s adult male detainees throughout DOC’s other facilities around the city. However, such an observation would reflect overlooking a few important facts. The Rikers facility into which McGrath moved the teen inmates from the Brooklyn House did not exist when Kross made her decision in 1956. But AMK did oversee its construction to completion in the early 1960s. So she did not have as many options available to her as her successor had available to him 11 years and eight months later.
But as with C-76, she oversaw construction of the bridge to virtual completion. In a sense, Kross made possible the move McGrath made. Finally, AMK set a priority on adolescent detainees, especially first offenders. She saw them as representing society’s best chance for nipping lives of crime at their budding and its best hope of instead redirecting youth along constructive channels. Without apology, she gave adolescents preference in planning the uses to which she put the facilities, programs and services at her command. Thomas C. McCarthy
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*For purposes of identification only. The historical perspectives and interpretations posed, however tentatively offered in this analysis of the written record, are solely the responsibility of its author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any correctional colleagues, current or former, nor of any correctional group or agency with which he is or has been associated. |
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