After the Doors Were Locked

Countless physicians in training encounter the Hippocratic Oath: ‘First, do no harm.’  It is a pity that correctional administrators, their staffs, and the people who set policies and fund juvenile detention institutions do not subscribe to this mantra.  The harm they cause is substantial.  Macallair, a correctional expert in California, was commissioned by the California State Assembly's Committee on Public Safety to examine juvenile detention from its inception to the present.  This brilliant regional history links failures and innovations in the Golden State with key developments occurring elsewhere.  What starts politically with enthusiasm eventually ends with changed political priorities and reduced public funding.  For example, the establishment of the California Youth Authority in 1942 under Governor Earl Warren brought humane conditions and concerted efforts for rehabilitation.  Over time, seeming success resulted in more youths being sentenced, exceeding funding for their care and services.  Decline set in.  Macallair concludes that congregate youth incarceration generally fails.  The high costs—well into six figures annually per juvenile—do not produce low recidivism.  Frequently, sadism reigns after the doors are locked.  Rehabilitation is opposed, and incapacitation becomes the default policy.  Today's credence?  Community care seems to work best. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. * CHOICE *
[I]f you are interested in the incarceration of children and adolescents, but you are not all that familiar with the history of youth corrections, then this book has a lot to offer you. . . .[A]s author Macallair points out in this historically important book, it has taken our society about 190 years to figure out that children should not be locked up because they are poor, lower class, immigrant, or black – or because they are acting like children. -Jim Windell * Michigan Psychological Association *
Macallair's book is a complete and necessary survey of youth corrections that takes careful account of the social, economic, and political factors at play in California's juvenile justice system. -- Ashley Nellis, PhD, Senior Research Analyst, The Sentencing Project
This book provides a comprehensive, detailed account of the development of the juvenile justice system in California. It serves as an excellent resources for the inquiring novelist as well as the experienced researcher. -- Riane M. Bolin, PhD, Assistant Professor , Radford University
Macallair uses a mixture of legislative history, court rulings, factual accounts and public inquiries to lay bare the brutal history of California and the Nation's approach to juvenile delinquency from the gold rush to the present.  California has spent millions of dollars on numerous investigations and commissions dating from the late 1800's through the 2015 report by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. In the words of the philosopher George Santayana "those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."  Everyone involved in any aspect of the juvenile justice system needs to read this book.  California is on a precipice: move forward and change, or doom the next generation to the same failures of the Houses of Refuge at the hands of Child Savers. May Macallair's account help Californians make the right choice. -- Andrea F. Joseph, New Mexico State University