(Photos via Wikimedia Commons. Photo illustration by Natasha Vicens/PublicSource)
Since Dorothea Dix declared the county’s approach to detaining kids to be perfectly flawed in 1845, the county has repeatedly come up short in efforts to house arrested youth. Next up: private management.
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As soon as Allegheny County announced in September 2023 that it would be reopening Shuman Juvenile Detention Center through a contract with an independent nonprofit, proponents and critics alike reopened a 180-year-old conversation about local juvenile incarceration. Do children belong in jail? One just for them? One with adults? What do we owe children and teenagers before, during, and after they are incarcerated?
The facility, renamed Highland Detention at Shuman Center, started receiving transfers out of the Allegheny County Jail [ACJ] in July. The site is still under renovation with only one of the five 12-bed pods ready. As of August 29, there were an unspecified number of juveniles being held at Shuman and 23 still in the ACJ.
A lawsuit by County Council seeking to block private management of the facility has been settled, following council approval Tuesday evening.
Here’s how juvenile detention has evolved over nearly two centuries of change and controversy here.
1844-1845: Philanthropist and prison reformer Dorothea Dix visits the ACJ
Dix, a former school head mistress who visited hundreds of jails and prisons, and whose advocacy helped create a psychiatric ward at Western Pennsylvania Hospital, said the Allegheny County Jail “combines all the faults and abuses of the worst county prisons in this state, or in the United States.” The problem, in part, was because it did not segment its population by age, race, sex, diagnosis or crime. In a lengthy statement to the Pennsylvania state legislature in 1845, she described “little boys listening greedily to gray-headed, time- and crime-hardened convicts.” She added, “If it had been the deliberate purpose of the citizens of Allegheny County to establish a school for the inculcation of vice and the obliteration of every virtue, I cannot conceive that any means they could have devised, would more certainly have secured these results than those I found in full operation in the jail.”
For the prior 20 years, cities and states had begun to think differently about how, why and where they incarcerated children. Leading the way, the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents opened the New York House of Refuge as a place for youth who committed minor crimes.
By the time Dix visited Pittsburgh, approximately 25 Houses of Refuge had opened across the country. Many also housed youth from impoverished families and others with problematic behaviors.
April 22, 1850: The incorporation of the House of Refuge of Western Pennsylvania
“How infinitely better it would be,” one Allegheny County judge wrote in a March 1850 plea for a House on the western side of the state, “to secure for these young and frail transgressors, a place of refuge within a convenient distance, and a prospect of reformation.” The county’s request to the legislature called upon Pennsylvania’s history of prioritizing prevention and individual rehabilitation over “severe and vindictive punishment.”
In response, the state appropriated $20,000 toward construction of a building with the agreement that the funding would be matched with private donations. Both Philadelphia and Allegheny County would take in boys under 21 years old and girls under 18.
December 13, 1854: The House of Refuge opens
The Western Pennsylvania House of Refuge was constructed at 67 Fourth Street in what is now Pittsburgh’s Chateau neighborhood. It billed itself as “a place of reform and not of punishment: a refuge, not a prison.”
The institution took youth from Allegheny County and 11 surrounding counties. It was designed to hold 226 children.
By the end of 1857, there were 209 children in care, surpassing the capacity for boys (155 at the year’s peak). Management desired to build additional dormitory space to accommodate need. That year, the youngest child committed was 5 years old, though the most common age was 14.
Children received four hours of school instruction per day. There was one library for the boys and one for the girls, each with a range of instructional and religious books. They had recreational time, chapel on Sundays, the occasional field trip and, as a reward for good behavior, trips home to visit family. They were also expected to work. The boys had tasks such as plating bridle bits and making trunks. Girls made clothing and bedding for the House in addition to doing all of the washing, ironing and cooking.
The facility’s 1857 annual report demonstrates a rehabilitative ethos. “More than ever we feel convinced that, in order to advance the work of reformation, it is essential to cultivate the kindlier feelings of the youthful heart by reiterated acts of love and kindness.”
At discharge, children were primarily released into indentured servitude, though some were returned to family and caregivers or on their own recognizance.
1864–1876: Reform schools and the move to Washington County
An August 1864 article in the Pittsburgh Commercial called for the creation of a reform institution in addition to the House of Refuge. The unnamed writer had learned that the House had turned away at least one 16-year-old girl because “they have had enough of her.” The unnamed author feared that, if similar girls were not attended to, Pittsburgh would turn into “a pest house of vice and crime” like Chicago.
According to the Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice, Houses of Refuge across the country were falling into the same problems as adult jails and prisons regarding overcrowding and deteriorating buildings. Those problems dovetailed with an increased call for compulsory education for all children, leading to the creation of reform schools. There, children could be removed from society and reformed through education and structured discipline.
Allegheny County followed suit by renaming the House the Pennsylvania Reform School in 1876.
Four years prior, the school, plagued with sanitation issues, had moved to Washington County, near Canonsburg. There, children were split into eight “families.” Rather than a jail-like structure, as the House had been, each “family” lived in its own building under adult supervision.
Life at the school otherwise continued to include academic instruction 6 1/2 hours per day, vocational training in trades such as farming and carpentry for boys and chores associated with being a housewife for girls, chapel services and leisure time.
1890s–1900s: The push for children’s/juvenile courts
It wasn’t until 1893 that Pennsylvania law required separate trials for children and prohibited their incarceration with adults.
Allegheny County established its own children’s court for those 16 and under accused of minor crimes in 1902. In May 1903, the county converted the jail’s hospital ward into juvenile rooms, in a move that skirted the letter of the law.
Women’s clubs had taken on the cause of creating juvenile courts. Cook County, Illinois, established the first such court in 1899. Its founding legislation emphasized that those brought before the court “shall be treated not as criminals but as children in need of aid, encouragement, and guidance.”
The court had a staff of 10 probation officers, all women, paid through private funding.
The provisions of the state’s new juvenile court law also stipulated that dependent (foster) children should not be placed in detention institutions alongside delinquent children, though some courts split hairs on whether or not the law encompassed detention homes.
1910-30s: Growing the juvenile court
It wasn’t until 1910 that the county commissioners, at the behest of the Civic Club of Allegheny County, finally removed the children’s detention rooms from the jail.
The new rooms were in the nearby former Pittsburgh Academy building. A contemporaneous account by the club says: “While these rooms are not ideal, they are incomparably preferable to the old arrangement under which many wholly innocent and very young children, capable of being set in the right path, were blighted by the stigma of having been in jail.”
1911-1920: Schools opened, razed
For children who had been sentenced to incarceration for crimes as severe as rape or as nebulous as incorrigibility, the Allegheny County Industrial and Training School for Boys opened in 1911 in Marshall Township. Boys ages 11 to 18 received similar care as other reform schools. As the fields of social work and child welfare continued to grow, some boys who would have been sent to a reform school for minor crimes such as truancy were instead placed in foster homes. Still, the school housed as many as 500 children in the early 1920s and otherwise averaged between 200 to 250 per year.
The school operated on a cottage system like the Pennsylvania Reform School, though vocational training focused on agricultural development, allowing for the school to be almost entirely self-sustained.
The school, which later became the Thorn Hill School for Boys, closed in 1978.
In 1914, the county razed the Academy building and leased a house in Oakland for the new Juvenile Court Detention Home. It did not meet the state’s requirements, including separation by sex, intelligence and “moral turpitude,” and by 1920 the county replaced it with a purchased building on Forbes Street in Oakland, which became the Juvenile Court Detention Home.
1926: Gumbert School for Delinquent Girls
For girls, the county purchased an old mansion with 75 acres on Three Degree Road in Ross. Opened as Gumbert School, it was designed to house 25 girls between the ages of 8 and 16 and offered instruction in the same domestic skills as other institutions. It suffered the problems of overcrowding and understaffing common to other institutions, though some further criticized its “country club” appearance and the high cost borne by the county.
Gumbert closed in 1961.
1928-1938: Oversight, studies, reforms
In 1928, the detention home in Oakland gained a Board of Managers, which would prove instrumental in later advocacy for the county’s incarcerated children.
A 1930 investigation of the detention home found dependent and delinquent children living in separate buildings as required, though both buildings were described as “very unsatisfactory” and the courtrooms “a fire trap.”
During an eight-month period in 1929, the investigation recorded that the most represented ages for both sexes were 12 to 15 years old in delinquency cases, and 5 to 9 for dependent children, with the overall population ranging from ages 2 to 20.
Following changes to the state’s Juvenile Court Law, a new building for courtrooms and living spaces opened in Oakland in 1938, establishing Allegheny County as the first major metropolitan region to “combine the justice system with rehabilitation and prevention.”
Pittsburgh Public Schools provided academic instruction to children living in the detention home with supplemental reading services by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Social work students at the University of Pittsburgh and then-Carnegie Tech acted as volunteer probation officers.
Inside the court, hearings were informal and judges had free reign in sentencing. Data recorded in the 1930 investigation showed that half of delinquent children held in the detention home were sent back to their families on probation, 20% into institutions (such as The Pennsylvania Reform School, Thorn Hill School, and Gumbert), a little more than 10% were privately placed through the Home Finding Department and the remainder either dismissed or still awaiting hearings.
1958-1974: Problems with the Juvenile Court Detention Home
In 1958, the state Public Welfare Department gave its first warning about overcrowding at the detention home, and issued another the next year. By 1961, a local judge called the overcrowding “a very dangerous, explosive condition.”
The building had been designed for 46 beds; in 1964, the population peaked at 120 and, in 1973, averaged 100. Delinquent and dependent children were being housed together even after Allegheny County Child Welfare Services was created in 1963, officially separating the oversight of the two populations.
“Kids deserve equal opportunities to be treated fairly and equally, have a chance to live a full and healthy life, make mistakes and get it right, and be provided with care and support.”
2023 County Controller’s Report outlining Shuman center failures
The county, however, stalled on removing dependent children from the detention home. The overcrowding issue grew increasingly contentious as younger children awaiting foster home placement witnessed riots by the older incarcerated children in 1964.
From the state’s initial warning, it would take 16 years to complete the new building, due to neighborhood backlash, street widening proposals and other problems.
Anna Jane Shuman, a journalist turned advocate who became chair of the Juvenile Court Detention Home Board of Managers in 1967, pressed officials to build a new facility for the children.
In 1969 commissioners finally selected an architecture firm with experience in juvenile detention facilities, and the following year approved the Leech Farm property in East Liberty as the site.
December 1974: Anna Jane Phillips Shuman Juvenile Detention Home opens
The facility cost $8 million, sat on 16 acres of land and had 120 beds for children under 18 years old. It was likened to college dormitories with each of the 10 units complete with a living/game room with ping pong tables, and a quiet room for studying. One member of the board, who thought it would have been better to remodel the old facility, worried that the new building would lend itself to long-term confinement instead of its intended temporary (primarily pre-hearing) purpose. One judge admitted he would feel better not sending kids to a “hell-hole.”
Problems at Shuman began almost immediately.
It took less than a year to go over the bed limit with 154 kids housed at one time in 1975. By the summer of 1976, Shuman faced financial problems despite funding from federal, state and local streams. A 1977 management report called the facility “a precarious house of cards.” The facility still wasn’t meeting the requirements for a permanent operating license and averaged 140 children per day, with a high of 172.
A state law passed in 1977 made it unlawful to incarcerate children because of repeat offenses such as smoking, truancy and running away. But not all of the judges supported the act because placement in foster care seemed too lenient and ineffective.
Instead, they found a workaround — holding children in contempt of court — and Shuman’s population remained high. A staffing shortage in 1978 lead to “near-crisis conditions” as described by one juvenile court judge. After an argument about funding, Shuman hired 20 additional workers. The next year, however, the state changed staff ratio requirements, necessitating even more hires and encouraging the belief that the state was picking on the county.
1990s: Increase in juvenile crime, the ACJ and Act 33
The average population at Shuman dropped in the 1980s before increasing again and nearly doubling by 1994. So, too, the average length of stay rose from 10.4 to 22.6 days. The early ’90s saw a rise in juvenile crime — credited to increased gang activity — that also played out in the dynamics of the youth who were incarcerated.
In addition to adding staff, the county opted to move teenagers who had been accused of homicide (or were being tried as adults for other crimes) to ACJ. This was part of a larger “get tough” message of the time and had already been implemented in other counties across the state.
At the ACLU’s intervention, the county agreed that all juveniles would be housed in the annex with less-violent offenders, would have increased supervision in the shower and gym areas, and would be provided an appropriate education through the Allegheny Intermediate Unit. In return, the ACLU would not sue the jail.
In February 1995, the county commissioners announced — prior to receiving consent from the state and without consulting the Shuman board or the jail board — that its new jail building would have a juvenile pod to hold up to 56 juveniles charged with violent crime. Allegheny would be the first in the state to do this, which one commissioner called “a bold step.”
Act 33, passed in 1996, redistributed certain felony charges for teenagers 15 and older out of juvenile court and into criminal (adult) court. The youth could also be returned to the juvenile court if deemed appropriate.
Youth incarceration rates trended down in the succeeding years, while the jail was crowded with adults, prompting a prison board vote to remove the juvenile pod in 1999 to free up the beds.
Removal of the juvenile pod, however, did not mean there weren’t juveniles in the jail. They were mixed in with the adult population until the pod reopened in 2016. The new pod had 108 beds (there were 16 juveniles in the ACJ at the time) and the youth were given mandatory academic instruction, individual and group therapy, drug and alcohol treatment, contact visits and mindfulness practices.
2000s-2021: One problem after another
The mid-aughts forward found Shuman in a seemingly endless series of violations, citations and news stories. The state dropped the facility’s license to provisional in 2008 and again in 2013. Provisional licenses are typically issued in six-month increments and are intended to give a facility time to address violations.
In 2015, the county overhauled Shuman and declared a new dawn for the facility. By the end of the year, though, they were back on a provisional license and remained there. Violations including abusive staff, delaying medical assistance and unauthorized use of restraints continued. By the time the state arrived for an unannounced inspection in the summer of 2021, Shuman was out of chances, and the repeat offenses led to the revocation of their license and the closure of the site that September.
2023-2024: Shuman reopens under private contract
In September 2023, not long after the county announced it would be reopening Shuman, County Controller Corey O’Connor released a report delineating Shuman’s failures over the years and emphasized the growing body of evidence that youth detention facilities and incarcerating youth in general “are less effective as responses to criminality and community safety. Diversionary programming, on the other hand, is more effective and cost-efficient than past practice.”
The report’s concluding statement, in some ways, echoed the sentiments of the original House of Refuge: “Kids deserve equal opportunities to be treated fairly and equally, have a chance to live a full and healthy life, make mistakes and get it right, and be provided with care and support.”
Nonetheless, Highland Detention at Shuman Center, now operated by private nonprofit Adelphoi, reopened July 2. Adelphoi plans to have a pod set aside for juveniles charged with adult crimes and so remove them from the county jail.
Editor’s note (9/15/24): This story has been updated with county council’s approval of a lawsuit settlement.
Amy Whipple is a Pittsburgh-based journalist and can be reached at [email protected].
Additional research by Asher Grace.
This story was fact-checked by Lucas Dufalla.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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