Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

by Monique W. Morris

Since the eighteenth century, girls who were in trouble with the law, even as part of the enslaved population, were confined in semi-penal institutions: asylums, jails, reformatories, and other homes. Between 1825 and 1828, the United States opened its first juvenile reformatories in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, for the purpose of providing “food, shelter and education to the homeless and destitute youth and to remove juvenile offenders from the prison company of adult convicts.”9 Children in these facilities participated in activities that were deemed appropriate for their moral rehabilitation at the time, meaning many children were assigned domestic chores, and some even attended school four hours each day.10 However, because Black children, including Black girls, were not deemed suitable for such facilities, their alternative reality often involved mob lynchings or placement into punitive adult correctional facilities. It was not until 1835, following an intense, racially charged debate between reformists and racial justice advocates about the rehabilitative promise of troubled Black youth, that the New York House of Refuge, in Hudson, became the first juvenile reformatory to accept Black children. However, in these early days, the blueprint for “reform,” as reflected in the practice of reformatories across the nation, included plans to prepare Black girls for lives as “cooks, maids, and seamstresses,” and to provide them with religious (Christian) instruction, w...