Juvenile Justice

Report Outline
‘A Walking Time Bomb’
The Massachusetts Experiment
National Focus on Lesser Offenders
Special Focus

‘A Walking Time Bomb’

One night 16 years ago, Jerome G. Miller and Jessie Fay Sargent were in Bridgewater, Mass. He was the state's reform-minded commissioner of youth services and she was the wife of the Republican governor, Francis W. Sargent. Miller had been giving Mrs. Sargent tours of training schools and other state institutions for juvenile delinquents. On this night they were in Bridgewater for an unannounced look at a maximum-security facility, the Institute for Juvenile Guidance.

What they found inside was, in Miller's words, “a near riot, kids running for the walls and being pummeled around on the ground and handcuffed…[and being hauled off] to cells.” On the way back to their cars, Miller recalls, Mrs. Sargent remarked how awful the facility was and how unlikely it was that any of its graduates would emerge anything but worse for the experience. “So I kind of thought she'd probably tell that to the governor when she got home,” Miller says, “and I thought, well, maybe now's our chance to do something.”

What Miller did next was, in retrospect, the beginning of a radical experiment in demstitutionalization that would alter the face of juvenile justice in Massachusetts. He closed the Bridge-water institute by paroling must of its inmates and transferring the rest to other institutions.