Alternatives To The Traditional Institution

• Author: Benedict S. Alper
• Published date: 01 April 1974
• Date: 01 April 1974
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/003288557405400106
• Subject Matter: Articles

Alternatives To The Traditional Institution
By Benedict S. Alper*
The earliest precedent for today’s alternatives to the traditional
institution is to be found in a school for boys which was built before
the penitentiary itself came on the scene. This was the Hospice of San
Michele, established in Rome in 17U-1, at the instigation of Pope Clemente
XL1 In the places of detention of the time-where persons were held for
trial-children and adults were locked up together. In its day and for its
time, the Hospice was a radical departure, for it promulgated a principle
to which a great deal of lip service has since been paid, but which in
practice is still violated in many of our most enlightened urisdictions-
that children should not under any circumstances be confined with adults.
It followed, as might be anticipated, the model of the monastery of that
period, both in its architectural arrangements and in its reliance upon a
program of silence, hard work and prayer.
A century later the first private institutions for children were estab-
lished, first in New York state, followed soon thereafter by similar places
under public auspices, the first in Massachusetts in 1846. The open work
programs of some prisons in Spain and Italy during the second half of
the nineteenth century, the beginnings of probation, parole and after-care
at about that same time, all anticipated today’s &dquo;new&dquo; emphasis on com-
munity alternatives to imprisonment.
Once a breach has been made in solid practice of sentencing convicted
offenders to closed institutions, by permitting certain persons for reasons
of age, sex, mental condition, or likely response to conditions of limited
freedom to serve their sentences in the community, the court-correctional
system must seek additional and more effective forms of dealing with
more and more offenders in this way. At the end, the only ones that should
be left for whom incarceration is required is a hard core of persons whose
degree of dangerousness to the community is so great and whose present
inability to respond to rehabilitative programs is so doubtful, that there
is no safe way of permitting them abroad in the community.
For the implementation of a policy of placing in the community those
whose prognosis for response to it is good, all that is required is the
necessary facilities and personnel, and the imagination and courage to
bring them together in a community setting, under varying degrees of
supervision and control.
As with traditional forms of release into the community under
supervision-probation and parole-there is always available the last
resort-imprisonment-the threat of being committed or returned to an
institution as a punishment for failure to take advantage of modified con-
ditions of control outside of it. This is the ultimate sanction. When viewed
* Professor Alper is Professor of Criminology at Boston College. This article appears
as a chapter in his recent work, Prisons Inside-Out. It is reprinted with permission
of Ballinger Publishing Co., 17 Dunster St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.
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as such, rather than as first choice, the ground is prepared for its replace-
ment by a host of alternatives.
FOSTER HOMES
Foster homes-the homes of persons willing to open their dwellings
to care for boys and girls whose own families either reject them or are
incapable of caring for them-are the first choice for young people, at
least, among these many available alternatives. All authorities agree with
the principle that a child’s own home is the best place for him to be. It
is there that he will in most instances ultimately return after a term in
school or institution or whatever. But when the home is-if only tem-
porarily-regarded as unfit to take in a son or daughter, the home of
someone else is the next best place.
Over the years the foster home has maintained its place as one of the
best alternatives to traditional institutional care. Originally designed to
care for the neglected and dependent child, used in some places for the
temporary detention of children awaiting trial who would otherwise be
confined in jails, recent years have seen the extension of foster-
homes services to many other kinds of children,2 and even to adults. The
old idea of searching for homes of people who were at an economic level
where a few dollars a week would make a sizeable difference to their
budgets has been replaced by the attitude that foster parents should be
amply recompensed for the actual extra expense of caring for a child,
plus enough of an overage to provide an inducement to them to open
their homes to children who are not their own.
Some states-notably in the Midwest-have developed the foster
home idea to a very high point indeed. Special state departments with
responsibility in this area of child care actively seek out foster homes.
They also develop and impose high standards under which children are
placed. By paying a monthly stipend for a bed in such homes, foster par-
ents are assured of a regular source of income, whether the bed is occu-
pied or not, and the authorities are assured a place to which youngsters
can be assigned. When a child is accepted for care in one of these homes,
the rate is then increased to cover expenses in addition to such items as
pocket money, clothing, and medical and dental care. As in so many other
areas of dealing with people, once the economic factor has been resolved,
there ifs then room for attention to less impersonal aspects of life-the
atmosphere, the attitudes, the kind of concern and involvement of foster
parents in the lives of their foster child which is the distinctive char-
acteristic, and contribution, of this kind of care.
Many couples whose own children have grown up and moved away
find themseleves with living quarters larger than required for their own
needs. Such couples are sought out as prospective foster parents. Parents
of large families have even been known to accept-and deal effectively
with-more than one child. The so-called group foster home has thus
emerged as an excellent way of dealing with children who can be dealt
with more effectively in a group than as an only child. Foster homes
accommodating as many as twelve or fifteen children have been reported.:1
The most recent innovation in foster-home care provides another
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example of a reversion to earlier familial patterns of caring for children
who, for whatever reason, did not or could not make their homes with
their natural parents. Based on the same custom of less highly developed
tribal societies in Africa and Polynesia, this type of foster care seeks out
blood relatives of the child in need of a home-aunt, uncle, grandparents,
cousins-who might be willing to board and care for a young relative if
their income were to be supplemented by funds from a private or public
child-care source. IVet-t to the child’s own home, this would appear to offer
the most desirable alternative.
BORSTAL
There are correctional systems which contain within themselves a
variety of measures-from the freest conditions to tight security. One of
the best known of these is the Borstal system of training in Great Britain.4
Beginning in 1902 in the village of Borstal near Rochester in Kent, with
one unit, the system by 1939 had grown to twelve, and in 1972 to a total
of twenty-nine: twelve completely open schools for boys and one for girls;
thirteen closed schools for boys and three for girls.5 Like the Youth
Authority Plan, which derived from the experience of Borstal, any youth
who is deemed in need of institutional care is committed by the court to
Borstal, and sent first to a reception and observation center for a deter-
mination of his or her needs and condition.
It is here that the decision is made about what available program is
best suited for a particular boy or girl. One of the advantages of this
initial observation period is to give the young persons the benefit of the
doubt, that is, of sending them, as their initial commitment, to a place of
greater rather than of less freedom. For there is available, always, the
alternative of a tighter program should they find it difficult or impossible
to adjust at the outset to conditions of greater freedom. This is of the
essence of the system of Borstal training: provision of the widest possible
range of facilities and programs all under one integrated administration,
with latitude to transfer youngsters between them as their changing needs
and development dictate.
The advantage of this approach is the more readily appreciated when
compared with the lack of alternatives in many of our juvenile training
schools. Here, if a young person fails to adjust or is a chronic threat to
the security and program of the school, the ultimate alternative is usually
transfer to an adult institution, where the advantages of tight security are
more than outweighed by the baneful influence on a young person of being
confined with adults. That this is not an isolated occurrence is seen in the
large number of children-somewhere between 500 and 1000-who are
transferred each year to adult prisons and reformatories, without court
order or any review, simply by administrative decision and action on the
part of the two agencies involved-the training school and the adult
corrections department.6
Borstal offers a broad choice of locations and programs: forestry
camps, a seaside camp where the main work is reclaiming land from the
North Sea, farms, open cottage layouts, former jails and prisons re-
modelled to accommodate younger inmates, and a variety of...