Boy With A Knife. Jean Trounstine
is not an exaggeration to claim that what I heard next changed my life.
Karter’s presence at MCI-Shirley was no anomaly; it was entwined in our country’s complicated history of dealing with children in conflict with the law. The way our policymakers have imprisoned juveniles stems directly from whether or not we see youth as different from adults, and if we afford all children the same rights whether rich or poor, white, black, or brown.14
The early American settlers were influenced by their British legal forebears in policymaking, specifically in determining when youth ended and adulthood began. The eighteenth-century lawyer William Blackstone, who in 1753 explicated English doctrine in his Commentaries on the Law of England, saw the intention of “malice” as defining the age of youth culpability.15 Blackstone and his peers attributed some children, no matter their age, as having “vicious will.”16 Blackstone wrote: “One lad of eleven years old may have as much cunning as another of fourteen. . . . Under seven years of age indeed an infant cannot be guilty of felony; for then a felonious discretion is almost an impossibility in nature: but at eight years old he may be guilty of felony. Also, under fourteen . . . if it appear to the court and jury, that he . . . could discern between good and evil, he may be convicted and suffer death.”17
Sentencing young people to death didn’t sit well with everyone, however. In 1787, Quaker reformers set up the first penitentiaries as a way to deal with “the moral disease” of crime.18 Boston College law professor Sanford J. Fox wrote that these early prisons in Pennsylvania and New York “reduc[ed] the number of offenses that warranted the death penalty and introduced as an alternative periods of long-term incarceration.”19 Long-term incarceration meant isolation. But there were severe drawbacks to solitary confinement as a way to achieve reflection and penitence.20 There were other systemic problems as well. In one Philadelphia prison, there were “subterranean dungeons for those under sentence of death,” and “in one common herd were kept by day and night prisoners of all ages, colors and sexes. . . . Parents were allowed to have their children with them in jail, and these youthful culprits were exposed to all the corrupting influences of association with confirmed and reckless villains.”21
Because housing young lawbreakers with adults created a “classroom for crime,” chaos resulted in these early prisons.22 Children of prisoners might seek a life of crime if reformers did not make changes; these reformers wanted to separate neglected and criminal youth from adult prisoners.23 Their solution in New York, and soon after in other states, was to “rescue” children by forming Houses of Refuge, where pre-delinquents or those not beyond help, so-called “proper objects,” could be saved from “pauperism” and “criminal conduct.”24 In 1825, “child savers” opened the New York House of Refuge, initiating what Nell Bernstein called “a mechanism for gaining control over children of the poor . . . a race- and class-driven enterprise intended explicitly for ‘other people’s children.’”25 The child-savers could choose to save some children and abandon others, as reform was never intended to be across the board for all children.26 Dr. Alexander Pisciotta, professor of criminal justice, spelled out how white children (mainly boys) were incarcerated until they were twenty-one, and how reformatories meant schooling, religious instruction, and an apprenticeship by a “racist and sexist” guardian—the state.27 Such institutions could be profitable. Oliver Warner, Secretary for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, reported in 1865 that the income earned by labor from its child charges at the Boston House of Reformation was “considerable.”28
The concept of parens patriae—the doctrine that gave the state power to serve as guardian and allowed courts to intervene in the lives of neglected and criminal children—was first judicially recognized in the US in 1838, though blacks and girls were treated differently by this so-called benevolent baby-sitter.29 Blacks were trained for menial positions and barred from admission to reformatories until a separate reformatory for them was opened in 1848; girls were trained for their “proper place” in domestic positions or as wives.30 Parens patriae allowed the court to decide the juvenile’s “fitness for treatment, and that meant it was at the court’s discretion.”31 By the middle of the nineteenth century, some parents protested children being taken from their homes, as it was clear by now to the public that children who were poor were often lumped in with those who were delinquent.32 A report by the Boston Bar Task Force on Criminal Justice stated that the philosophy shifted from “a religious and educational approach to an emphasis on providing a better family life and vocational training.”33 But localities varied greatly on which kids were sent to adult prisons and which went to a not-so-benign foster home or training school.34
The first juvenile court was created in Chicago in 1899, and the movement spread rapidly across the United States.35 In 1906, Boston’s juvenile court was created.36 Early juvenile courts were known for being non-adversarial and more relaxed than their adult counterparts, though the juvenile judges’ wide discretion created problems, as they had the power to order children to group homes or shelters without clear evidence that the child had committed a crime.37
Even as the seeds of a juvenile court system were being sown, the fear of youthful lawbreakers and the need to punish them—and in some cases, punish harshly—never disappeared, no matter what rehabilitative models developed.38 As a result, the adult system was never totally off-limits for children.39
To understand Karter Reed’s story, we must leave MCI-Shirley, where my students and I sat stunned in a kind of pained wonder. We need to go back down the highway, past the fast-food restaurants that have sprung up along a once-quiet Route 2, and head fifty-four miles south, to a world far from Boston and its renowned universities. Past rural towns, each with sturdy pride in its distance from the bustle, with no-nonsense names like Ashland, Holliston, and the more affluent Dover; we bypass the busy high-tech belt of Route 128 that tightened in the 1990s when the tech market bottomed out. This drive leads to old roads with dim highway lights where cars race to get home or campers veer away from Cape Cod. Route 24 turns into Route 140, angling past the town of Fall River and ending in a narrow strip bordered by water. Here we find New Bedford, the city of ships where Karter Reed was born.
After I met Karter at MCI-Shirley, I visited New Bedford several times between 2008 and 2012 to learn more about the place he came from. Karter once wrote in frustration about his hometown that “there’s absolutely nothing [t]here but drugs, guns, and crime.” His statement was partially right. The first teen in Massachusetts tried and convicted of murder in an adult court was from New Bedford: Antonio Ferrer, a fourteen-year-old charged in 1992 with shooting a man.40 Only two years before Karter’s crime, in 1991, New Bedford was deemed by the FBI as “the most violent city in New England.”41
Called “Heroin Heaven” in 2009 by a user on the crowd-sourced Urban Dictionary, New Bedford has certainly seen its fortunes change dramatically over the last few hundred years.42 Back in the 1700s, it was a quiet New England fishing and farming village. Barely a century later, the city had become a top-notch whaling port and manufacturing hub. In his 1851 classic Moby-Dick, Herman Melville described New Bedford’s “patrician-like houses” and “opulent” parks and gardens as some of the most striking in America.43 However, even back then you could already see the discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots if you looked closely at Melville’s Spouter Inn, which he describes as a “dilapidated little wooden house” that “looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district.”44 Even “the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it.”45
While whaling sagged a few years after New Bedford had formally incorporated in 1847, the textile industry aided the city’s economy.46 The population burgeoned as hopefuls arrived to work in the mills; the Irish, French Canadian, and Portuguese joined the Native Americans, Africans, Azoreans, Cape Verdeans, and Brits who already dotted the city’s landscape.47 Long before federal officials tore into the Michael Bianco textile factory in 2007 and arrested approximately 360 out of 500 workers, separating mostly Central American “illegals” from their