Miriam Van Waters

Miriam Van Waters (October 4, 1887 – January 17, 1974) was an American prison reformer of the early to mid-20th century whose methods owed much to her upbringing as an Episcopalian involved in the Social Gospel movement. During her career as a penologist, which spanned most of the years from 1914 through 1957, she served as superintendent of three prisons: Frazier Detention Home for boys and girls in Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall for girls, and the Massachusetts Correctional Institution – Framingham, then called the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women. While in California, Van Waters established an experimental reformatory school, El Retiro, for girls age 14 to 19. In each case, Van Waters developed programs that favored education, work, recreation, and a sense of community over unalloyed incarceration and punishment.

Born in Pennsylvania, she grew up in Portland after her father, a clergyman and Social Gospel advocate, accepted a position there as rector of St. David's Episcopalian Church. As the eldest daughter of an ailing mother, she often served as a surrogate mother, as she did later as a supervisor of imprisoned women and children. After graduating from secondary school, Van Waters attended the University of Oregon, majoring at first in philosophy and graduating in 1910 with a master's degree in psychology. Three years later, at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, she completed a doctorate in anthropology.

Van Waters' public-speaking skills, assertive manner, and charisma drew national as well as local attention to her methods, and she was supported financially by philanthropists including Ethel Sturges Dummer, who helped pay for El Retiro and for leaves of absence from her supervisory duties to work on two books, Youth in Conflict (1925) and Parents on Probation (1927). Another wealthy philanthropist, Geraldine Morgan Thompson, supported Van Waters financially and emotionally from the mid-1920s until Thompson's death in 1967. Eleanor Roosevelt, a first lady, and Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard law professor and then a Supreme Court justice, were among Van Waters' many admirers and political supporters, but her methods drew the ire of opponents who viewed them as over-lenient and ineffective. Opposition in Los Angeles led to her departure from California in 1932 and to much-publicized hearings in Massachusetts after she was fired as Framingham superintendent in January 1949. Re-instated in March, she continued running the reformatory until 1957. After retiring, she remained in the town of Framingham, living in a woman-centered household, as she had often done, until her death in 1974.

Early life Miriam Van Waters was born in 1887 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Her parents, George Browne and Maude Vosburg Van Waters, were from middle-class families from Rensselaer Falls, New York, in George's case and Dubois, Pennsylvania, in Maud's. After studying at Oberlin College, George attended Bexley Hall, an Episcopal seminary from which he received a divinity degree in 1883. In 1884 in Dubois, the site of his first posting as a clergyman, George met and married Maud. Their first child, Rachel, was born in 1885, the year the family moved to Greensburg. Rachel died there at age 2 and, in the same year, Miriam was born. In 1891, the family moved again, this time to George's new posting as rector of St. David's Episcopal Church in Portland, Oregon.

Miriam, as the eldest daughter, helped her mother with housekeeping and with the care of younger siblings, of which there were three more—Ruth, Rebekah, and George—by 1896 and another, Ralph, in 1905. Her mother, in failing health, often retreated to the Oregon coast or to her parents' home in Pennsylvania, leaving Miriam in charge of the household. During these growing-up years, Miriam was strongly influenced by her father's love of books and scholarship, his participation in the Social Gospel movement, and his use of the rectory as a kind of settlement house open to everyone. She attended St. Helen's Hall, an Episcopal girls' school, for her secondary education, graduating in 1904. Remaining at St. Helen's for another year as a post-graduate student, she left Portland for the University of Oregon in Eugene in 1905.

University education: 1905–1913 The university, about south of Portland, had a total enrollment of only about 500. Van Waters excelled academically, majoring in philosophy and focusing on courses related to progressive ideas, feminism, public service, and politics. Her senior thesis was titled "The Relation of Philosophical Materialism to Social Radicalism". She served on student committees, joined the women's debate team, and became chief editor of the Oregon Monthly, a campus literary magazine. As a graduate student, she majored in psychology and was the teaching assistant for one of her professors, Henry D. Sheldon. Her master's thesis focused on philosophical materialism and social progress. In 1910, she was awarded a fellowship at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, to pursue a doctorate in psychology under the guidance of G. Stanley Hall, a specialist in child psychology and education.

Van Waters admired Hall's intellect and use of quantitative data but resisted his focus on genetics as the component of adolescent psychology most worthy of study. She preferred the interventionist approach of social reformers, especially Jane Addams, in the lives of troubled teen-agers. In her third year at Clark, she changed advisors, from Hall to Alexander Chamberlain, an anthropologist who favored cultural rather than genetic explanations for adolescent behavior. Her dissertation, The Adolescent Girl among Primitive People, was influenced by Chamberlain's cross-cultural studies and her personal investigations of juvenile delinquency in Boston and in her home town, Portland. She graduated from Clark in 1913 with a Ph.D. in anthropology. |group=n

She recuperated over the next three years, first at a property owned by her family near Cannon Beach, Oregon, then as an inpatient and later an outpatient at Pottenger Sanatorium near Pasadena, California. Her attempts during these years to start a second career as a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry did not succeed. Despite health concerns, she took and passed a California civil service exam, then applied for the position of superintendent at the Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall, a detention center for girls. She began work there in August 1917.

Los Angeles: 1917–1931 Assisted by many other women reformers, she worked to modify the detention center to include health care, counseling, psychological assessment, improved diet, recreation, and other social services. In 1919, she founded El Retiro, an experimental school for girls aged 14 to 19 chosen from among those sent to Juvenile Hall. The school, kept unlocked in a rural setting outside Los Angeles, favored education, work, and recreation as opposed to incarceration and punishment as antidotes to juvenile delinquency. According to journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns, El Retiro stood in sharp contrast to many early 20th-century prisons for women and children, where conditions were "foul, fetid and medieval". After meeting social reformer Mary Bartelme at Jane Addam's Hull House in 1921, Van Waters promoted the idea of a Los Angeles halfway house for women who had graduated from El Retiro and needed a safe place to stay while looking for work. Partly funded by Chicago philanthropist Ethel Sturges Dummer, the halfway house opened later in 1921 and over the rest of the decade served several hundred young women, each staying an average of four months. From 1920 through 1929, Van Waters, succeeding Orfa Jean Shontz, served as a court-appointed referee presiding over hearings about cases involving boys and girls younger than 12.

According to historian Estelle Freedman, Van Waters' career advancement in the Los Angeles juvenile justice system of the 1920s depended partly on her personal charisma and public-speaking skills, partly on a network of academic, legal, and social-service professionals, and partly on reform networks exemplified by women's clubs such as the Friday Morning Club. She gave frequent lectures about child welfare and juvenile justice to clubs, parent-teacher associations, and church-affiliated welfare groups, and wrote a series of articles about the juvenile court for the Evening Herald.

Between 1917 and 1927, Van Waters lived with other women in a residential complex known as the Colony. Among the residents during at least some of these years were her sister Rebekah, her long-time friends Sara Fisher and Elizabeth (Bess) Woods, and Shontz. Philanthropists such as Dummer, social reformers including Grace Abbott, Edith Abbott, and Sophonisba Breckinridge; psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, and prison reformer George W. Kirchwey spent time at the Colony when they visited Los Angeles. Shontz convinced Dummer to award a grant to Van Waters to undertake a national survey of women's penal institutions across the United States; taking a leave of absence from her work in Los Angeles, Van Waters began the survey in late 1920. Results were published in 1922 as "Where Girls Go Right: Some Dynamic Aspects of State Correctional Schools for Girls and Young Women" in The Survey, a leading social service journal. Financed by Dummer, Van Waters took other leaves of absence during the 1920s to widely promote her ideas about child welfare and prison reform, citing El Retiro as a model.

With further help from Dummer, she was able to complete a book, Youth in Conflict (1925), detailing her juvenile-delinquency theories and supporting them with examples from court cases. The well-received and financially successful book helped establish Van Waters' national reputation. In 1926, Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard Law School professor and later a Supreme Court justice, found Van Waters' book impressive and asked her to manage the juvenile delinquency fraction of the Harvard Crime Survey, which sought to determine the causes of crime and the best methods of prevention. In 1928, she completed a second book, Parents on Probation, which repeated her assertions that juvenile delinquency stemmed from families that failed to provide children with adequate attention and positive role models. In 1929, she was elected president of the National Conference of Social Work, the first woman from the western part of the United States to win the organization's top post.

While Van Waters' reputation grew nationally during the 1920s, it declined in Los Angeles County among voters and politicians who preferred methods more punitive than those favored by Van Waters. By 1927, the probation committee, a seven-member group appointed by the county supervisors had become so hostile to Van Waters' methods that it fired Alma Holzschuh, the El Retiro supervisor favored by Van Waters, and replaced her with one more to their liking. Soon thereafter, policemen were used to control the students. Distraught by her loss of control over El Retiro and encouraged by her professional opportunities elsewhere, she planned a permanent move to the northeastern United States. Her parents had by then relocated from Portland to Wellsboro, Pennsylvania; the Harvard Crime Survey, with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was unfinished, and in November 1929 Van Waters agreed to direct the juvenile-delinquency division of the Wickersham Commission, formally titled the National Committee on Law Observance and Enforcement, established by President Herbert Hoover. In that same year, she became the legal guardian of seven-year-old Betty Jean Martin, a ward of the juvenile court whom she renamed Sarah Ann Van Waters. After taking a leave of absence in late 1929 to join Hoover's commission in January 1930, Van Waters formally resigned from the Los Angeles juvenile court in late 1930.

During the latter half of the decade, Van Waters entered what was to be a strong, eventually intimate 40-year relationship with another wealthy philanthropist, Geraldine Morgan Thompson, who supported prison reform in her home state of New Jersey and elsewhere. Encouraged by Thompson, Dummer, and Frankfurter, Van Waters relocated to Cambridge in 1931. In that same year, publication of her 175-page Wickersham Commission report, The Child Offender in the Federal System of Justice, enhanced her reputation as an expert on juvenile justice. After declining a job offer from Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot, as an administrator in the state welfare department, she learned in November that she would soon be offered the position of superintendent at the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women at Framingham, replacing Jessie Donaldson Hodder, who had recently died.

East Coast career Early years at Framingham: 1932–1948 In March 1932, Van Waters began her new job at Framingham, where she served as superintendent for the next quarter-century. From the time of its opening in 1877, the reformatory had incorporated progressive ideas about how women's prisons should function. Framingham, governed by women, included a resident physician and a resident chaplain, both of whom were women, and a system of day work for inmates who could be trusted outside the prison. Most of the inmates were serving time for prostitution, extramarital sex, "crimes against chastity", alcoholism, and other offenses known at the time as "crimes against public order", which in some cases included being homeless or being a "stubborn child". She emphasized rehabilitation rather than punishment, referred to the prison population as students rather than inmates or prisoners, relaxed the dress code, encouraged the women to talk to one another and to staff members, brought in guest speakers such as Frankfurter, Thompson, Dummer, Robert Frost, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Margaret Mead, and expanded the women's freedom of movement within the prison and outside its walls. Federal funds made possible the construction in the mid-1930s of two cottages separate from the main reformry; Hodder Hall housed inmates between the ages of 17 and 21, and Jessie Wilson Sayre Cottage housed up to 30 mothers and their babies. A nursery inside the prison accommodated up to 60 more babies whose mothers lived in the main building rather than in a cottage. A donor base of women philanthropists, including Thompson, provided funding for social welfare workers and internships, psychiatric staff, and individual financial emergencies not covered by government funds.

For eight hours a day, the inmates made clothing and flags at the reformatory for the state or worked in the prison kitchens and its farm unit, and Van Waters supplemented the required work with voluntary educational courses in arts and crafts, literature, theater, singing, journalism, hiking, and how to live after parole. A typical number of course offerings during Van Waters' tenure was 26 or more, according to Dominique T. Chlup, a professor of adult education at Texas A&M University.

Below is a partial list of Van Waters' published work.

Books

Articles

Other

Notes and references