CIESPI has long documented the perils facing young people in residential care in Brazil. It has noted the placement of street children in shelters with the resultant chaos of moving from place to place, and the lack of any kind of positive support for young people in such institutions.

A fresh example of the basic inadequacy of such care comes from the state of Illinois in the United States where vast sums of money are spent by state government in most often unsuccessful attempts to care for young people in residential settings. A recent series of stories by the well-known newspaper, the Chicago Tribune shows the cost to both the taxpayer and to the young people of the institutional strategy. In a series of stories starting on December 3, 2014.

The paper reported that the state of Illinois paid over $200 million (about R$600 million) a year to care for a youth institutionalized population with a daily count of about 1,400 young people. Most of these young people are African American. The residential centers promised round the clock supervision and appropriate therapy to these “wards of the state” who tended to have long histories of abuse, neglect, mental and behavioral problems.

What in fact happened was very different from the promise of caring, therapeutic environments. As the paper reported:

Reports of patient-on-patient sexual assault are commonplace at some of Illinois' largest and most relied-on facilities. Child prostitution schemes take root. Vulnerable children are terrorized by older ones and taught a life of crime. Some are preyed on sexually by the adults paid to care for them. And staggering numbers of wards, some as young as 10, flee to the streets.
For the years 2011 to 2013, 428 reports were sent from individual institutions reported cases of sexual abuse or assault yet the institutions remained open. Another 1,052 cases of physical abuse were reported and a staggering 29,425 cases of runaways. Yet there was no public inquiry and the state continued to send young people to these places. The stories did not emerge because of strict privacy laws and this current story was only put together by a team of dedicated reporters.
In one institution in Chicago that for many years was considered a showpiece institution, young residents resorted to gang fights, coerced peers into sex, regularly left the institution to work as prostitutes, and to rob and steal. Sometimes the institution reported these incidents to the state yet nothing happened. Sometimes coerced sex by an older ward on a younger ward was described by staff as consensual sex.
Reactions to the reporting included the acting director of the department expressing shock and lack of knowledge despite the actual reporting to her department of many incidents, a call for more training, some youth diverted to foster care with supportive services, some youth sent to mental health facilities including locked facilities and the usual plea for more effective services earlier in a young person’s life.
This posting is made at a time when Brazil is debating the reduction of the of penal majority from 18 years of age to 16. (In Illinois, minors “may” be tried as adults for certain offences but a bill is on its way to the Governor’s desk for signature that would prevent the courts from imposing life without parole for such young persons convicted of very serious crimes.) What this story should show is that institutional care is fraught with dangers, is unlikely to constitute a therapeutic environment, and that the spending of more money, even massive amounts of money on such care will not necessarily make it better. Life in Brazilian prisons is much worse than the institutions described above. The reduction of the age of majority is likely to guarantee that more young people will be “trained” for a life of crime. (Malcolm Bush, is an affiliated scholar at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago and is a senior consultant at CIESPI/PUC-Rio).
[1] The main reporters writing the series were David Jackson, Gary Marx and Duaa Eldeib of the Chicago Tribune.