Youth of Color and California's Carceral State: The Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility

Abstract

Youth of Color and California’s Carceral State: The Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility Miroslava Chavez-Garcia Miroslava Chavez-Garcia is a professor of Chicano and Chicana studies at the University of California, Santa Bar- bara. I would like to thank Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Kelly Lytle-Hernandez, and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of American History for their patience and insightful comments and criticism. I would also like to thank all the editors of this special issue for giving me the opportunity to share my work. Readers may contact Chavez-Garcia at mchavezgarcia@chicst.ucsb.edu. For a work that extends the themes covered in this essay, see Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley, 2012). doi: 10.1093/jahist/jav197 © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. June 2015 The Journal of American History Downloaded from http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on June 17, 2015 The Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility, originally known as Whittier State School when it opened in 1891, lies dormant as a result of massive California state budget cuts in the early 2000s. Though the facility is closed, its history remains alive, intimately tied to the early practices of the emerging carceral state in California. Beginning in the 1910s, with the support of Gov. Hiram Johnson and under the guidance of the progres- sive reformer and newly appointed facility superintendent Fred C. Nelles, Whittier State School used a rigorous science- and scientific-research-based approach in determining the causes of delinquency among its young incarcerated population. Relying on leading thinkers and practitioners in the nascent fields of psychology, education, social work, and eugenics, state officials implemented the latest tools and techniques—namely, intel- ligence testing and fieldwork—to understand and contain the sources of juvenile crime. To aid in the interpretation of the research, officials also drew on the latest ideas about and ideologies of race, intelligence, heredity, and crime. Those Whittier State School resi- dents classified through this process as “normal” and “borderline normal” remained in the institution and received individualized attention, while those considered beyond the assistance of the program were labeled “feebleminded” and “defective” and farmed out to alternative sites of imprisonment or simply returned home, leaving Nelles with what he considered a group of pliable juvenile inmates. Nelles’s winnowing process proved successful. Within a few years of its founding, Whittier State School became known nationally and internationally as a premiere site of rehabilitative confinement. 1 Nelles’s achievement in implementing the new policies and practices took a toll, though, on the most vulnerable inmates: the impoverished and poorly educated racial and ethnic minorities (in particular Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and African Ameri- cans). In poking and probing juvenile inmates’ intelligence, heredity, and environment, state officials labeled a generation of youths of color as “feebleminded delinquents” whose biology or race linked them to criminality. That most Mexican youths who took the in-