ABSTRACT
The child-welfare agencies separated children at risk from their parents on the grounds that the home was intolerable. Nevertheless, the statistics from reformatory and industrial schools indicate that almost 30 per cent of the inmates in reformatories and industrial schools returned to their parents following their detention, and hundreds of others drifted home in the years following those spent in the institution. The child-savers admitted to trying to discourage this. One stated that he told a boy on the eve of his release after four years: “Your father doesn’t want you, he simply asks you to come to him that he may have your wages.”1 To another boy he said: “You know your father and you know your mother; you know how badly they behaved to you. I do not want you to go to them.”2 A girls’ reformatory matron explained: “I can generally talk to the parents …and try to make them understand that the girls will do better among strangers than in their old environment.”3 The child-savers were severely disappointed when they learned that an inmate had gone home. While they attributed the decision to “parental interference”,4 this concluding chapter will return to the suggestion that we must think of the institution as a social system of domination and resistance ordered by complex rituals of exchange and communication.5 The goal of this chapter is to place the foregoing analysis of the child-saving movement into this broader perspective.
