Girls reformatory leaves legacy of hurt, haven

By Heather Hollingsworth

updated 7:05 p.m. ET Oct. 24, 2009

BELOIT, Kan. - Many were broken, many were saved here.

Beloit's name became synonymous with its girls' reformatory, one of the longest-operating in the country, which for more than a century mirrored the most enlightened reforms but also the cruelest horrors of such places. Now, at its closing, residents and staff members are wrestling with the contradictions.

Beloit was where "bad girls" were sent: That's what Diane Roles had heard as a child. A friend's sister had gone there.

Growing up in the 1960s, Roles endured a seriously dysfunctional family — a chronically violent father and a fearful mother. People didn't talk much about child abuse then, and young Diane's solution was to run away from home to escape beatings.

Once, she said, her father kicked her with his steel-toed boot, leaving her jaw swollen. Another time, her bruised legs prompted a girlfriend's mother and a neighbor to call her family. But nothing changed.

"I got to the place where I didn't even cry anymore," she said. "The more they hit me, the more I laughed."

Her older sister complained to their mother that she had been molested. Roles said her mother slapped the sister, saying, "What am I supposed to do?"

The offense that landed Roles in the juvenile court system was taking her brother's car for a joy ride. After fleeing a foster home, she was offered placement in a "trade school," and she grabbed it.

It wasn't until the frightened 13-year-old was riding across the wind-swept prairie of rural north-central Kansas that it dawned on her the school was Beloit. "I mean to tell you my heart dropped clear down to my toes," she said.

AP Diane Roles talks about Beloit from the porch of her home in Holton, Kan.

But looking back now, she sees it differently. "Going to Beloit was a safe haven for me," she said. "Basically, I was an abused kid. Back in them days they didn't do anything. They shook their heads."

There is no barbed wire — no fence at all — surrounding the complex of limestone and brick buildings that came to be known as Beloit Juvenile Correctional Facility. Across the street is the high school for the shrinking, agricultural town of 3,600. Its two-block long downtown, filled with charming century-old buildings, is less than a mile away.

The institution, right down to its rural setting, is typical of the ones that began opening in the middle part of the 19th century as rehabilitation-focused reformers sought to end the practice of housing juveniles alongside adults in deplorable conditions.

The Women's Christian Temperance Union, a suffragist group that had fought for prohibition, lobbied for the girls' facility in Kansas, soliciting donations of land and money and operating it for its first couple of years before the state took it over in 1890. As was common at the time, girls as young as 8 spent long days toiling in the gardens and caring for the animals that supplied their food. For a time, girls were even indentured to farm families.

But with the high-minded ideals of the reformers, there was a dark side as well, explained Ned Loughran, executive director of the Council for Juvenile Correctional Administrators, in Braintree, Mass.

"These kids were an eyesore for the upper classes of society," he said. "The solution wasn't to change the conditions they were growing up in, the poverty and lack of parental supervision. The view was to get them out of sight. Then people forgot they were there, and abuses crept into the system."

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