Catholic Protectory

A protectory is a Roman Catholic institution for the shelter and training of the young, designed to afford neglected or abandoned children shelter, food, raiment and the rudiments of an education in religion, morals, science and manual training or industrial pursuits.

Institutions of this character are to be found in most of the dioceses of the United States. They are usually open to the reception of juvenile delinquents, who, under the better ideas now obtaining in criminal procedure, are committed by the courts, especially by Juvenile Courts, to educational rather than to penal institutions.

San Michéle, the first protectory for youth, was founded at Rome in 1704 by Pope Clement XI. When John Howard, the English prison reformer (1726–90), visited the institution, he read above the entrance this inscription: "Clement XI, Supreme Pontiff, for the reformation and education of criminal youths, to the end that those who when idle had been injurious to the State, might, when better instructed and trained, become useful to it. In the Year of Grace 1704; of the Pontiff, the fourth". On a marble slab inserted in one of the interior walls he read further: "It is of little use to restrain criminals by punishment, unless you reform them by education". This became the keynote of modern penology. The inmates worked together by day in a large hall where was hung up in large letters, visible to all, the Latin word silentium, indicating that the work must go on in silence. At night they slept in separate cells. This system of associated or congregate labour in silence by day and cellular separation at night, for which, under the name of the Auburn System, so much excellence has been claimed in American penology, was thus inaugurated at Rome in the beginning of the eighteenth century, more than a hundred years prior to the introduction of the method into use here. The same wise pontiff established in connexion with this foundation of San Michéle a special court for the trial of offenders under twenty years of age, a plan that has re-appeared in the last decade in the Juvenile Courts established in America and eelsewhere for the trial of delinquents under (seventeen years of) age.

Secular protectories or reform schools, or euphemestically termed "training schools", were instituted in America during the initial quarter of the nineteenth century. On 1 January 1825, the House of Refuge was opened with appropriate exercises on what is now Madison Square, New York City. Nine children, just gathered from the streets, were present and formed the nucleus of the new establishment that later grew to vast proportions on Randalls Island. Boston followed with a similar institution in 1826; Philadelphia in 1828; and in 1855 a girls' reformatory was founded at Lancaster, Massachusetts on the family or cottage plan, dividing the institution into three separate houses of thirty girls each, with their three matrons, all under the general supervision of a superintendent.

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