Gatesville State School

The Gatesville State School for Boys was a juvenile corrections facility in Gatesville, Texas. The 900-acre (360 ha) facility was converted into two prisons for adults, the Christina Crain Unit (formerly Gatesville Unit), and the Hilltop Unit.

The Texas Legislature established the House of Correction and Reformatory, the first rehabilitative juvenile correctional facility in the Southern United States, in 1887. The facility, operated by the Texas Prison System, opened in January 1889 with 68 boys who had previously been located in correctional facilities with adult felons. The Victorian reformers who opened the facility intended for the farmwork in the dry climate and the schooling to reform juvenile delinquents. At the beginning the institution also housed boys who did not commit any crimes but had no family and no other place to live in. Children were previously housed in the Huntsville Unit, a prison which also housed adults, in Huntsville.

Robert Perkinson, author of Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire, said that the institution gained "a reputation for ruthlessness" as decades passed. Gatesville, which served as the main juvenile detention facility for Texas since its opening, had a focus on labor instead of rehabilitation. Throughout the state school's history the state government did not appropriate sufficient funds, and the dormitories became overcrowded. Before the state school first opened, the reformatory officials complained about an influx of non-White children who they believed were not capable of being rehabilitated. Michael Jewell, a former Gatesville state school student who attended the school in 1961, said that long periods in solitary confinement, stoop labor, fights between gangs, beatings perpetrated by staff members, and sexual assault occurred at the facility. Perkinson said that Gatesville, intended to resemble the Elmira Correctional Facility in Elmira, New York, instead had an attitude similar to that of the Texas prison farms for adults.

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