Abstract
Havenwood was founded in 1897 as a summer camp for six poor urban white boys. In the early part of the twentieth century, Havenwood’s population grew and it became “junior municipality for misfit and unwanted children,”1 a permanent, residence for the founding couple and urban boys. At this time Havenwood was a “boys’ home” and organized life using Christian doctrine. Over the course of the twentieth century, following trends in institutional living, and psychology and psychiatry in the United States, Havenwood shifted its focus from being a boys’ home that taught discipline and obedience to a therapeutic milieu designed to meet the emotional, cognitive, and psychological needs of society’s troubled youth. In this chapter, I provide a general context and historical trajectory for children’s institutions in the United States, illustrating how and when frameworks shifted from religious and moral reform to psychiatry and mental illness rehabilitation. Havenwood has been in existence during these phases, reinventing itself along the way. I also provide a historical and cultural context for how race, either explicitly or implicitly, informs incarceration, psychiatry, and psychiatric custody in the United States. I also introduce a history and the context of hip hop, which emerged as a meaningful cultural practice at Havenwood. This chapter is organized thematically, rather than chronologically, as I braid these histories together to illustrate how they have come to shape psychiatric custody in the United States. These histories are not meant to be exhaustive, and I direct readers to the appropriate literature for further reading.
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Notes
For extensive histories of psychiatry see Edward Shorter’s A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997), Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine’s Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535–1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), Mary Ann Jimenez’s Changing Faces of Madness: Early American Attitudes and Treatment of the Insane (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), and Gerald N. Grob’s The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill (New York: The Free Press, 1994).
See for example, Bruno Bettelheim’s Truants from Life (New York: The Free Press, 1955), B. Bettelheim and E. Sylvester’s “A Therapeutic Milieu,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 18 (1948): 191–206, William Caudill’s The Psychiatric Hospital as a Small Society (Published for the Commonwealth Fund by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1958), R. E. Cohen and L. Grinspoon’s “Limit Setting as a Corrective Ego Experience,” Archives of General Psychiatry 8 (1963): 74–79, and Joseph Noshpitz’s “Notes on the Theory of Residential Treatment,” Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 1 (1962): 284–296.
See also Robert V. Guthrie’s Even the Rat Was White: A Historical View of Psychology second edition (New York: Pearson, 2003) for historical details regarding leading African American psychologists.
For more analysis on the ways color-blind ideology shapes American social life and institutional structures see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Brown et al.’s Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), Joe Feagin’s Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 2006), Wahneema Lubiano’s (1997) “Introduction,” in The House that Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, Wahneema Lubiano, editor (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997) pp. vii–ix, Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (2012) “Racial Formation Rules: Continuity, Instability, and Change,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, Daniel Martinez HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido, editors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) pp. 302–331, David Wellman’s Portraits of White Racism, second edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Tim Wise’s Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Inequality (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010).
See Angela Davis’s (1997) “Race and Criminalization: Black Americans and The Punishment Industry,” in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, Wahneema Lubiano, editor (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997) pp. 264–279, Preston Elrod and R. Scott Ryder’s Juvenile Justice: A Social, Historical, and Legal Perspective (New York: Jones & Bartlett Learning, 1999), Everette Penn, Helen Greene, and Shaun Gabbidon’s “Introduction,” in Race and Juvenile Justice, Everette Penn, Helen Greene, and Shaun Gabbidon, editors (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2006) pp. 1–7, Everette Penn’s “Black Youth: Disproportionality and Delinquency,” in Race in Juvenile Justice, Everette B. Penn, Helen Taylor Greene, and Shaun L. Gabbidon, editors (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2006) pp. 47–64, Robert Taylor and Eric Fritsch’s Juvenile Justice: Policies, Programs, and Practices (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2010), and D. Bishop and C. Frazier’s (1988) “The Influence of Race in Juvenile Justice Decision-Making: Findings of a Statewide Analysis,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 22 (1988): 309–328 for detailed discussions of this link between treatment centers and prison.
For more on the history of urban contexts and the Bronx in particular in relationship to hip hop see Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation and Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).
Graffiti writing is often considered the fourth element of hip hop. Originally, graffiti was used in turf wars and in gang culture. However, graffiti artist known as TAKI 183 wrote his name all over subway stations and subway cars. All of a sudden graffiti was no longer about isolated gang tags but rather about elaborate, complex art pieces that could move and be seen throughout all of New York City. Graffiti themes included hip hop slang and cultural projects (e.g., b-boys and fashion). DJs soon began using the graffiti styles on their party advertisements thereby linking the antiestablishment of graffiti writing with hip hop music. In many ways, graffiti was the most visible element of the dynamic youth culture. For more on graffiti’s history see Zeb.Roc.Zki’s (2004) presentation of Martha Cooper’s Hip Hop Files: Photographs 1979–1984, Style Wars a 1983 documentary directed by Tony Silver and produced by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant Subway Art (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1988), and Craig Castleman’s Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York (Cambridge, MA: The Massachusetts Institution of Technology Press, 1984).
For more comprehensive histories of Black popular music see Mark Anthony Neal’s What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka’s The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1987), Iian Chamber’s Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1985), and Arnold Shaw’s Black Popular Music in America: From the Spirituals, Minstrels, and Ragtime to Soul, Disco, and Hip-Hop (New York: Macmillan, 1986).
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© 2015 Katie Rose Hejtmanek
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Hejtmanek, K.R. (2015). Histories and Social Contexts. In: Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop. Culture, Mind and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137544735_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137544735_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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