Juvenile
May 30, 2001
Former Resident Recalls Trauma of MacLaren Days
LOS ANGELES - If anyone captures the hope and the harm of MacLaren Children's Center, it is Andrew Bridge. As a child, Bridge was taken from his mother and lived at MacLaren Hall (as it was called then) for six months until he was placed in a foster home. He was never returned to his mother and no one adopted him.
As a child, Bridge was taken from his mother and lived at MacLaren Hall (as it was called then) for six months until he was placed in a foster home. He was never returned to his mother and no one adopted him.
"You were treated in every respect like you had entered the juvenile justice system," he said. "They took your possessions and catalogued them. You were given a standard-issue white T-shirt that said 'MACLAREN' on the back and you wore standard-issue jeans and white sneakers."
Now 37 and the chief executive officer and general counsel of the Alliance for Children's Rights, a public interest law firm, the graduate of Harvard Law School said, "There was no room or concern for individual identification or the trauma of having just left your parents for whatever reason."
Boys, ranging in age from preschool to 18, were sent to live in a large dormitory, while girls went to the another dormitory.
"Fights were common, as were AWOL attempts by kids trying to climb over the barbed wire. The punishment was swift and harsh and, at the time, every child was aware that for an infraction they could be subject to lockup," Bridge said.
Lockup was a windowless room with a mattress. Children, according to old news accounts, were routinely kept there for days at a time, sometimes in the dark.
Bridge, a first-grader at the time, said he found himself in the lockup shortly after he arrived at MacLaren.
"I was too shy to go out and play with the other kids. I wanted to sit on my bed," Bridge said. "If the room was intended to change a child's behavior, it certainly did that. From that point on, I wanted to go outside. It worked."
In hindsight, he said, putting a traumatized child in an isolation room is more psychologically damaging than physical violence. "There is no justification," he said.
Bridge also recalled how it felt to be taken to court in a Sheriff's Department bus with bars on the windows and where adult prisoners sat with little kids.
What particularly hurt the lonely boy was that no one would allow him to see his mother. "MacLaren was a place that ripped into a child's soul," he said.
Others remember how MacLaren Hall was then, too.
One of them, Fred Baker, 54, a former deputy probation officer, confirmed Bridge's recollections about the treatment of dependent kids. "They used to put the delinquent and the nondelinquent children all together," he said. "The nondelinquent children were treated almost like the probation kids."
In the late 1970s, the county began moving delinquents out of MacLaren Hall and the facility was refashioned as an emergency shelter. Many of the employees who worked for the Probation Department elected to remain on at the facility. They were allowed to do so, which allegedly created problems. A retired employee of the Department of Children and Family Services, who asked to remain unidentified, said the corporal punishment of children at MacLaren by former Probation Department employees became the norm. "Getting them not to use excessive force was difficult," she said. "Some lost their jobs because of it."
In the 1980s, the word "Hall" was dropped and the facility was renamed MacLaren Children's Center. In place of the old dorms, bungalows were built to house smaller numbers of children in age groups that were appropriate for them. In time, the facility added a library, gymnasium and swimming pool. "Many of those things owe a special credit to United Friends of the Children [a volunteer group]. They changed that place from what it was when I was a child there," Bridge said.
Over the years, Bridge has watched the changes, as only someone who's lived there can appreciate.
"MacLaren today is a very different facility. It's a de facto mental facility and the staff lacks the appropriate training to care for and protect these children," Bridge said. "Institutions like MacLaren do a poor job of ensuring the physical and emotional safety of children."
Cheryl Romo
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