The Press: Scandal in New Mexico

When the New Mexico Commission on Youth invited the press on a conducted tour of the state reformatory last spring, only one reporter took advantage of the offer. He was Neil Addington, 30, police reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican. Addington, a cigar-chomping exmarine, went on the “routine inspection” trip because the paper thought it might be helpful for a series that they were planning on juvenile delinquency. What Reporter Addington found was far from routine. In the state reformatory at Springer (The New Mexico Industrial School for Boys), he discovered that 1) some boys were as young as eight, 2) there was no real rehabilitation program, and 3) the facilities were pitifully inadequate. If the reformatory looked that bad on a guided tour, reasoned Addington, what must it be like when not tidied up for inspection? By last week Addington’s answers in the New Mexican had created a statewide scandal.

Bread & Water. Addington tracked down parents of the boys, found one father who said that guards had tied his son to a carpenter’s sawhorse while they whipped him with straps. Another parent said that her boy had been whipped with a fan belt split at the end. Addington paid a surprise visit to the reformatory, demanded that Superintendent Jaffa Miller show him the jail, where he had been told that boys were kept on bread and water for days at a stretch. The jail proved to be filthy, airless cells, one containing three emaciated teen-agers stripped to the waist. There was no toilet (only an uncovered pot), and the boys spread their blankets on the concrete floor to shield their bare feet from the cold.

Miller admitted that guards used paddles on the boys, and some of them used belts to whip them. A former inmate told Addington: “They’d strip a boy to the waist and tell him to grab anything nearby while they whipped him loud with leather straps. We were told to watch, but we wouldn’t. We would hold up our hands and cover our eyes.”

Ideals v. Communism. Addington’s stories brought a flood of letters to the paper. One came from Victor Black, 30, a teacher at the reformatory. Wrote he: “Over and over again, boys come to our classes with deep cuts on their arms, faces or other parts of their bodies … I attempt to teach the Constitution and American ideals, and I am laughed at, because these boys would prefer Communism to our system of handling youths . . .”

Teacher Black’s letter brought unexpected results: he was summarily fired by the local school board. Last week, at a hearing on the decision, the board said it was not interested in the truth or falsity of the letter, only whether or not he had written it. Meanwhile, the pressure was too much for Superintendent Miller: he resigned. But the New Mexican was far from satisfied. It planned to carry on its battle, hoped to persuade incoming Governor John F. Simms Jr. to start a state investigation of the scandal.