By the late 1880’s, New Bedford pulsed with industry. At the height of its prosperity in 1920, there were seventy mills producing high quality goods for twenty-eight cotton companies.49 Unfortunately, this was the calm before the storm. In 1928, a labor strike paralyzed the city, as 20,000 workers rose up against the mill owners because the over-production of goods was cutting their wages.50 The workers were out for six months, and many had to take pay cuts to get their jobs back. Then the Depression hit. Tens of thousands of jobs in the textile and apparel industries disappeared and the exodus out of the city began, and New Bedford’s economic health grew weaker. Important manufacturers moved to states where cheap labor was readily available.51 Fishing commerce provided the one bright light, but it wasn’t enough to help New Bedford attract new industry. While other parts of the state began to expand, the city’s population declined. That decline and the loss of business destroyed any chance of recovery. Industries in aerospace, electronics, defense, and medical research headed elsewhere.52
By 1993, while most of Massachusetts was coming out of the recession that had begun in the late 1980s, economic improvement was still nonexistent in New Bedford.53 The city had no champion to drag it out of its financial plight, no Senator Paul Tsongas to help secure federal monies to remodel its mills—as did Lowell, another gateway city that had once boomed with textiles and manufacturing. Called “gateways” because immigrants looking for the American Dream had settled in these older industrial areas, the towns of New Bedford, Lowell, Lawrence, Worcester, Springfield, and others were labeled the “tenements” of the state, providing cheap housing to new inhabitants and minorities.54 For this distinction, these cities were looked down upon and often ignored by those in power. When Governor William Weld formed the Hispanic Advisory Commission in 1993, not one representative from southeastern Massachusetts was appointed, despite the large number of Hispanics residing in the state’s southeastern cities.55
While New Bedford was struggling for recognition and support to help its citizenry during the twentieth century, the fledgling system for juveniles was undergoing transformation. The idea that children’s conduct was strongly influenced by their social and familial environments had gained favor.56 Proponents of a separate juvenile system expressed concern that because children were not the same as adults in terms of accountability, they did not deserve the same punishment.57 This stance would later find support in brain development research showing that adolescents are different from adults, but this was still far in the future. Instead, children were seen as more influenced by their surroundings, and some, able to change their ways.58 All of these notions would be considered and challenged as the century progressed, and teens like Karter would be caught in the crossfire.
In the early part of the twentieth century, a family-like atmosphere was what administrators strived for in juvenile detention facilities.59 But equitable care for all juveniles continued to be a myth, as children with criminal offenses were seen to have behaved “wickedly.”60 As of 1921, the state of Massachusetts could send those between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one to any facility, including to adult courts if they were accused of a crime punishable by death or life imprisonment.61 It would take until 1948 to modify this and restrict at what age a child could be sent to adult court; that year, the state would give jurisdiction to a Youth Services Board, forerunner of the Department of Youth Services.62 The idea that permeated the system was still parens patriae, a sort of father knows best, in spite of charges of racism in foster homes and, at other placements, complaints of “whips, paddles, blackjacks and straps.”63
Juvenile courts of the period were to emphasize the youthful nature of those who came before them. Across the country, children in these courts were “adjudicated,” not tried and sentenced as in an adult court of law. But scholar Sanford J. Fox said that in spite of its goals, “It was clear that juvenile courts were really deciding criminal responsibility.”64 Children had limited civil rights compared to adults. Justine Wise Polier, a New York judge, wrote that “youth charged with offenses sat for hours in airless waiting rooms. Noisy verbal and physical battles had to be broken up by court attendants. The hard benches on which everyone was forced to sit and the atmosphere, like that in lower criminal courts, resembled bullpens more than a court for human beings.”65 In the 1930’s and 1940’s, legal activists began challenging the powers given to juvenile court judges.66
The middle part of the century would see changes in laws regarding juveniles, what rights they should be afforded, and the courts that held jurisdiction over them. In a 1948 decision, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas challenged what Massachusetts Judge Jay Blitzman called “the closed world of juvenile court.”67 Douglas said the Fourteenth Amendment meant that no child could be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law, and “prohibited the use of a coerced statement made by a juvenile in a state court.”68 In 1966, the case Kent v. United States gave juveniles the right to a hearing before a judge prior to being transferred to an adult court.69
Other due process rights for juveniles were gained—and lost—through cases that came before the Supreme Court. A 1967 case, In Re Gault attempted to assure that due process would be followed in the juvenile courts.70 With Gault, Justice Abraham Fortas said “Neither the Bill of Rights nor the Fourteenth Amendment is for adults alone,” and juveniles gained—again, on paper—the right to counsel, the right to confrontation/cross-examination as well as the right against compelled self-incrimination.71 However, in 1971, the ruling in McKeiver v. Pennsylvania, prohibited youth from having a constitutional right to a jury. It was feared that “such a step would signal the beginning of the end for juvenile courts.”72
As juvenile crime and homicide rates rose in the 1980s, those who considered children as culpable as adults, i.e. “criminals who happen to be young . . . responded to the realities and perceptions of youth violence by facilitating the prosecution of children accused of violent crime as adults.”73 Karter Reed had no understanding of the charges soon to be levelled at his kind in the 1990s by political scientists such as William J. Bennett, John J. Dilulio, Jr., and John P. Walters: “America is now home to thickening ranks of juvenile ‘super-predators’—radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters . . . [t]o these mean-street youngsters, the words ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have no fixed moral meaning.”74 While this ideology would be proven wrong, the policies it inspired would proceed into the twenty-first century.
The concept of criminal court transfer was one of such policies. Transfer—when a juvenile is sent to the adult court system, loses his status as a minor, and becomes legally culpable for his behavior—is still in dispute today.75 We know now that transferring juveniles to adult courts has not made us safer, as juvenile transfer laws have been proven to be ineffective at deterring crime and reducing recidivism.76 And yet, legislatures in nearly every state have expanded transfer laws to allow or require the prosecution of juveniles in adult criminal courts.77 In 2015, forensic psychologist Robert Kinscherff, who testified for Karter at his trial, pointed out that our current policies have “criminalized” children.78
The house on Hillman Street where Karter spent his teenage years was gray-blue with bright blue shutters. There was a Portuguese bodega across the street, a common sight in this part of town called the West End. Although there were some single-family homes, most everybody lived in what Karter called “three-story tenements or projects.” The area was known for having the largest share of New Bedford’s eighteen federally and state-funded housing developments. While Karter was growing up, Cape Verdeans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans intermingled uneasily with the older Irish immigrants—boys cracking jokes while hanging out in doorways of bodegas, looking for something to do instead of going to school. There were language barriers and cultural boundaries.
Karter, born in 1976, lived primarily in the West End, where he wrote in 2008, in one of his first letters to me, that “few had driveways, much less garages.” The West End was in the middle of the city, and Karter said families in that area lived “paycheck to paycheck.” They were as overwhelmed by drugs