And their average length of stay in Tompkins County, the facility's rap sheet says, is 2.9 years.
On these youth the State of New York has imposed its will and its will includes a fiercely protective stance against the inquiries of reporters inquiring about wards they feel they are protecting from harming themselves and from harming society at large-perhaps in equal measures.
But these inmates need more than just protection. They need the resources to help them develop the skills and attain the knowledge they need to do well on the outside.
That's where Ithaca attorney, child advocate, and City Court Judge Marjorie Olds comes into play. When Olds returned to Tompkins County in 1998 after six months working for Mary Robinson (former president of Ireland) at the High Commission for Human Rights at the United Nations in New York City, she made the MacCormick center a special project.
Since coming back, Olds has developed a support system for the inmates that has Ithacans coming into the walls to teach and to bring books. The small team of volunteers provides a variety of services for the inmates. They do everything from helping them to put on plays to giving them the support they need to get their GEDs.
A Helping Hand
Before she left, Olds had long been on the board of directors for the MacCormick Secure Center, a defunct group that met as little as once a year. The board performed no special tasks, flexed no board muscle, and were in no more of a hurry, apparently, than the inmates at the prison itself.
"I vowed when I got back, I would make this an active board again," Olds said. So, two days back in town, she made an appointment to see MacCormick Director Ruben Reyes, to whom she declared her intentions. "Give me two things to do," she said, "and I will build a board around those goals."
Reyes, who has since moved on, told Olds he needed "college courses" and "books." In 1996, Olds said, the federal and state funding that had covered libraries and college courses in prisons had abruptly vanished, leaving inmates high and dry. At MacCormick, she said, funding that helped 14 of their inmates enroll in Empire State College, which has a take-home course structure, suddenly disappeared.
Chances for inmates to show self-improvement, inner growth and self-discipline, "the very things parole boards look for," were no longer available.
Olds said that not long after, as her own ideas about how to help those at MacCormick began to bloom, she attended a Christmas party for a different board, a small group of six who oversee the Durland Alternative Library at Cornell University.
The library, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics, and Social Policy, has a decidedly proactive mission and at the time had recently connected with libraries in the villages of Ngor and Yoff in Senegal, forming a "sisterhood" of fund-raising and information sharing.
Olds asked them to try something closer to home and in their agreement to begin work at the MacCormick Center, library director Lynn Andersen also agreed to join the MacCormick board, which now numbered two: Andersen and Olds. The pair formed a new concept: Books in Prison, Teach in Prison.
"We now had the books," Olds said. "Now we went out in search of teachers."
They found, first, Molly Adams, a long-time behind-the-scenes political player from Brooktondale (in the Town of Caroline), who was a friend of Olds and who joined the board.
This triumvirate of activists honed in on the MacCormick Secure Center in an effort to embrace the inmates, whom they saw as neighbors who were living, as it happened, behind shiny wire.
When the Durland Library agreed to donate and loan books, and raise money for the prison, Olds said, "you could just about hear the angels fluttering about the room." When her enthusiasm mixed with her deep empathy ("these kids have been treated like so much flotsam and jetsam, just dumped on the street," she once said) her sales pitch became hard to resist.
Invited to a luncheon at the retirement community, Kendal of Ithaca, Olds came away with nine who volunteered to plant gardens at the prison.
After a visit to a Quaker meeting, Olds returns with another volunteer - a teacher of computer graphics. A call to Ithaca College yields to a visit to speak to students there, more calls, more visits, and eventually Ithaca College is in for six keyboards, a trumpet, a trombone, a cadre of volunteers, a small recording studio, and a composer, who visits the school weekly to teach piano to groups of three. On top of that the bookstore begins a fund-raising campaign, all to MacCormick's benefit.
The list goes on.
* The Hangar Theater, applied for, and received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts and, twice a week for 30 weeks, two of their best worked at the prison on acting, improvisation, speech and playwriting. The end result was a rare, whole-prison gathering and a production of "What Would You Do?", a play about choices, decisions, and repercussions which was written, performed, and produced by inmates lead by Hangar staffers Dean Robinson and Rich Keller.
* A poetry workshop resulted in a book called "Inside Coming Out", which was just published.
* A computer class yielded a Web site designed by inmates which, as it happens, they cannot see, since they are denied access to the Internet.
* A Cornell Law professor, Nancy Cook, a victim of a chance meeting with Olds, organized one of her classes to teach a writing seminar, which will morph next spring into a law course that will include mock parole board role playing.
And the list still goes on. The Cayuga Role Players, organized by Suicide Prevention, performed provocative, improvised role plays on the theme of "visitors day," in 2001.
A monthly newspaper, the MacCormick Press, begins; recovery speakers sign on to visit the prison, poetry workshops come and go. And the center hosts Career Day.
Leading the Way
Literacy volunteers, gray around the temples, park their cars outside the prison, submit to a pat down, and meet one-on-one, only to form bonds that go beyond any definition of literacy.
"All these people who come out to teach are just like saviors to these kids," said one literacy volunteer, former Ithaca College philosophy professor Linda Finlay.
She calls the experience "very safe."
Finlay, like many others, points out the dual-responsibility the state has for the inmates of MacCormick. They are, of course, there for society's protection. But they are there for their own protection, too.
And the state, for all that, is not only their wardens, but the acting foster parents for these kids and, given their age, the overseers of their high school educations, too.
MacCormick is a prison, a school, a home, and, considering the "chaos" of inmates' previous lives, perhaps one of the safest places they've ever lived.
"Being locked up is not for everybody, but it certainly saved my life," Finlay recalls one of the juveniles saying.
Betsy Fuller, an attorney and clinical law professor, lives a few miles from MacCormick and passes by the empty stretch of Buffalo Hill Road, which rises out of Slaterville Springs, nearly every day.
"I drive past these kids, who are my neighbors, plopped into a community that has no relationship with them," she said. So, she had felt for years the need to reach out - or, technically speaking, for the need to reach in.
She was just back from El Salvador, she said, (where she was helping assemble curriculums for law schools there), when she ran into Olds - with predictable results.
Within weeks she had organized Victims Awareness Day, bringing to the prison speakers that included two who were HIV positive and one mother "whose child had died of some nasty drug at the age of 19," Fuller said.
Fuller explained her motivation as one of a neighbor who no longer wanted these kids to be her clients.
Olds says merely, "it's the simplest idea, that these kids belong to the community."
It's that idea that drove Larry Clarkberg to MacCormick to teach a graphic design course a year and a half ago. That, of course, and a letter from Olds that was read to the Quaker meeting his wife attends.
Clarkberg explains the relationship is reciprocal, too. He simply likes to teach, he said.
He also related the most serious concern any volunteer offered, having talked to almost a dozen in researching this article. It was an inmate in the graphics course, Clarkberg said, who was skilled enough to fart, pretty much, at will.
His antics, of course, cracked up the class. But the center assigns a guard, who also attends each class, and the guard, Clarkberg said, was quick to respond, ending the problem.
Without a hint of irony, Clarkberg said the inmate, "had the most natural talent of anyone in the class."
What glimpses the volunteers are afforded of prison life, however, reveals a consistent picture of a MacCormick staff whom they say are personable, hardworking, and enjoy working with the kids. Teachers, Clarkberg said, "seem slightly overwhelmed."
The guard who helps the nine elderly gardeners from Kendal is "a great guy," said Madonna Stahl, the retired Albany City Court judge who organizes that group.
She predicted vandalism, she said, but has not noticed so much as a flower petal disturbed in the beds planted in a few of the member "backyards" that border the back of each dorm.
Making Contact
Ruby Andrews, the 90-something former owner of the "beloved Andrews' Confectionery on State Street," Olds says, donated enough yarn to begin a veritable flurry of crocheting at MacCormick, afghans for everyone...or maybe just a select few.
One day, "one of the biggest, burliest guys in the whole prison" Olds said, finds he cannot suppress his excitement. He tells Olds he is going to present "a special lady" with an afghan and when Lynn Andersen, arrives, just as Olds is leaving the camp, she looks through a window to see him "draping this beautiful afghan on this tiny lady's shoulders."
Andersen will later say, "it doesn't take too long before you know that meeting with someone one-on-one for a couple of years, the relationship grows outside of just being literacy volunteers."
And the Children and Family Services public information officer in Albany, Kent Kasselbrack, almost in a whisper over the phone, discusses the programs as if they were a secret he did not really want to get out. Yes, he says, the administration encourages more involvement at the center. Yes, he says, "we are always happy when the community wants to get involved."
Yes, he says, "we are appreciative of the efforts of the Citizens Advisory Board."
And, yes, he says, almost in afterthought, violence between prisoners at the center, in the last two years, has gone down.
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