This article is the second part of a historical investigation into the Long Lane School For Girls, an institution for deviant female youth, formerly adjacent to the University’s campus.

Long Lane School For Girls is an unknown entity for many Wesleyan students, its vacant halls just a curious part of the local landscape. But only a decade ago, Long Lane still lived as a functioning juvenile correctional facility, if one plagued by problems with abuse and neglect.

Guided throughout its history by the ideals of its ambitious founders, Long Lane nonetheless changed dramatically in character as the 20th century came to a close. The school underwent two of its most significant changes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first change came when Long Lane was brought under the supervision of the Connecticut Department of Children and Youth Services, which, not coincidentally, followed the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case, “In re Gault.” The Gault case “made it more difficult for youth to be sent to institutions for status offenses,” wrote Beth Davies ’09 in her thesis about Long Lane in Middletown’s collective memory.

This meant that the makeup of the school necessarily shifted—fewer youth were sent there for minor, non-criminal charges and more were sent for serious violations of state or federal law.

A second change came just a few years later, in 1972, when male inmates were added to the population of the school. It seems that this shift in admission and authority altered more than the school’s demographics. Long Lane, by most accounts, became more of a genuine detention facility in this period. Davies quotes a local woman named Dorothy in her thesis.

“The girls, they raised cows down there, and they took care of the cows and the barns and they grew strawberries down by the field,” Davies quotes Dorothy as saying. “For many years, you could go down there and pick the strawberries that remained, [but] after, the school changed…. It became a boys’ school.”

Although it would be hard to say that the school was idyllic before the advent of coeducation—it was, after all, a detention facility meant to cure or at least isolate “delinquent” children—accounts of the school after the early 1970s make it clear that Long Lane became more prison-like, and its early high standards were deteriorating quickly.

Davies also quotes Mitchell, a young man sent to Long Lane School, currently a Middletown resident.

“That was not a school; it was a warehouse for kids,” Davies quotes Mitchell as saying.

The decline of Long Lane from an institution with high hopes of providing a home away from home for troubled girls to a catch-all facility for kids with as diverse problems as pregnancy to larceny charges was well noted in the local and state press. News reports of runaways from Long Lane abound after the 1970s, and the fate of the property and the school became a subject of heated debate by the late 1990s.

By that point, the school was a shadow of its former self. Buildings were decrepit and ridden with asbestos. Parts of the property designated for likely runaways were fenced in. Buildings equivalent to solitary confinement units had been put into use.

And, perhaps most importantly, the old reform ethic seems to have been virtually abandoned. Staff members were repeatedly accused of abuse and neglect. It is unclear, however, if there were more instances of these offenses or simply more reports of them.

The September 1998 suicide of 15-year-old Tabatha B. brought these issues to the fore. A Child Fatality Review Panel report from the Office of Governmental Accountability in late 1998 recounts in harsh and public detail the extent to which Tabatha’s death could have been prevented by an institution better equipped than Long Lane to deal with her mental health. Based on the report, it seems shocking  that Long Lane was not shut down long before 2003.

Noting that Long Lane School operated as a Department of Children and Families (DCF) correctional facility without oversight, accreditation, or licensing, the report goes on to discuss the seeming futility of reporting the many alleged acts of abuse at the facility.

“Reports of abuse and neglect against children by staff and agency police officers are investigated by DCF Hotline, another branch of the same agency, without independent oversight of those investigations,” the report reads.

This messy bureaucracy, as intimated by the writers of the report, was compounded by the dysfunctional nature of the juvenile detention system and Long Lane School itself.

“After a long series of failed placements in foster homes, shelters, and a residential facility, Tabatha was ultimately placed in Connecticut’s only juvenile correctional facility, an institution that is overcrowded, lacks resources, is understaffed and does not provide the therapeutic milieu necessary to treat a diverse population of emotionally disturbed children,” the report continues.

The report ends by making clear that signs of Tabatha’s suicidal tendencies were apparent for years before she succeeded (she had first attempted to end her life when she was five), but the various state agencies tasked with caring for her, including Long Lane, failed to notice them or take appropriate action in response.

Tabatha was found hanging in her room at Long Lane School on Sept. 26, 1998. She died two days later.

“State Child Advocate Linda Pearce Prestley called conditions there ‘appalling’ after her investigation into the girl’s death,” reads a Hartford Courant article from a few months after Tabatha’s passing.

Tabatha’s suicide was the first in the century-long history of the school, but it colored the past and future of Long Lane for all involved. The late 1990s saw passionate debate in and around Middletown about the future of the school. After the state proposed a renovation of the property into a smaller and more high-security facility, neighbors of the school protested.

The University bought the property in 2000 for $15 million, ultimately helping to fund the construction of a new juvenile detention facility for boys, which opened in August 2001 at the Connecticut Valley Hospital. By 2003, the girls of Long Lane had been moved to other facilities throughout the state; no equivalent to Long Lane School was built for the female inmates after the school’s closing.

In the years since The University bought the Long Lane property, all but three of the school’s buildings have been demolished. The Cady Building became the Physical Plant office, and a turf field was erected in the place of one of the secure units.

Its political history has been, in many ways, subsumed by an environmental presence: disputes over remediation of the property due to polluted soil have taken center stage, and Long Lane Farm has become a centerpiece of the University community’s sustainability efforts.

Perhaps as a result of the limited institutional memory of such a transient community, most students have only a vague idea of the history of Long Lane; for most, it is that idyllic sounding place just down the road. Interest in memorializing the site in some way has come to little, and most seem content to let the memories and the ghosts of Long Lane School lay fallow for the coming years.