When the term “crossover youth” is used today it refers to children who touch both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. These are young people whose lives are shaped by abuse, neglect, family separation, poverty, and then, too often, punishment.
It sounds like a modern problem, born of contemporary systems that struggle to coordinate care and services. But sadly, America’s first crossover youth lived — and too often died — long ago.
From the 1800s well into the 20th century, thousands of children were confined in institutions with names like houses of refuge, industrial schools, and houses of reformation. We have recently learned that many are buried in unmarked or forgotten graves near such institutions. Their stories are largely absent from our national memory, but their experiences reveal a truth we are only now beginning to confront: Long before we had child welfare or juvenile justice agencies as we know them today, the state was already criminalizing childhood trauma and poverty.
At places like the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children in Maryland, many children were not incarcerated for what we would today call delinquent acts. They were locked up for being “incorrigible,” for vagrancy, for being a “minor without proper care,” or simply for being poor, orphaned, abused or unwanted. These were children society deemed unmanageable rather than children in need of protection.
In modern times, they would almost certainly have been placed in the child welfare system. Instead, they were incarcerated, subjected to harsh discipline, forced labor, neglect and violence. It appears many died of disease.
But we are also learning that others were beaten or killed. Most were buried without ceremony, without acknowledgment or proper notification to their families, and surely without any dignity afforded to them at the end of their lives — or in death. Their punishment was not for what they did, but for who they were: Children born to families without a voice, children without “adequate” care, without resources, without power, and disproportionately children of color.
These children were the original crossover youth — caught at the intersection of neglect and punishment, child welfare and juvenile justice, care and control.
Today, researchers and advocates understand that crossover youth are among the most vulnerable children in our systems. Studies consistently show that youth with child welfare involvement are far more likely to enter the juvenile justice system than their peers, often not because they commit more serious offenses, but because their behavior is more quickly criminalized and less compassionately understood. Trauma responses are mistaken for defiance. Survival behaviors are too often treated as crimes.
The Georgetown University Center for Youth Justice has documented how system fragmentation — separate agencies, separate courts, separate funding streams — contributes to creating greater vulnerabilities that results in poorer outcomes for these children. When systems fail to acknowledge, understand and coordinate, children fall through the cracks or are pushed deeper into confinement, even when their primary needs are safety, stability and healing.
What is striking is how familiar this all sounds.
The children confined in 19th-century houses of refuge and reformation were experiencing the same dynamic, just without modern terminology. Their “status offenses” — running away and noncriminal disobedience — were often the direct result of poverty, abuse, neglect or abandonment. Yet the response was incarceration, not care. Control, not compassion. These responses are exemplary of the racist practices that were inherent in America during that time and remain today but are institutional in their delivery.
The Forgotten Children Initiative seeks to recover and document these lost stories — not as an exercise in historical curiosity, but as a moral reckoning and a call to action. The unmarked graves near these institutions are not only reminders of past cruelty and likely crimes; they are mirrors held up to the present. They ask us whether we have truly changed our approach, or whether we have simply refined the language.
We no longer send “incorrigible” children en masse to houses of refuge. But too many children today — particularly children of color, children with disabilities, and children in foster care, almost all of whom are also poor — are still punished for the harm done to them. Too many are removed from their homes, moved from placement to placement, school to school, facility to facility, until the system itself becomes the source of instability. In actuality, the system does what it accused the families of — but with no retribution.
Recognizing the children buried at the houses of refuge and reformation as the nation’s first crossover youth forces us to confront a hard truth: The boundary between child welfare and juvenile justice has always been porous, and too often, it has functioned as a one-way door toward punishment or a lifelong connection to ill-equipped systems.
Remembering these children is not just about honoring those that died long ago. It is about changing how we treat the living.
If we are serious about preventing future forgotten children, we must invest in policies that keep children safe with families whenever possible, respond to trauma with care rather than confinement, and ensure that child welfare involvement doesn’t become a pipeline to the juvenile justice system and incarceration. We must build systems that share responsibility, not blame, and that see children not as problems to be managed, but as lives to be protected and nurtured.
The children buried near the houses of refuge and reformation had few advocates, no data dashboards, no reform commissions, nor licensed workers. All they have now is us — and the obligation their stories place on our conscience.
Will we repeat the same mistakes of past generations?
