What ghosts are you trying to erase?

Spoiler Alert: This essay shares plot details from the book, The Reformatory.

In the novel The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, a 12-year-old boy, Robbie, is sent to a reform school in the Jim Crow-era South for kicking the white neighbor who sexually harassed his sister, Gloria. The novel portrays the injustices Robbie faces inside the system, but also the way carceral systems affect whole families, as it depicts Gloria’s attempts to rescue her brother from an unfair fate. 

Gloria is the ultimate measure of selfless love, holding up a mirror to everyone in the book who claims to care about Robbie but ultimately fails to protect him. By doing so, Due seems to suggest that every person involved in systemic injustice has failed the people directly impacted. 

The supernatural aspect of the book is that the Reformatory is haunted by ghosts of children, inviting readers to contemplate the level of violence actually committed against children in reform schools from the past and present. It is inspired by the real-life Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, where Due’s great-uncle Robert Stephens was sent. Due equips her protagonist young Robbie with the ability to see these ghosts; a talent no adult possesses. 

Warden Haddock then enlists Robbie to capture and erase the souls of these lost children. No one can afford to look too closely at the ghosts his violence has created. 

While it would be easy for me to relate to Robbie, given my own interactions with the system when I was sent to juvenile detention as a victim of the Kids for Cash scandal twenty years ago, or even Gloria, who gave me real insight into the desperation that fueled my mother on her journey to have me released from detention, I have to own the more uncomfortable comparison to the central white woman in the novel, Miss Anne. Miss Anne represents the naïve allyship of White women, especially those from LGBTQIA+ communities who conflate their specific marginalization with the problems of Black Americans.

On my first read, I didn’t see the connection because I couldn’t. My economic background meant that having domestic help was not something particularly relatable. I’ve never been in a relationship I had to keep hidden from my family or community, and I can’t imagine a world where a girl, a young woman, works in my home and we don’t have some form of genuine friendship. But that dissonance wasn’t very honest.

I’m no longer a child affected by the system; I’m a cisgender white woman with some small social power as an authority figure in my classroom as a teacher. And I’m a grown-up in every space I walk into with children inside. And the moments when I forget that, when I lack awareness about the power dynamics that exist between the people around me based on the privileges I experience, are the moments when I most resemble Miss Anne. 

Anne’s inability to own her shortcomings and to act with authentic love with the full force of her conviction is why she fails to be the person she believes she is on the inside. She has deluded herself that her father’s allyship was enough, that his death somehow paid the sacrifice that justifies her silence and her comfortable denial of how mired in racism she still really is. Likewise, my brief stint in juvenile detention has not stripped me of my privilege, nor paid the toll for any earned apathy. 

My continued support of Juvenile Law Center is an attempt to rectify this, to ensure the attention I receive from my experience is used to highlight the issues that still exist in the system to remind people that Kids for Cash was not some sort of one off fluke of corrupt judges locking up children, but a symptom of a larger disease rooted in our attitudes about children and, the much uglier truth underneath, of how our “justice systems” in America have always unfairly targeted people of color, especially Black and Brown youth. 

It would have been easy to believe that my experience was unique, that one bad judge made a greedy call; I could convince myself that I was a good kid from an unusual circumstance. But my experiences have taught me the truth is much starker, and I cannot look away. Every character in The Reformatory has an excuse or a story they’re telling to distance themselves from the uncomfortable fact of their inadequacy. Due’s writing implicates everyone, including the savvy NAACP lawyer whose attempt to outmaneuver the racist judge in Gloria’s favor is unsuccessful. 

When I think about the villains in The Reformatory, or just the characters who did not do enough, one person from my own experience comes to mind. The director of the camp who collected me and my miserable cohort from our holding cell in the Luzerne County Courthouse, who I’ll call Sarah. 

I remember the enthusiasm with which she detailed the program we’d be attending, how she fought to be heard over the collective sound of sniffling as six despondent girls processed being thrown out like so much trash. We were supposed to be excited that this was happening to us, relieved that our imprisonment sounded so good. 

When Juvenile Law Center intervened on my behalf some weeks later, I remember the director’s tone had taken a completely different turn. I could feel her quiet anger from the front seat of her car as she carted me back to Luzerne County for a release hearing. I could feel her raging about the injustice of it all, the delusion I was carrying, as she saw it, that I’d somehow be released. 

“Ciavarella sends everyone away without lawyers! That’s just how it is!”

And you know what the crazy part is? I haven’t been mad at that woman since the day I was released. I understood perfectly, even at fifteen, even in the midst of my trauma, what she was protecting. If I was right and she was wrong, then she’d been complicit in carting off hundreds of teenage girls to jail unethically. And who could own that about themselves?

This is what Due’s book is trying to point to. Everyday villains like my camp director, Sarah, who convinced herself these systems exist to help children. I have no doubt she imagined she was doing good work by corralling teenage girls into the back of a van in an empty parking garage beneath the courthouse. All so everyone involved doesn’t have to face the stark reality of the injustices inflicted on children through collective, enthusiastic participation in it. 

I taught expressive arts and literacy classes in a juvenile detention center with a healing arts nonprofit for a couple of years in my 20s. I loved my boss, who was a trauma-informed instructor who insisted on baking fresh cookies for every class and who often argued with me that the teenage boys and girls wanted to be babied, to be treated like small children, because no one in their lives had ever treated them that way. 

We read poetry with these young people, played games, wrote deeply personal stories—and at the end of our sessions we left them there. They were marched out with their hands behind their backs as we passed through several sets of locked doors where we’d return to our families and lives outside of this dismal little facility.

And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew my very well-intentioned boss could not be aware of. That we were a brief amusement, a momentary break in these children’s days, a way to pass the time, really. Because we were on the outside and they were in there, we could not understand or appreciate their perspectives. We were untrustworthy, inherently, by the very nature of being free and them being—well—not. 

Miss Anne puts forth what she believes is her best effort to help. She involves her lover; she convinces herself that her private disagreement with racism and the system is enough. And just like my camp director, just like everyone else in the novel who isn’t Robbie or Gloria, it isn’t enough. 

It doesn’t matter that Miss Anne privately enlists help, or that she knows what’s happening is wrong. It matters that she’s never quite seen Gloria as anything more than the domestic help until this moment. And how her half-assed activism is more about her ego than doing what’s right. At the end of the day, the only person who truly helps Gloria and Robbie is Miss Lottie, their octogenarian godmother, whose age and real physical limitations prevent her from acting until all other resources have been exhausted. 

Ultimately, reducing systemic harm is not enough. To operate within the law, we must create just ones, and we must dismantle functionally flawed systems. The Reformatory uses a supernatural device to make a very plain assertion: We cannot claim to support children while we uphold the systems that harm them. This is why Juvenile Law Center has turned its work from simply harm reduction to abolition. Because no one who accurately sees the system can deny that its entire structure is flawed. 

On an individual level, it is important to discern what we can do to ensure the safety of all children, and act with the utmost integrity regarding their health and futures. At the very least, we must be willing to look at ourselves, to examine the ways we interact with all young people of all backgrounds, and ask ourselves: If we were their Glorias, what would we do to protect them? If we loved them as completely as we loved our own children, how would we serve them? 

Because children, especially those traumatized and jaded by injustice and adversity at a young age, have a sort of sixth sense regarding adults who have built systems to make their injustice invisible. 

What ghosts are you trying to erase?

Join me Thursday, Sept. 10th, 2026 to discuss The Reformatory with Tananarive Due, the author, and other youth justice experts. Register here.