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New York Training School for Girls in Hudson was a reformatory school, where those teenager girls, between the age of 12 and 16, who were convicted any form of juvenile delinquency in New York state were sent. The institution operated between 1904 and 1975. Since 1976 it has been a minimum security prison for young male adults, recently called as Hudson Correctional Facility. It is famous for the sociometric research done by Jacob Moreno in the 1930's.

History
The reformatory was established in 1904 as the only institution in New York state which could give training for delinquent girls under the age of 16. The institute took the place and the buildings of the former House of Refuge for Women. It was located on the east side of the Hudson river, with a "famous view" of the Catskill mountains. In the beginning there were seven three story, well established cottages for 26 girls on average, several sport fields, office buildings and a chapel. The institution was lead by a superintendent and each cottages had a teacher and few officers. The teacher, or "house mother" played the part of the parents, and officials like kitchen officials were responsible to lead the activity of the girls.

Early years
The official aim of the institution was to develop healthy bodily and mental activities in order to make their inmates more likely to "do well after leaving the institution". The "reformation" was based on three pillars.
 * 1) Physical culture: personalised callisthenics and gymnastics training
 * 2) Education: four grades of elementary school, introduction to houseworks, like cooking, ironing, laundry, dressmaking and gardening.
 * 3) Moral and religious introduction: "The moral instruction is enforced by practice and example rather than by percept" . Corporal punishment was strictly prohibited.

The '30s - Moreno and the sociometry
In 1932 there was a pandemic of runaways at the institution: within two weeks 14 girls ran away, which was 30 times more than the average number. At that time the reformatory consisted of 16 cottages. The supreme superintended, Fannie French Morse heard of Jacob Moreno idea to mapping up societies with natural scientific methodes and she also heard his successes in the Sing Sing prison. After the first meeting she hired Moreno to be the Research Director of the institute. Moreno and his assistant Helen H. Jennings examined 500 girls, their intelligence, social activities and most important, their feelings towards each other. Using the method of sociometric he visualised this connections in several [Sociogram|sociogram]. The earned experiences and the graphs were published in his seminal book Who shall survive?. As a conclusion he distilled that behind social phenomena there is an an unexplainable driving force which is due to the structure of the relationship between individuals. It was true for the girls from Hudson: the runaway reactions were not concious rather they behaved how their location in the social network forced them to.

Famous persons connected to the institute

 * Ella Fitzgerald, world famous jazz singer spent almost a year in the reformatory. According to the log book she arrived at April,1933 and she run away at the end of 1933 or the beginning of 1934.
 * Marion Palfi, photographer, visited the New York Training School for Girls in 1946, and she took pictures on white girls for here book (Suffer Little Children).
 * Jacob Moreno, psychologist