The Western House of Refuge was a prison for children in Rochester, New York founded in the mid-1800's that was the first state managed reformatory in the United States. In the 1880's, the prison was changed into a vocational school known as the State Industrial School. In the early 1900's, the school would move to Industry, New York, where it now operates as the Industry Residential Center run by the state Office of Children and Family Services. Founding In the 1840's, legislators in New York State sought to better address the issue of juvenile detention. At the time, children were "thrown in" with adults in the state's many jails and prisons. While the state had created the House of Refuge to address this problem in 1824, the Manhattan-based institution "did not serve" Western New York. In 1846, the legislature passed a bill creating a Western House of Refuge run by a superintendent overseen by a fifteen-member board. Upstate courts were required to send convicted child felons to the new institution; they were also given the discretion to incarcerate children who had committed minor offenses or were simply homeless. At the House, children were supposed to work eight-hour days on behalf of farms and local industries, while spending their non-working hours learning vocational and literacy skills. In 1849, the House formally opened on a 42-acre plot of land just north of the growing city of Rochester. The prison population quickly grew from 50 to over 400. In 1880, the local press called the House, which was managed by social and political elites in Rochester, "one of the best managed institutions of its kind in the country." Scandal In 1882, the institution's management asked the state to pass a bill that would drastically expand the House's size. In a move that made front page headlines across New York, the head of the state Board of Charities opposed the legislation, calling the House "essentially a prison" that "doomed" boys and girls to a life of child labor. The Buffalo Evening News would later report that it was an open secret that the House's managers had "wholly abandoned education so that contractors may obtain labor from helpless children." When the expansion bill failed, the House to hire a team of investigators, who - while finding "serious defects" in the institution - blamed these defects on poor performing employees, who were subsequently terminated. Unconvinced by