Robert Frost opened his poem, “Mending Wall”: 

Two neighbors meet in the spring to repair breaches made by “the frozen ground swell.” The poet sees no need for a wall. For his apple trees will never eat the neighbor’s pine cones. But  the stubborn neighbor mutters his mantra: “good fences make good neighbors.” But why? 

Some walls and fences may be good. Some walls and fences are distinctly bad.

A bad fence is now [October 1998] being erected along a narrow, tranquil semi-rural road west of Black Mountain, North Carolina. I first noticed this horror last week when driving home from Montreat College along Old U.S. Highway 70. There it was right beside the road: a Cold War transplant. Going up around the state’s Juvenile Evaluation Center (JEC) is a not yet completed, very high, inward curving, metal prison fence. “Juvenile Evaluation Center” is a euphemism for Reform School. But until a few days ago you needed a sign to tell you that those spacious JEC grounds did not house a posh boarding school. That ugly new barrier reminds of metal fences once dividing West Germany from Communist Czechoslovakia. Since the JEC structure is not complete, the pessimistic part of my imagination leaps to add at a later date barbed wire, guard dogs, watch towers with search lights and sirens.  By contrast, the optimistic, Ronald Reagan part of my imagination cries out a strangled Western NC version of, “Mr. Gorbachev: tear down that wall!”

For nearly four decades the Juvenile Evaluation Center functioned rather well. I know some JEC personnel. We have discussed the school’s curriculum and the lamentably low rates of success the State of North Carolina has had with the kids housed there. Sadly, the great majority will commit crimes as adults. I was told that, whenever an incarcerated teen escapes the JEC, you rarely have to conduct a man hunt. Just wait a day or two and then go straight to the escapee’s home to make your arrest. 

The JEC is across the road from a public middle school and abuts a public high school. Over the years I was delighted to spot a recurring kennel show, marked by RVs parked on the grounds. There were also soccer matches and very visible large-scale track and field events on the grounds.

The Black Mountain NEWS for Thursday October 29 shares my unease. A front page article by Barbara Hootman describes a variety of community uses of the JEC since it was built in 1961. Those dog shows, for instance, were the largest in the Southeast.

Ms Hootman says that people living near the  now a-building fence are distressed by the eye-sore. But more distant residents of Black Mountain feel secure. Ivan Randolph, principal of the adjoining Owen High School is quoted as saying: “I feel good about the fence and what it will do for Owen High School students.” 

The Swannanoa Valley JEC’s fence costs $650,000. JEC Director Phil Lytle is quoted: “Numerous individuals contacted the Governor’s office with concerns about the safety of Black Mountain. The Governor found the money in the budget, and the fence became a reality.” I wonder if Raleigh might not have got a better deal on tried and tested fences now discarded in once Communist Bulgaria, Romania or Hungary.

In a separate October 29 Editorial, the Black Mountain NEWS argues that a working 37 year old  balance between security issues and community access has been tossed away in non-consultative secrecy. Suddenly, “the fence sends a clear message to everyone associated with the JEC, "This is a prison, not a playground.” The editorial asks why only after the fence is going up are task forces being hastily thrown together to see if the expensive, ugly divider makes sense?  Prison officials will explain themselves after mid-November to a town meeting in Black Mountain. But “The time for the town meeting was before construction of the fence began.”

JEC Director Lytle is cited as saying, “it (the fence) will give us a lot more safe area inside to use with our residents.” Does that mean that for the first time, unhappy teens can walk right up to the fence and beg passers by to get them out? The Juvenile Evaluation Center’s appearance, in a very short time, is declining from a bucolic, not bad looking boarding school through youth prison into human zoo.

Is it too late to replace the government-owned JEC by a private, compassionate Boys Town? That marvelous institution was founded in Omaha in 1917 by a young Catholic priest from Ireland named Edward Flanagan. In 1938 Spencer Tracy won an academy award portraying Father Flanagan in an MGM movie. Mickey Rooney was the young punk who severely tested Father Flanagan’s credo ”there is no such thing as a bad boy.” Within months of its founding Boys Town was receiving boys sent by judges. But it also attracted kids who simply wandered in and asked for help. How many teens  clamor to get into the JEC?  Father Flanagan categorically refused to build fences or walls around Boys Town.  

Now that the hideous fence grows apace in Black Mountain, its owners plan to explain its virtues in a coming town meeting. Not an easy task. Good fences there may conceivably be. The one going up east of Swannanoa is a bad, mean-spirited fence. It will not make good neighbors. At that community meeting, perhaps the ghost of Robert Frost will arise and counsel once more:

Maybe the poet's motion will be seconded by the shade of a tall Irish priest from Omaha. It takes another Father Flanagan to imagine something more loving and effective than the State of North Carolina’s prison fence: the State's latest vision about how to educate the young.

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for Asheville TRIBUNE