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 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.

[5] 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.

The legislators found that the institution was a "half prison" paired with a "money-making" operation that preyed on a population of children whose sole "crimes" were often nothing but homelessness or insolence.

Five hundred boys as young as eight, who were allegedly being taught skills to "reform" them, were forced to spend most of their days as contract laborers, making shoes and garments for local businesses.

After attending perfunctory night "classes," the children were caged in "exceedingly repulsive" cells that lacked toilets, were bathed once a week in two tubs shared by all other boys, and were subject to "excessive," "frequent," and "cruel" punishments that included beatings, forced starvation, solitary confinement, and transfers to adult prisons.

While state rules ban the prison from selling the fruits of its children's labor, "friendly transactions" allow local chefs to obtain food grown by inmates in exchange for a "donation."