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Review Essay
The Rediscovery of Juvenile Delinquency
by Bill Bush, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
| BRUMBERG, JOAN JACOBS. Kansas Charley: The Story of a Nineteenth-Century Boy Murderer. New York: Viking, 2003. xii + 273 pp. Prologue, illustrations, notes, index. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-670-03228-X; $15.00 (paper), ISBN 01420-0488-X.
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| TROST, JENNIFER. Gateway to Justice: The Juvenile Court and Progressive Child Welfare in a Southern City. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. xi + 209 pp. Introduction, tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8203-2664-X; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8203-2671-2.
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| WOLCOTT, DAVID B. Cops and Kids: Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America, 1890–1940. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. x + 264 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $44.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8142-1002-3.
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Juvenile justice has occupied a relatively settled place in Progressive Era historiography for decades. Thanks to the seminal work of scholars such as Robert Mennel, Steve Schlossman, David Rothman, and others, we have long known that American social reformers began addressing the problem of juvenile delinquency as early as the Jacksonian period.1 Innovations such as the house of refuge, the juvenile reformatory, and foster care helped establish a sustained public commitment to the separate treatment of what were then called "wayward youth." However, the rapid pace of urbanization and immigration in Gilded Age America soon overwhelmed the capacity of existing institutions. By the 1890s, so the story goes, a generation of child savers successfully pushed for the creation of a separate juvenile justice system, whose key features included the juvenile court, probation, and juvenile detention. The new system was supposed to stress rehabilitation over punishment by pursuing the root causes of bad behavior rather than uncovering evidence of a specific crime. Juvenile court supporters believed that individual attention from trained judges, probation officers, and social workers could redirect most at-risk youth onto a better path. |
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Reality, however, tended to contradict these characteristically Progressive expressions of optimism and faith in scientific experts. The juvenile court often discriminated against working-class immigrants and racial minorities and punished girls disproportionately for violations of established gender norms. Juvenile correctional facilities, many of them staffed with well-meaning professionals, inflicted horrific abuses upon delinquents under the cover of rehabilitating them. Thanks to our earliest historians of juvenile justice, we know about these episodes and perhaps are unsurprised to find that they persist. |
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There is however, much we do not know about American juvenile justice that a new wave of scholarship has begun to address. A flurry of scholarly books has appeared in the academic marketplace in recent years, spurred by the centennial anniversary of the Chicago juvenile court, concerns about the overrepresentation of black and Latino youth in the current juvenile offender population, and renewed controversies over policies such as the juvenile death penalty, determinate sentencing, and transfer to adult court.2 As contemporary experts debate the wisdom of some of the founding principles of juvenile justice, scholars have embarked upon a much-needed re-examination of the institution's history. The books under consideration here represent a sample of this emerging literature. They demonstrate the expansion of the field into new methodological, geographic, and chronological directions. Particularly noteworthy is the extensive use of hard-to-obtain primary sources, such as institutional case files, which help historians get at the lived experiences of children and adolescents in trouble. While this usage is hardly new, it has become prevalent as more scholars have successfully negotiated around policies protecting the privacy of minors. Case files have become the gold standard for any historical research involving children in an institutional setting. The expanded use of such materials allows these authors to complicate the existing paradigm of juvenile justice history in ways that blur the usual distinctions between the Gilded Age and Progressive Era by demonstrating that ideas about children and adolescents usually ascribed to the juvenile court movement were being articulated years before its inception. |
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