| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.4

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.4 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Cops and Kids: Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America, 1890–1940. By David B. Wolcott (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press2005. x plus 264 pp. $44.95 cloth, $9.95 CD).

David B. Wolcott has enlarged the substantial but mostly separate literatures on juvenile courts and policing by considering their intersection in three cities from the decade before the founding of the first juvenile courts until 1940. Reformers promoting these specialized courts wanted to minimize the police role in handling delinquents; cops, they believed, relied on fear, made arbitrary arrests, and—like existing courts—were uninterested in rehabilitating delinquents. In fact, Wolcott argues, police did better than reformers claimed. Pragmatically aiming to minimize crime and maintain order, cops exercised considerable discretion over criminal, disorderly and truant kids. Instead of uniformly marching them to court, police imposed a range of informal sanctions, including warning, intimidation, return of stolen property, detention, even referrals. In detailed analyses of Detroit arrests and arrestees, Wolcott shows that police arrested kids at much lower rates than adults, and in patterns sensitive to age and gender. Nor were delinquents simply thrown into jails together with older, presumably hardened, criminals; instead, most were segregated and sent to court quickly. Thus, Wolcott argues, police were ultimately protective of delinquents. Unfortunately, while much of the evidence for this relatively favorable portrait comes from the police themselves, delinquents' voices are largely absent. We learn relatively little about the extent or character of informal sanctions, and nothing of conflicting points of view about the meanings of "delinquent" behavior.¹ Nonetheless Wolcott pokes a large hole in the reformist criticism of the cops, and brings us much closer to a balanced portrait of police behavior. One implication is that the project of the juvenile court was based on a misconception of the existing state of policing.

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