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Book Review
| David S. Tanenhaus, Juvenile Justice in the Making, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. $35 cloth (ISBN 0-18-516045-2); $18.95 paper (ISBN 0-19-530650-3).
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| Juvenile Justice concisely explores the development of the juvenile court system in Chicago from the 1890s through the 1930s. In the process, it analyzes shifting social constructions of the definition and causes of juvenile delinquency. The book joins a well researched and analyzed field and contributes new information about how such courts functioned in the quotidian. |
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Like many Progressive reforms, the creation of the juvenile courts in Chicago was largely the result of advocacy by middle-class and elite women's organizations. Through the 1890s, the Chicago Women's Club campaigned for the creation of a juvenile court that would remove children from harsh criminal laws and adult prisons. In one of those wonderful Progressive moments of coalition, eventually the Club was joined in its advocacy by the Chicago Bar Association and a variety of charities. A large hurdle to creating a juvenile court was how to draft legislation applicable to Chicago and not the rest of Illinois. Legislation, eventually passed in 1899, permitted but did not require the creation of courts for children. The new juvenile court shared jurisdiction for juveniles' crimes with the adult courts. The state's attorney could prosecute children as adults and juvenile judges could transfer cases to the criminal courts. Such ineloquent jurisdiction would haunt the juvenile justice system in the coming decades. |
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The juvenile court heard cases involving parental neglect, dependent children, and delinquent children. The court was also given the power to appoint probation officers, which was a key element of juvenile court, permitting a judge to assign a child to probation in lieu of jail. Probation also allowed for individualized treatment plans and rehabilitation rather than punishment. Yet probation subjected poor families to significant state intervention. |
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Despite lofty goals and good intentions, the court from its inception was severely under funded, quickly swamped by cases, and immediately attacked as a mechanism to impose middle-class Protestant values on immigrant children. Again in a quintessentially Progressive moment, the new court came to rely upon a public/ private partnership in which private organizations, often led by women, raised necessary funds for and provided supplies to the court. Unfortunately the work does not explore adequately how such private organizations may have exerted influence and even power over the court. |
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In 1911, Illinois began providing for "mothers' pensions" and the juvenile court served as the venue for administering the program. Tanenhaus insightfully writes that once juvenile courts were created, reformers began to think of them as general child welfare centers that could be continually expanded to meet new needs. Furthermore reformers believed that dependency and delinquency were closely connected. Reflecting gendered assumptions, the court informally created a two track system. Single "worthy" mothers would receive mothers' pensions but the children of single fathers would be institutionalized. All of these children were deemed dependent upon the state and they and their families now came under the supervision and scrutiny of the juvenile court. |
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Chicago's juvenile court continually found itself the subject of controversies that reflected larger social and political issues. Such conflicts included allegations of patronage, the qualification of employees, the role of probation officers, the court's jurisdiction, its constitutionality, and the broad question of state intervention into the home. |
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The last two chapters of Juvenile Justice focus upon the medicalization of juvenile delinquency, the founding of the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute, the Juvenile Research Center, and a variety of community outreach programs primarily directed at boys. These chapters are not particularly well integrated into the larger work. Tanenhaus seems to want to make the point that experts began to construct delinquency as a psychological condition more appropriate for medical experts and sociologists to handle than lawyers and judges. In addition, a new emphasis on preventing juvenile delinquency saw community based programs to be essential further detaching juvenile justice from the court system. In a certain sense this represented the fulfillment of reformers' desires yet also pushed against the reality of limited resources and the public's lack of sympathy for adolescents who committed violent crimes. It also further emphasized the conflict between the rule of law versus individualized justice. |
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At times one wishes that Juvenile Justice engaged in deeper analysis and was less descriptive. For example, Tanenhaus recognizes the involvement of middle class and elite women on the Chicago Juvenile courts but does not fully explore what this meant for its development beyond what existing scholarship already tells us. The work does not delve into the tremendous influence that Hull House had on the juvenile court or its many community projects related to the courts and to children. Rather Hull House and various women reformers play supporting roles for male professionals. A narrative could be shaped that more fully uncovers the tension between forces that wanted to feminize the courts and those that wanted a more masculine space. Even with such shortcomings, this important work joins a growing chorus of scholarship on Progressive era institutions that seeks to find a middle ground between celebrating these institutions as bastions of crucial reform and recognizing the role that they played as agents of social control. |
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| Felice Batlan
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| Chicago-Kent School of Law |
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