During the Progressive Era, a rehabilitative agenda took hold of American juvenile justice, materializing as a citizen-and-state-building project and mirroring the unequal racial politics of American democracy itself. Alongside this liberal "manufactory of citizens,” a parallel structure was enacted: a Jim Crow juvenile justice system that endured across the nation for most of the twentieth century.

 

In The Black Child Savers, the first study of the rise and fall of Jim Crow juvenile justice, Geoff Ward examines the origins and organization of this separate and unequal juvenile justice system. Ward explores how generations of “black child-savers” mobilized to challenge the threat to black youth and community interests and how this struggle grew aligned with a wider civil rights movement, eventually forcing the formal integration of American juvenile justice. Ward’s book reveals nearly a century of struggle to build a more democratic model of juvenile justice—an effort that succeeded in part, but ultimately failed to deliver black youth and community to liberal rehabilitative ideals.

 

Since its inception in Illinois in 1899, the juvenile court has become a remarkable legal and social institution all over the developed world, one that plays a singular role in modern government. At its founding, the juvenile court was intended to reverse longstanding legal traditions, and place the child's interests first in areas of law ranging from dependency to delinquency. Yet in recent years legal responses to youths' offences have undergone striking changes, as more juveniles are being transferred to adult courts and serving adult sentences.

A Century of Juvenile Justice is the first standard, comprehensive and comparative reference work to span the history and current state of juvenile justice. An extraordinary assemblage of leading authorities have produced a accessible, illustrated document, designed as a reference for everyone from probation personnel and police to students, educators, lawyers, and social workers.

Editors' introductions place into context each of the book's five sections, which consider the history of the ideas around which the system was organized and the institutions and practices that resulted; the ways in which this set of institutions and practices interacts with other aspects of government policy toward children in the U.S. and in other nations; and also the ways in which changing social and legal meanings of childhood and youth have continued to influence juvenile justice. The doctrine and institutions of juvenile justice in Europe, Japan, England, and Scotland are profiled in depth to show the range of modern responses to youth crime and child endangerment. This comparative material provides a fresh basis for judging the direction of policy in the U.S.

Margaret K. Rosenheim is the Helen Ross professor Emerita in the School of Social Service Administration of the University of Chicago. Franklin Zimring is Professor of Law and Director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. David S. Tanenhaus is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Bernardine Dohrn is Director of the Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University Law School.

Contributors:
Anthony Bottoms
Jaap Doek
Bernardine Dohrn
Peter Edelman
John Eekelaar
David Farrington
Frank Furstenberg
Michael Grossberg
John Laub
Paul Lerman
Rolf Loeber
Akira Morita
Margaret K. Rosenheim
Elizabeth Scott
David S. Tanenhaus
Lee Teitelbaum
Mark Testa
Franklin E. Zimring

Since the 1960s, recurring cycles of political activism over youth crime have motivated efforts to remove adolescents from the juvenile court. Periodic surges of crime—youth violence in the 1970s, the spread of gangs in the 1980s, and more recently, epidemic gun violence and drug-related crime—have spurred laws and policies aimed at narrowing the reach of the juvenile court. Despite declining juvenile crime rates, every state in the country has increased the number of youths tried and punished as adults.

Research in this area has not kept pace with these legislative developments. There has never been a detailed, sociolegal analytic book devoted to this topic. In this important collection, researchers discuss policy, substantive procedural and empirical dimensions of waivers, and where the boundaries of the courts lie. Part 1 provides an overview of the origins and development of law and contemporary policy on the jurisdiction of adolescents. Part 2 examines the effects of jurisdictional shifts. Part 3 offers valuable insight into the developmental and psychological aspects of current and future reforms.

Contributors: Donna Bishop, Richard Bonnie, M. A. Bortner, Elizabeth Cauffman, Linda Frost Clausel, Robert O. Dawson, Jeffrey Fagan, Barry Feld, Charles Frazier, Thomas Grisso, Darnell Hawkins, James C. Howell, Akiva Liberman, Richard Redding, Simon Singer, Laurence Steinberg, David Tanenhaus, Marjorie Zatz, and Franklin E. Zimring

Anthony Platt's study, a chronicle of the child-saving movement and the juvenile court, explodes myth after myth about the benign character of both. The movement is described not as an effort to liberate and dignify youth but as a punitive, romantic, and intrusive effort to control the lives of lower-class urban adolescents and to maintain their dependent status. In so doing Platt analyzes early views of criminal behavior, the origins of the reformatory system, the social values of middle-class reformers, and the handling of youthful offenders before and after the creation of separate juvenile jurisdictions.

In this second, enlarged edition of The Child Savers, the author has added a new introduction and postscript in which he critically reflects upon his original analysis, suggests new ways of thinking about the child-saving movement, and summarizes recent developments in the juvenile justice system.

Volume 31 of Crime and Justice presents a global view on youth justice systems, examining Canada, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and an aggregation of Western countries. The systems are addressed in five sections, which discuss the relevance of a separate youth justice system, age limitations, historical stability and changes, welfare concerns, and a comparative look at current laws as written and administered.

Contributors:
Hans-Jörg Albrecht
Anthony Bottoms
James Dignan
Anthony N. Doob
Carl-Gunnar Janson
Josine Junger-Tas
Britta Kyvsgaard
Allison Morris
Julian V. Roberts
Jane B. Sprott
Lode Walgrave

At a time when America's court system increasingly tries juvenile offenders as adults, Michael Corriero draws directly from his experience as the founding judge of a special juvenile court to propose a new approach to dealing with youthful offenders. Since 1992, Judge Corriero has presided over the Manhattan Youth Part, a New York City court specifically designed to discipline teenage offenders. Its guiding principles, clearly laid out in this book, are that children are developmentally different from adults and that a judge can be a formidable force in shaping the lives of children who appear in court. Judging Children as Children makes a compelling argument for a better system of justice that recognizes the mental, emotional, and physical abilities of young people and provides them with an opportunity to be rehabilitated as productive members of society instead of being locked up in prisons.

What should be done with minors who kill, maim, defile, and destroy the lives of others? The state of Texas deals with some of its most serious and violent youthful offenders through “determinate sentencing,” a unique sentencing structure that blends parts of the juvenile and adult justice systems. Once adjudicated via determinate sentencing, offenders are first incarcerated in the Texas Youth Commission (TYC). As they approach age eighteen, they are either transferred to the Texas prison system to serve the remainder of their original determinate sentence or released from TYC into Texas’s communities.

The first long-term study of determinate sentencing in Texas, Lost Causes examines the social and delinquent histories, institutionalization experiences, and release and recidivism outcomes of more than 3,000 serious and violent juvenile offenders who received such sentences between 1987 and 2011. The authors seek to understand the process, outcomes, and consequences of determinate sentencing, which gave serious and violent juvenile offenders one more chance to redeem themselves or to solidify their place as the next generation of adult prisoners in Texas. The book’s findings—that about 70 percent of offenders are released to the community during their most crime-prone years instead of being transferred to the Texas prison system and that about half of those released continue to reoffend for serious crimes—make Lost Causes crucial reading for all students and practitioners of juvenile and criminal justice.

In Our Children, Their Children, a prominent team of researchers argues that a second-rate and increasingly punitive juvenile justice system is allowed to persist because most people believe it is designed for children in other ethnic and socioeconomic groups. While public opinion, laws, and social policies that convey distinctions between "our children" and "their children" may seem to conflict with the American ideal of blind justice, they are hardly at odds with patterns of group differentiation and inequality that have characterized much of American history.

Our Children, Their Children provides a state-of-the-science examination of racial and ethnic disparities in the American juvenile justice system. Here, contributors document the precise magnitude of these disparities, seek to determine their causes, and propose potential solutions. In addition to race and ethnicity, contributors also look at the effects on juvenile justice of suburban sprawl, the impact of family and neighborhood, bias in postarrest decisions, and mental health issues. Assessing the implications of these differences for public policy initiatives and legal reforms, this volume is the first critical summary of what is known and unknown in this important area of social research.

The juvenile justice system navigates a high degree of variation in youthful offenders. While professionals with insights about reform and adolescent development consider the risks, the needs, and the patterns of delinquency of youth, too little attention is paid to the responses and practicalities of a system that is both complex and limited in its resources. 

In his essential book, Taking Juvenile Justice Seriously, Christopher Sullivan systematically analyzes key facets of justice-involved youth populations and parses cases to better understand core developmental influences that affect delinquency. He takes a comprehensive look at aspects of the life-course affected by juvenile justice as well as at the juvenile justice system’s operations and its multifaceted mission of delivering both treatment and sanctions to a varied population of youths.

Taking Juvenile Justice Seriously first provides an overview of the youth who encounter the system, then describes its present operations and obstacles, synthesizes relevant developmental insights, and reviews current practices. Drawing on research, theory, and evidence regarding innovative policies, Sullivan offers a series of well-grounded recommendations that suggest how to potentially—and realistically—implement a more effective juvenile justice system that would benefit all.

A classic of investigative journalism that lifts the curtain on the failures of the American juvenile justice system.

Kenneth Wooden’s Weeping in the Playtime of Others—first published in 1976 and an enduring work of investigative journalism and criminology that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize—exposes the harsh realities faced by children in the American juvenile justice system. Wooden’s extensive research and firsthand accounts highlight the systemic abuse, neglect, and violence that incarcerated youth endure. Investigative reporter Wooden journeyed across thirty states to document brutal conditions in juvenile detention centers and training schools. His work revealed in stark detail how these institutions regularly failed to provide the rehabilitation they promised, perpetuating cycles of violence and criminality, and presented a devastating picture of the detrimental effects on of solitary confinement, physical punishment, and inadequate educational and psychological support.

Wooden’s many case studies include that of a young Charles Manson, illustrating how early institutionalization can presage lifelong criminal behavior. Wooden also critiques the political and economic forces that sustain these abusive systems, calling for comprehensive reforms.

In Youth on Trial, a wide range of leaders in developmental psychology and law combine their expertise to investigate the limitations of our youth policy—including the problematic trend of trying alleged juvenile criminals as adults.