Juvenile Justice in the Making

By David S. Tanenhaus, Foreward by Bernardine Dohrn
New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Juvenile Justice in the Making tackles one of the enduring questions for the criminal justice system today: how should we deal with youth that break the law? The United States was the site for the birth of the juvenile court which tries and incarcerates youth separately from adults. Tannenhaus (2004: xv) analyzes almost 3,000 previously unseen case files to present a “detailed historical-institutional analysis of the trial-and-error development of America’s first juvenile court” in Chicago, Illinois beginning in 1899. Despite this book chronicling U.S. history, Canadians interested in juvenile justice issues should take notice.

This historical account of the development of the U.S. juvenile justice system takes the reader on a journey from the child saving movements that played such a pivotal role in the early stages of the court to the constitutional and legal challenges that ensued in its first 30 years and then through the challenges of the twentieth century both philosophically (i.e., community based movements by Shaw and McKay and the medicalization of deviance) and logistically (i.e., jurisdictional changes). However, this is not a mere historical account that chronicles what has gone by with few implications on the current situation facing the police, probation, juvenile courts, and corrections. Rather, from the very beginning it becomes apparent that “a thorough understanding of the history and institutions of American juvenile justice can be of substantial and specific help in confronting the policy choices of the twenty-first century (2004: xxvi-xxvii).

Chapter 1 describes the process and the individuals that helped to bring forward the creation of the juvenile court system in 1899. The assumptions that have guided juvenile justice, such as parens patrie, are introduced as well as the guiding principle of individualized treatment to rehabilitate instead of punish juveniles. What becomes clear is that the jurisdictional borders were not set in stone. Similarly, the cumulative nature of case law had yet to be established and judicial decisions were in flux based on political decisions much as they are to some extent today (see pp. xxix, 19-22). Chapter 2 shows the development of the court in its formative years. In many ways, the features we currently associate with juvenile justice only came into existence in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The original court was a work in progress and although there was agreement on the court’s fundamental purpose of diverting youth out of the adult criminal justice system there existed considerable disagreement on “the degree to which the juvenile court should intervene in the lives of children and their families” (2004: 40).

Chapters 3 and 4 examine the degree to which the juvenile court intruded into the family and the constitutional and legal challenges during 1910-1920 that further clarified the scope and jurisdiction of the juvenile justice system. In many cases, “how the court defined the ‘delinquent child’ helped to determine which children appeared before it” (2004: 51). Tannenhaus (2004) summarizes this historical period as dealing with four issues: “perpetuation of child slavery, denial of due process protection, unwarranted interference with the parent-child relationship, and invasion of privacy” (97). Chapter 5 examines the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute which opened in 1909 to investigate the causes of juvenile delinquency. Lastly, Chapter 6 describes the medicalization of deviance and the academic and activist work of Clifford Shaw in developing community responses to deviance instead of focusing on a juvenile’s personality as the root cause for their behaviour.

Forty years ago, C. Wright Mills pointed out the importance of the intersection of history and biography in understanding society. Tanenhaus (2004) has combined institutional information with details from individual case files to illustrate that the crimes committed over 100 years ago are similar in nature and severity to those that are committed today (see also the discussion regarding the similarity in causes of delinquency on p. 125). This holds true not only for the United States but also in many respects for Canada. For example, there has been a re-emergence of status offences with the Provincial Protection Acts and various school board acts that involve the reporting of delinquent behaviour to the police for recordkeeping purposes if it involves a youth under the age of 12. Similarly, the rate of transfer to adult court has increased which is reminiscent of the judicial system prior to the creation of separate juvenile courts and detention facilities. However, after reading this account, the current state of affairs in the United States is much graver. The U.S. is one of only six countries that are in contravention of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Thus, what I found to be one of the most important points Tanenhaus makes is that the current juvenile justice system has become “draconian” as “the United States, once the leader in the international crusade to secure justice for children, is now in this respect effectively a rogue nation” (2004: xxiv, inside back cover).