When the Welfare People Come by Lash Don;

Author:Lash, Don;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, ebook
ISBN: 4800186
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2017-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

Six

Juvenile “Justice”

“A Kind and Just Parent”

Foster care and programs for “delinquent youth” are considered separate functions of government, often carried out by different agencies or different arms of the same agency. There are a number of similarities, however. Both emerged in their modern form during the same basic period of progressive reform. Both have roots in the bourgeois desire to repair an underclass that is potentially disruptive. Both have gone through a process of increasing racialization during the same time frame.

Programs for youthful offenders began to emerge in the United States with industrialization. Initially, children and youth were locked up for a variety of reasons, and there wasn’t necessarily an effort to differentiate criminal conduct from homelessness, vagrancy, begging, or having been abused or abandoned. New York opened its “House of Refuge” in 1825, and it eventually housed more than a thousand children at a time. Similar facilities were built in other cities.

As the nineteenth century wore on, detention for children who became public charges simply because no one could support them fell out of favor. For criminal conduct, courts and legislatures increasingly recognized an “infancy defense,” holding that very young children could not form the “guilty intent” to be held responsible for their conduct. While detention occurred, sometimes children initially detained were turned over to charities supported by the wealthy and middle classes for rehabilitation through adoption into a more wholesome environment. In some places, young offenders were sent to rural youth camps. Just as with the Orphan Trains, the assumption seemed to be that a break with the corrupt influence of the urban environment teeming with immigrants would make young people healthy, vigorous, and morally upright.

Despite the infancy defense and early reform initiatives, imprisonment of young offenders with adults continued, especially in large cities. In Chicago, for example, children younger than fourteen were housed in adult jails, and one middle-class reformer expressed her horror at seeing “quite small boys confined in the same cells with murderers, anarchists, and hardened criminals.”1 The comment reveals that mingled with the no doubt sincere concern for the safety and well-being of the boys was a fear of “contamination” by dangerous political doctrines.

Illinois established the first juvenile court in the nation in 1899, handling abuse, neglect, and delinquency. The creation of a children’s court came at the same time as the emerging field of psychology began to express the developmental theory of adolescence as a period of rebellion. The progressive vision for the court was to serve as a “kind and just parent” to help young offenders find their way to adulthood. In a variation, two early sociologists said the state should be “a sorrowing parent . . . no longer a power demanding vindication or reparation.”2

Despite the rhetoric, juvenile court never lived up to the ambitions of the middle-class Progressive reformers. They were underfunded, and tended to be staffed by patronage appointments. Because their mission was ostensibly about rehabilitation and nurturing rather than punishment, the niceties of due process—right to counsel, proof of guilt—were largely dispensed with.

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