A Century of Juvenile Justice: A Work in Progress or a Revolution that Failed?

A century ago, Progressive reformers adopted a more modem construction of childhood as a developmental period of innocence, dependence, and vulnerability. They embraced a more scientific understanding of social control positive criminology and tried to identify the causes of crime and to treat, rather than to punish, offenders. Reformers combined the new vision of childhood with new insights into criminality to create a judicial-welfare alternative to the adult criminal process. Jurisdiction over dependent as well as delinquent children reflected juvenile courts' broader role as a child-saving welfare agency and not simply a "junior" criminal court.' Juvenile courts simultaneously asserted families' responsibility to raise their children and expanded states' prerogative to act as parens patriae or "superparent." Because some poor and immigrant parents failed to meet their responsibilities, juvenile courts intervened to socialize and control their 2 children. At its inception, they attempted to assimilate and "Americanize" the children of southern and eastern European immigrants pouring into industrial cities of the East and Midwest.3 A century later, one of juvenile courts' primary missions is to control young black males in America's post-industrial cities. For most of its existence, juvenile courts' rehabilitative goals and discriminatory means remained unquestioned and unchallenged. Systematic