The Early History of the Court Sanford

The history of the juvenile court precedes its formal beginnings in the Illinois Juvenile Court Act of 1899. This article traces key trends in the early history of the court, beginning with the founding of separate penal institutions for children in the 1820s and ending with the development of critical analyses of court practice in the 1930s. The Illinois statute distinguished between delinquent and dependent youths. However, early nineteenth-century intervention typically did not make such a distinction: children convicted of crimes and children who were abandoned, abused, or simply very poor were often housed in the same institutions. Both criminal behavior and poverty were viewed as threats to the social order. In the second half of the nineteenth century, efforts were made to treat dependent and delinquent children differently. Private sectarian agencies were founded to remove noncriminal youths from their homes or the almshouses and “place them out,” often either with families in other states or in indus-