Juvenile Delinquency. Although children and youth have always misbehaved, the concept of juvenile delinquency as a distinct social phenomenon arose in the United States only in the early nineteenth century, when it was associated with the breakdown of traditional familial controls in a period of emerging
industrialization,
urbanization, and
immigration. Delinquency included both criminal acts (such as theft) and noncriminal activities (such as “incorrigibility” and “stubbornness”). Reflecting a new faith in the power of the environment to curb delinquent tendencies, philanthropists in the 1820s founded the first “houses of refuge” in northern cities. By the late nineteenth century, most states had established juvenile reformatories, most of which quickly degenerated into repressive, overcrowded institutions.
After 1900, a new generation of Progressive reformers, lauded as “child savers,” sought innovative means to save children from a life of
crime. In Illinois, they established the first juvenile court in 1899. Other states followed suit. Juvenile‐court procedures, designed to be informal, lacked the legal rights accorded to adult defendants, including the right to a lawyer; social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists were to guide the judge. Juvenile courts never lived up to their founders' ideals however. Few had specialized treatment services, and most defined delinquency in highly gendered ways, routinely sentencing girls to reformatories for sexual behavior for which boys were rarely punished.
Scholars have offered many competing theories of juvenile delinquency.
Progressive Era sociologists stressed environmental causes such as
poverty. Biological determinists regarded juvenile delinquents as physically and mentally degenerate. From the 1920s to the 1950s, social and psychological explanations of delinquency predominated, as sociologists focused on family breakdown, social strains, deviant subcultures, and class and racial discrimination.
Treatment of juvenile delinquents changed radically after the 1967
Supreme Court decision
In re Gault, which gave juveniles unprecedented legal rights. Congress's landmark 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act encouraged states to define delinquency far more narrowly, removing truants and runaways from court jurisdiction. As a result, juvenile courts became more formal and legalistic institutions. In the 1980s and 1990s, fueled by perceptions of spreading gang warfare and drug‐related inner‐city violence, states became much more punitive, “criminalizing” or “adultifying” their juvenile‐justice systems, imposing longer sentences, transferring juveniles to adult court, and holding them in adult prisons and jails. Widespread anxiety over juvenile delinquency characterized nearly every twentieth‐century decade. During
World War II, with many fathers at war and many mothers working, fears of escalating delinquency mounted. The 1950s witnessed a juvenile‐delinquency “panic” (captured by Hollywood in such films as
The Wild One [1954],
Rebel without a Cause [1955], and
Blackboard Jungle [1955]), while the protests, riots, and counterculture of the 1960s sparked new concerns. Whether delinquency changed significantly over the twentieth century remains unclear. Crime statistics, affected by changes in
police practice and reporting, must be treated with caution; increasing arrests do not necessarily indicate an increase in delinquency rates. In the 1990s, police were more likely to arrest juveniles than they had been in earlier decades. Nevertheless, only 6 percent of juvenile arrests in the 1990s involved serious, violent offenses. While public attitudes toward juvenile delinquents became more punitive after the 1960s, most “juvenile delinquency” continued to consist of petty larceny, disorderly conduct, underage drinking, truancy, and running away from home.
See also
Family;
Fifties, The;
Gender;
Life Stages;
Prisons and Penitentiaries;
Sixties, The;
Social Class.
Bibliography
John R. Sutton , Stubborn Children: Controlling Delinquency in the United States, 1640–1981, 1988.
Thomas J. Bernard , The Cycle of Juvenile Justice, 1992.
L. Mara Dodge
