William S. Bush

Using Texas as a case study for understanding change in the American juvenile justice system over the past century, the author tells the story of three cycles of scandal, reform, and retrenchment, each of which played out in ways that tended to extend the privileges of a protected childhood to white middle- and upper-class youth, while denying those protections to blacks, Latinos, and poor whites. On the forefront of both progressive and "get tough" reform campaigns, Texas has led national policy shifts in the treatment of delinquent youth to a surprising degree. Changes in the legal system have included the development of courts devoted exclusively to young offenders, the expanded legal application of psychological expertise, and the rise of the children's rights movement. At the same time, broader cultural ideas about adolescence have also changed. Yet the author demonstrates that as the notion of the teenager gained currency after World War II, white, middle-class teen criminals were increasingly depicted as suffering from curable emotional disorders even as the rate of incarceration rose sharply for black, Latino, and poor teens. He argues that despite the struggles of reformers, child advocates, parents, and youths themselves to make juvenile justice live up to its ideal of offering young people a second chance, the story of twentieth-century juvenile justice in large part boils down to the exclusion of poor and nonwhite youth from modern categories of childhood and adolescence.

Race and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-century Texas

Who Gets a Childhood?

David S. Tanenhaus

Six compelling histories of youth crime in the twentieth century Ages of Anxiety presents six case studies of juvenile justice policy in the twentieth century from around the world, adding context to the urgent and international conversation about youth, crime, and justice. By focusing on magistrates, social workers, probation and police officers, and youth themselves, editors William S. Bush and David S. Tanenhaus highlight the role of ordinary people as meaningful and consequential historical actors. After providing an international perspective on the social history of ideas about how children are different from adults, the contributors explain why those differences should matter for the administration of justice. They examine how reformers used the idea of modernization to build and legitimize juvenile justice systems in Europe and Mexico, and present histories of policing and punishing youth crime. Ages of Anxiety introduces a new theoretical model for interpreting historical research to demonstrate the usefulness of social histories of children and youth for policy analysis and decision-making in the twenty-first century. Shedding new light on the substantive aims of the juvenile court, the book is a historically informed perspective on the critical topic of youth, crime, and justice.

William S. Bush

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