Juvenile Court Turns 100, But is the Party Over?

This is the city where a 10- and 11-year-old boy dropped five-year-old Eric Moses from a 14th floor window because he wouldn’t steal candy for them.

It is the city where 11-year-old Robert Sandifer shot 14-year-old Shavon Dean to death as a gang initiation — and was himself slain by fellow gang members to stop him from squealing to cops.

It is the city where a Juvenile Court judge returned three-year-old Joseph Wallace to the care of his schizophrenic mother, who then hanged him to death.

Perhaps it is fitting that Chicago — where juvenile crime and courts make worldwide headlines — is not only hosting the centennial of the nation’s first Juvenile Court, but is at the center of a debate over whether Juvenile Court should be overhauled or even eliminated.

The sometimes sensational nature of a few juvenile crimes — like the Chicago murders related above, or the series of school shootings around the country over the past 18 months — has driven public officials to nearly reverse the 100-year-old principles behind Juvenile Court. Thanks partly to a decade of heavy media attention to juvenile crime and the ensuing public fear, increasing numbers of children are now being sent to the adult prison system — where, studies show, they are more likely to be abused by adults. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly 5,000 juveniles served sentences in adult prisons in 1997.

“It’s tragic. It shows just how far we have fallen in the way we view children,’’ said Steven Drizin, a supervising attorney at Northwestern University’s Children and Family Justice Center.

“At the turn of the century, the Juvenile Court here in Chicago was developed in large part because of the horrible experiences children were being subjected to in adult jails,’’ Drizin said. “And as we approach another turn of the century, we are moving in the direction of placing more and more children — and younger children — in adult prisons.’’

Others are optimistic about the future of juvenile justice, saying a re-examination of Juvenile Court is healthy. “You need to refine any system, adult or juvenile, to make sure it’s responsive to any change in circumstances or change in our society — to make sure it has the flexibility it needs to be effective, then make sure you invest it,” said Shay Bilchik, administrator of the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. “In a way, this scrutiny the Juvenile Court has been under is long overdue.”

Birth of a Notion

The need for Juvenile Court — where abused children are protected and misbehaving children are corrected — arose from cases like that of 12-year-old James Guild, a black child from Hopewell, N.J., who was convicted of murdering a white grandmother in 1828. The verdict carried an automatic sentence of death.

In a recent report, “A Celebration or a Wake? The Juvenile Court After 100 Years,” University of Richmond law professor Robert Shepherd tells how the boy awaited his fate in an adult jail by playing with mice in his cell. He conducted a mock trial with rodents as jurors and defendant, then executed the “bad’’ mouse. The boy was hanged while a crowd gawked.

Shepherd, who wrote his report for the Washington-based Coalition for Juvenile Justice, which advises the president and Congress, says that during the 19th century at least 10 juveniles who were under 14 at the time of their offenses were executed in the United States. Two of them were just 10 years old.

Although many states had Juvenile Reform Houses beginning in the 1820s, the Juvenile Court movement began in the 1880s with social reformers like Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop of Chicago’s Hull House, a settlement house and sanctuary for abused women and children.
Outraged at the abuses inflicted on children locked up in adult prisons, the reformers called for a separate system of justice for abused, neglected or delinquent children.

Police and prosecutors joined the call, frustrated by increasing numbers of “jury nullifications’’ in which juveniles obviously guilty of serious crimes were acquitted by juries who did not want to see them going to adult prison, Shepherd said.

The first true Juvenile Court was born in 1899 here in Cook County. The movement held such promise that it spread quickly; by 1915, 46 states, three territories and the District of Columbia had established Juvenile Courts.
In Colorado, a parallel movement led by Denver Judge Ben B. Lindsey used the jurisdiction under Colorado’s compulsory school attendance law to protect and reform children. When Lindsey lost re-election in 1927 to a candidate backed by the Ku Klux Klan, he took the matter of confidentiality for children seriously by burning all his court’s juvenile records. His motive: protect the families from KKK reprisals or harassment.

Juvenile Courts adopted the legal principle of parens patriae, allowing the court, on behalf of the state, to become “parent’’ to a child whose biological parents were unwilling or unable to raise him or her. A Juvenile Court judge, acting much like a firm yet caring parent, looked for individualized ways to correct a child’s misbehavior, disregarding a one-size-fits-all approach to justice.

Juvenile Court hearings were informal and confidential; juveniles were not represented by attorneys. Many judges did not wear robes, creating a more home-like atmosphere to proceedings.

Abuses Spur Reforms

But paternalism inevitably led to abuses; children were often jailed with little concern for basic fairness. In a notable 1967 case from Arizona (In Re: Gault), wherein a judge had incarcerated a 15-year-old boy indefinitely for making an obscene phone call, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas likened the youth’s Juvenile Court trial to a “kangaroo court.’’ The Gault case led to massive reforms in juvenile justice nationwide.

Gault and other Supreme Court decisions forced Juvenile Courts to become more like adult courts, protecting the rights of accused youths to have attorneys present during all phases and to not be incarcerated for minor matters like status offenses.

Some of the changes, however, brought new problems. “The concept of Juvenile Court was that it was not punitive and, therefore, you could treat the person like a child,’’ said James Lincoln, Juvenile Court Judge in Wayne County, Michigan, from 1960 to 1977. “A father says to the child: `What did you do? Tell me.’ And the child would come clean.

“Nowadays, the child has an attorney who says, ‘Don’t tell.’ This is kind of a psychological change, because you say to the child, ‘You can beat the rap, even though you’re guilty,’’’ said Lincoln, now 82.

Some conservatives say Juvenile Court is too lenient with young criminals; some liberals believe the court tramples on children’s rights. Still others say Juvenile Court destroys families by removing children and throwing them into a temporary and often poorly managed foster care system, now home to more than 500,000 kids.

“The idea of Juvenile Court is that we can combine social welfare and criminal social control in one institution,’’ said Barry Feld, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who promotes abolishing the court. “When we try to do both missions, we do them both badly.”

Kids who commit crimes don’t fully understand their rights to remain silent or have an attorney present during police questioning, Feld and others say. “The reality of the current Juvenile Court is that it functions primarily as a scaled-down, second-class criminal court for young offenders.”

Feld would abolish Juvenile Court and try children in adult courts. They could get a “youth discount’’ at sentencing, he says, and be kept separate from adult offenders in prison.

A U-Turn on Kids?

Over the past six years, 40 states — driven by public fears over violent juvenile crime — have passed laws excluding more young people from the juvenile justice system because of the nature of their crimes, and making it easier to put children in adult prison. Critics say that trend reverses a century-long tradition of treating young offenders differently than adult criminals.

“Part of the argument to abolish the court is that rehabilitation doesn’t work,’’ said Shepherd, former legislative chair for the Coalition on Juvenile Justice. “But I’ve seen programs that do work and we do have a much better idea now of things that are successful with kids.’’

The trend to give children “adult time for adult crime’’ has drawn criticism from human rights groups like Amnesty International, which recently used a picture of an accused juvenile killer from Michigan, 12-year-old Nathaniel Abraham, for the cover of a report on abuses of children in the U.S. criminal justice system (Youth Today, December/January 1999).

Shepherd said legislators make a mistake by taking away from judges the decision on whether a youth should be tried as an adult, and giving that decision to prosecutors.

“They’re saying basically that judges can’t be trusted to make decisions about transferring kids [to adult court], so they’re going to do it legislatively,’’ Shepherd said. “That is clearly an attack on the traditional model of the Juvenile Court, where cases are dealt with on an individualized basis and [which] still focuses on rehabilitation and treatment, rather than punishment.’’

On the Ropes

But juvenile crime rate increases since the mid-1980s are driving the call for more punishment. Since 1994, actually, juvenile crime rates have dropped dramatically nationwide, but are still above the pre-1980 levels.

Juvenile Court “is on the ropes for a number of reasons,’’ said Ira Schwartz, dean of the school of social work at the University of Pennsylvania. “One is that it’s failed to live up to the rehabilitative ideal of being able to provide prescriptive diagnostic and treatment services for kids because of the limitations of the social sciences.

“Another is the long history of not providing basic due process and procedural rights for young people, which took a series of Supreme Court decisions’’ to correct.

One-time anti-war activist Bernardine Dohrn, director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern, contends that Juvenile Court has been subjected to intense scrutiny over the past 20 years, exposing every flaw. “It’s not hard to imagine that adult criminal court, if it had this kind of light shown on it, would look pretty bad,’’ she says. “Is the adult system really willing to take 30,000 cases of juveniles into it? Not to mention status offenses and truancy issues.”

No one says adult prisons are better at rehabilitating people. Indeed, recent studies from Florida — where most serious juvenile offenders are automatically tried as adults — show that youths sent to adult prison are far more likely to commit new crimes than are youths in juvenile treatment facilities.

[Florida’s automatic waiver policies were championed in the early 1990s by Dade County prosecutor Janet Reno, now U.S. Attorney General, and by Bilchik, who was then her deputy.]

The Coalition for Juvenile Justice believes it’s not too late to save Juvenile Court. It says Congress should re-authorize the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Act (which it has failed to do since 1996), direct more federal funds to juvenile crime prevention efforts, stop the wholesale transfer of children to adult court, and make the court more family-focused.
But Congress may soon pass legislation pressuring states to put more juvenile offenders in the adult system. One bill, known as S.10, failed to pass last year; this year Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) have co-sponsored a new version, S.254.

Celebration Anyway

In Chicago, officials have scheduled a series of lectures to discuss juvenile justice and child welfare. The Juvenile Court here is sponsoring an essay contest for students, and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges will hold its conference here in July — almost exactly 100 years after the first Juvenile Court case was called by Judge Richard Tuthill on July 3, 1899.

But any celebration is under a cloud. “I think it’s an alarming and dangerous prospect to think that, as a society, we have so little hope in our abilities to correct and resolve problems that young people have,” says Cook County Juvenile Court Judge Nancy Sidote Salyers, who presides over the court’s child protection division. “We’re in essence giving up on ourselves if we give up on our children.”

Salyers is leading the year-long effort to highlight the Juvenile Court’s birth, growth — and what she hopes will be its future.

Resources

Marie Mildon
Centennial Coordinator
National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges
P.O. Box 8970
Reno, NV 89507
(775) 784-6012

Ira Schwartz, Dean
School of Social Work
University of Pennsylvania
3701 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
(215) 898-5541

The Coalition for Juvenile Justice
1211 Connecticut Ave. NW, Ste. 414
Washington, DC 20036
(202) 467-0864

Professor Robert Shepherd
University of Richmond Law School
Richmond, VA 23173
(804) 289-8203

Professor Barry Feld
University of Minnesota Law School
35263 County Road 40
Effie, MN 56639
(218) 743-3118

Sidebar:

Juvenile Court Turns 100, But is the Party Over?: Juvenile Court: Happy Birthday

Juvenile Court Turns 100, But is the Party Over?: Juvenile Justice: A Timeline

Kresnak, Jack. "Juvenile Court Turns 100, But is the Party Over?" Youth Today, March 1999, p. 1.

©2000 Youth Today. Reprinted with permission from Youth Today. All rights reserved.