Juvenile Justice in the Making.

Vol. 14 No. 7 (July 2004), pp.576-578

JUVENILE JUSTICE IN THE MAKING by David S. Tanenhaus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 264pp. Cloth $29.95 / £22.95. ISBN: 0-19-516045-2.

Reviewed by Lucy S. McGough, Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University. Email: lmcgoug@lsu.edu

This book is a slim volume written by a law professor for those who are curious about the history of one of the most intriguing American legal innovations—the juvenile court. It is accessible to those whose professional specialty is the law or political science, as well as to a broader audience. The title, JUVENILE JUSTICE IN THE MAKING, is a trifle misleading because this narrative only recounts the events surrounding the creation of the juvenile court in Chicago. Most scholars credit Cook County, Illinois, with establishing the first specialized court for children in 1899, although Progressives sought the same goal at about the same time in Denver and Boston, and by1920 all states had embraced the reform. Nonetheless even if the Chicago coalition of social workers, prominent lawyers and socialites was only one of the earliest, the story of its struggle is well worth the telling and probably best told, as David S. Tanenhaus has chosen, by focusing upon the juvenile court movement of a single locale rather than by skimming an American juvenile court history.

The cast of characters in turn-of-the-century Chicago is memorable: Lucy Flower, an orphan who became a rich woman by marriage and a zealous philanthropist who led the Chicago Women’s Club to embrace child protection as its mission; Julia Lathrop, a social worker who lived at Jane Addams’s Hull House and who later became the Director of the federal Children’s Bureau; John Altgeld, a lawyer who popularized the plight of juvenile offenders in a book based on his investigation of Chicago’s criminal court and House of Corrections (and who later became Governor of Illinois); and other civic-minded lawyers, like Harvey Hurd, Ephraim Banning, and Hastings Hart, who played key roles in drafting and securing support for the legislation creating the court. If anything, the book might have been strengthened by relating more about the personal interactions of these intriguing individuals.

This institutional biography covers only the earliest period of juvenile court formation, from roughly 1888, with Lucy Flower’s call to reform, to the 1930s when the Illinois appellate courts retrenched from the idealism of the earlier period by handing down a series of opinions affirming the uneasy exercise of concurrent jurisdiction over older juvenile offenders by both the juvenile and criminal courts. However, Tanenhaus makes clear that the past is indeed prologue. The book is framed with the highly publicized 1999 Michigan first degree murder trial of Nathaniel Abraham, the young eleven-year-old who fired a fatal sniper rifle shot at a neighbor child. The Michigan juvenile court decided to retain the defendant in the juvenile justice system, rather than to impose a “blended” [*577] sentence that would permit future review and imposition of more stringent criminal penalty. Tanenhaus concludes that those who found the court’s decision and rationale to be astonishing simply failed to appreciate the give-and-take of idealism and social backlash that have always uneasily coexisted in the maintenance of a rehabilitative court for young offenders. As he observes, the book seeks to

shatter the myth of immaculate construction that posits the juvenile court was born institutionally intact. . . . [and] to dispel the lingering myth that the present is unprecedented, and that “kids today,” whether in the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s or 1990s , are a new breed of offenders. [C]hild savers in the early twentieth century struggled with many of the same issues that twenty-first century policy-makers must address. (pp.164-165).

A dire lack of rehabilitative alternatives to detention, insufficient probation staff, racial profiling and a disproportionate number of cases against children of racial and ethnic minorities, transfers to criminal court trial, closed or open hearings – all are issues to be found on any administrative or legislative agenda today.

In partial recompense for the book’s relatively narrow band of historical coverage, the author includes substantive footnotes and a bibliographic essay that identifies the major historical and analytical works concerning the evolution of American child welfare policy and of the juvenile court. Readers wanting to explore the court’s work will find that information very helpful. Less useful are the occasional statistics and summary of cases tried by the Chicago juvenile court. Although Tanenhaus was given access to the court’s case archives from 1899-1926, their significance is not discussed in any great detail.

Of perhaps greater interest is Tanenhaus’ assertion that he finds the “most creative moments” in this history to have occurred when court reformers sought to discover the root causes of juvenile dependency and delinquency. He explores several theories advanced from time to time to explain deviant delinquent behavior. Certainly focusing on the sources of a juvenile’s problematic behaviors seems critical to the development of appropriate reformative responses, then and now. All too often reformers, counsel, judges, and sadly even probation and social work staff, forget the importance of untangling cause and effect and of promoting all efforts to find effective preventive programs. There are great difficulties in presenting the intertwined histories of abuse and neglect programs and delinquency treatment, and Tanenhaus wisely concentrates only on the development of delinquency jurisdiction, although he acknowledges the larger framework. This book is most helpful in educating lawyers and political scientists about the findings of delinquency studies from the sister disciplines of sociology and psychology.

As the American conceptualization of the juvenile court reached its centennial, scholars debated its future. Some famously called for its abolition as a failed institution, citing high recidivism rates and what has seemed over the past decade to be burgeoning juvenile violence. Others countered with remarkably mild defenses noting the [*578] absence of any better, reasonably priced alternative short of complete social overhaul and reprioritization. JUVENILE JUSTICE IN THE MAKING does not present any new justifications for the court, nor does it suggest any revisions that might improve the juvenile justice system. It does present reassurance that the delinquency issues plaguing 2004 policymakers and child advocates are not new; although, all said, this history is disheartening in that these social welfare failures are so persistent, perhaps even intractable.

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