TANENHAUS, THE AUTHOR OF “JUVENILE JUSTICE IN THE MAKING,” IS SCHEDULED TO SPEAK ON JUNE 6 AT THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
Your book describes how Chicago set up an innovative juvenile court system in the late 19th Century. Why did it happen here? The efforts of [activists] Lucy Flower, who came from a wealthy background, and Julia Lathrop, who was part of the first generation of college-educated women in American society, succeeded because they understood how to work with elites. They knew you couldn’t just go to Springfield and present a bill. They brought leading attorneys and clergy into the process and met with city leaders to make their case.
Did this system become influential elsewhere? Chicago became a model for other cities. People came to see how the Chicago system was set up. By 1925, 48 states had juvenile court law based on the Chicago juvenile court model, and so did nations in Europe, Asia and South America.
Was the juvenile justice movement related to the child labor movement? In the late 19th Century, people were trying to make childhood a protected period. They wanted to keep kids in school, off city streets and out of factories and millls. They said youth can really be harmed by the adult criminal justice system; we should keep kids in a system designed just for them.
You say the idea that kids today are worse than ever has a long history. What I’ve seen in my research is that about every 20 years-in the 1950s, ’70s and ’90s-you see the same rhetoric about kids being different, committing much more serious and violent offenses, and that the juvenile justice system isn’t for kids who break “real” laws. Jane Addams wrote, in “The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets,” how sad it was to read in the newspaper almost every day about a kid shooting another child.
But the perception of violent youth, you write, leads us to try more children as adults. There was a real spike in youth violence in the late 1980s and early ’90s. But when those numbers began to drop quite dramatically, states continued to pass very harsh laws. There’s often not a correspondence between what’s going on and how we respond. We’re trapped in the mindset that things are always getting worse.
What should our mindset be instead? We’re dealing with people who are developing and are qualitatively different from adults. We should think of juvenile justice as part of an overarching youth policy in this country and not just a subset of adult criminal justice.
