TY - JOUR
AU - Schmidt, James, D.
AB - Barry C. Feld has been a longtime advocate for young people and a critic of the juvenile justice system. The Evolution of the Juvenile Court culminates his career, bringing together broad and deep knowledge across numerous fields to make a powerful argument for change. The book will be highly valuable for scholars in various disciplines and for policy makers across the United States and beyond. In the book's opening sections, Feld surveys the social and economic changes caused by industrialization that altered the social and cultural meaning of youth. Drawing on his training as a sociologist, he proposes a model that leans heavily on socioeconomic environment to explain youthful indiscretion and societal responses. The early chapters also trace legal developments, stressing the rehabilitative functions of the juvenile court in its inception before discussing the rights revolution of the Warren court. The book hits its stride in the middle chapters, where Feld traces the “get tough” era of juvenile justice that began in the 1970s. Responding to urban unrest, economic change, and political upheaval, and steeped in veiled racism and white privilege, policy makers across the United States cracked down on youth crime, lengthening sentences and turning away from rehabilitation toward punishment. Politicians duped unsuspecting white voters into supporting such policies by using coded language to activate racist ideologies. In the best chapters, Feld provides an excellent discussion of how such policies fell disproportionally on youth of color, how girls met differential treatment, and how lawmakers and jurists created a school-to-prison pipeline. A final section surveys recent developments, carefully analyzing Supreme Court cases that have begun to establish the notion that youthful offenders have diminished capacity for judgement. Feld draws here on research in neuroscience to buttress the notion that “juveniles' immature brains contribute to impulsive decisions,” a natural fact that means “youth are less competent than adults” (pp. 237, 270). This natural incapacity prevents justice when young people are placed in a juvenile court system that often treats them as adults. In response to these injustices, Feld advances a number of potential remedies, including limited-length interrogations and mandatory counsel and recording. Most radically, he proposes an across-the-board “Youth Discount” in sentencing. Ultimately, like most left-liberal scholars, Feld believes that poverty causes crime and that structural change is necessary to make any real progress. But he ends the book on a bleak note, arguing that racism and lack of political will are likely to prevent necessary reform. The Evolution of the Juvenile Court provides a highly valuable analysis of sociolegal developments that have trapped young people in a system that destroys lives before they start. Historians might find early sections reductionist and deterministic, but the legal history of juvenile law in the bulk of the book is clear and compelling. One also wonders how future scholars might view the contemporary neuroscience of youth, since it reverberates with the linguistic maneuvers that deprived others of capacity in previous eras. These quibbles aside, every juvenile court functionary should read this book—as should every voter. © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Evolution of the Juvenile Court: Race, Politics, and the Criminalizing of Juvenile Justice
JO - The Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaz243
DA - 2019-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-evolution-of-the-juvenile-court-race-politics-and-the-MAZBZZRFyd
SP - 199
VL - 106
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -