Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [106]
In other states, private “industrial schools” were authorized to take in children in need, or who had committed crimes. By 1887, there were four of these schools in Chicago, two for boys (one Protestant, one Catholic), and two for girls (one Protestant, one Catholic).82ai As of 1889, the City and County Industrial School of San Francisco held 122 boys and 52 girls, most of them sent by Police Court judges. All but one of the girls had been adjudged guilty of something called “leading an idle and dissolute life”; fifty-two of the boys had committed the same offense. The rest had violated the criminal code; forty-seven boys, for example, had committed petty larceny.84
Despite all these institutional changes, children could still be arrested, detained, tried, and sent to prison in many states. In 1870, there were 2,029 minors in jail in Massachusetts; 231 of them were under fifteen. 85 And even in states with specialized institutions, houses of refuge, reform schools, industrial schools, and the like, the trial process for juveniles was the same as for adults.
Specialized criminal courts for juveniles attacked this problem. The pioneer was an Illinois law (1899), which applied to Cook County only (Chicago and its suburbs). The law covered “dependent, neglected and delinquent children”: specifically, any child who “is destitute or homeless or abandoned,” or who “habitually begs or receives alms,” or who “is found living in any house of ill fame or with any vicious or disreputable person”; also, any “child under the age of 8 years who is found peddling or selling any article or singing or playing any musical instrument upon the street or giving any public entertainment”; and any child “whose home, by reason of neglect, cruelty or depravity on the part of its parents ... is an unfit place for such a child.”86
The law, in short, continued the trend of lumping bad and bad-off children together. Under its terms, a circuit-court judge would sit in a separate courtroom, and keep separate records. The judge had power to put the court’s wards into the proper institution or to give them probation. Timothy Hurley, president of the Chicago Visitation and Aid Society, praised the act as a “return to paternalism,” words that have a somewhat ironic ring today. But to him the “paternalism” was exceedingly welcome; it meant the “acknowledgment by the State of its relationship as the parent to every child within its borders.” Civilization, Hurley felt, had lost sight of this relationship, and consequently faced “utter demoralization.”87 For him, then, the juvenile court movement was a form of interventionism—made necessary because the pillars on which society rested, including the family, had weakened so in the late nineteenth century. The movement thus dovetailed neatly with the other reforms of the period, and with the upsurge in interest in traditional morality. The full story of the juvenile court movement, however, belongs to the twentieth century.
Local Jails
The newfangled devices and reform institutions were at the cutting edge of American penology. They were reforms that affected, on the whole, the great northern penitentiaries and certain special categories of offenders—notably, children. But they left virtually untouched the huge squalid mass of county and local prisons: the end of the line for thousands of men and women who were picked up for drunkenness or vagrancy, as well as brawlers, petty thieves, and countless others.
The local jails, in the aggregate, housed a considerable number of prisoners. The 1880 census counted 58,609 prisoners (not including juveniles in reformatories). Of these, 30,659 were found in penitentiaries,