Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [265]
What we do know does not quite jibe with Anthony Platt’s diatribe. In the early years, in particular, the children were not, by and large, dragged into court by social workers, policemen, upper-class snoops and hegemonists. More often than not they were brought in by their very own parents. This comes out clearly in the files of the juvenile court of Alameda County from 1903 to 1910, which Friedman and Percival studied. Louise Rolland’s mother complained that her thirteen-year-old daughter was “incorrigible.” She kept company with “bad and dissolute characters” and stayed out all night. Minnie Young, the mother of George Oscar Young (seventeen years old), was a widow. Her son, she said, was “vicious” and paid her “no respect whatsoever.” Bartolomeo Comella was a widower; his son, Salvatorio, kept late hours and “upon his return he does not explain to his father where he has been.” He also stole $100 from his father’s trunk.109
The evidence from this and other studies suggests that the juvenile courts were popular courts. Working-class and immigrant parents used the courts, as a club over rebellious children. It was a weapon in a culture clash—a clash of generations, especially between old world parents, at sea in America, confused about values, horrified at the mobility, the laxity, the narcissism, the “fatal liberty” that swallowed up their children and destroyed a nexus between parent and child that they had thought to be as sacred as a worshipped sun.
It all seems, in a way, terribly distant and somewhat innocent: kids who stole peaches, or went joy riding, or smoked and drank a bit, or had a taste for sex. Most delinquents were boys—in Cleveland, in 1920, there were 2,524 of them, and only 584 delinquent girls, according to the Cleveland Crime Survey of 1922.110 Nonetheless, the double standard was in full flower. Girls were dragged into court for sexual activity that never troubled the parents of boys. Nobody dreamt then of fifteen-year-olds with submachine guns, or the hard-core delinquents and toughs who would appear after 1950. But as the years went on, the police role in juvenile justice got larger and larger, and the parental role diminished accordingly. As early as 1919, in Boston and St. Louis, the police referred to the court more than 80 percent of the delinquency cases in these cities; in Los Angeles, the police brought in 61 percent, parents only 21 percent.111
The system of juvenile justice was part of the general system of criminal justice, and it went through the same cycles of ebb and flow. There was the Warren Court era, with its emphasis on rights and due process, followed by the post-Warren backlash. The landmark juvenile case of the Warren Court was In re Gault (1967).112 Gerald Francis Gault was fifteen years old. He got in trouble in 1964 “in the company of another boy who had stolen a wallet from a lady’s purse.” Gault was put on six months’ probation. Before that period expired, the police picked Gault up again: a neighbor had complained about indecent phone calls. Process in the Juvenile Court of Gila County, Arizona, was informal, perfunctory; in the end, the judge declared Gault a delinquent, and committed him to the State Industrial School.
The Supreme Court cast a sharp, beady eye on the system of juvenile justice. It cut through the cant that had encrusted the system—the idea that the courts were motherly, caring places, dedicated to helping young people, not to punishing them; that there was no need for lawyers or due process because everything that went on was only for the child’s own good. The system had committed Gault to an “institution where he may be restrained of liberty for years.” This was punishment, whatever one called it. Naming the institution an “industrial school” instead of a prison did not change the realities. If this was a kind of punishment, then the informality and discretion would not do. Proceedings in juvenile court