Ages of Anxiety: Historical and Transnational Perspectives on Juvenile Justice ed. by William S. Bush and David S. Tanenhaus

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ages of Anxiety: Historical and Transnational Perspectives on Juvenile Justice ed. by William S. Bush and David S. Tanenhaus Tera Eva Agyepong Ages of Anxiety: Historical and Transnational Perspectives on Juvenile Justice. Edited by William S. Bush and David S. Tanenhaus. New York: New York University Press, 2018. ix + 193. Cloth $49. Ages of Anxiety: Historical and Transnational Perspectives on Juvenile Justice is a critically important examination of international juvenile justice policy in the twentieth century. The contributing authors and editors have co-created a cutting-edge volume that surveys the emergence of juvenile justice and the transnational circulation of ideas surrounding delinquency. This six-chapter volume historicizes the middle decades of the twentieth century—a period that has been under-examined in juvenile justice scholarship. Each study highlights the important role that ordinary people and ideas have played in shaping juvenile justice, and the varied responses that modern, developing, and colonial regimes have had to delinquency. The first part of the book examines efforts that reformers and practitioners made to legitimize emergent juvenile justice systems in Belgium, Mexico, and colonial Zanzibar. The second part analyzes the varied approaches to policing and punishing youth crime in Boston, Paris, Montreal, and Turkey. David Niget highlights a transnational movement of ideas about juvenile courts among Belgian reformers, judges, and the International Association of Children's Judges (IACJ) by examining discourses that circulated internationally. Collectively, Belgian reformers, the IACJ, and other international congresses disseminated proposals for juvenile courts based on the "American" or "Chicago" model. This first chapter reveals the significant impact that the emergence of international human rights paradigms had on notions of juvenile justice in the aftermath of the world wars. In the second chapter, Shari Orisich's study of the transformation of Mexico City's juvenile court between the 1930s and 1960s similarly explores the impact of a transnational circulation of ideas. Orisich focuses on juvenile court workers' understanding and application of scientific ideas about delinquency and youth. The chapter contains rich analysis of estudio social (minors' case files that included reports by doctors, psychologists, caseworkers, and other state agents), revealing not only the impact that transnational ideas had on the ground, but the ways in which children themselves asserted agency over their own lives. Orisich's "reading against the grain" of the narratives in the children's case files brilliantly historicizes how [End Page 129] a new welfare state modernized authority on a "body of knowledge that was built on youth" (53). Corrie Decker's chapter on the limits of Western conceptions of juvenile justice in colonial Zanzibar concludes Part I of the text. British colonial administrators resisted calls from the Colonial Office, beginning in the 1930s, and from the United Nations in the 1950s, to follow international blueprints for the administration of juvenile justice. Decker reveals how masheha (local chiefs) and mudirs (Islamic legal representatives) resolved cases of juvenile delinquency before colonial administrators knew about them. As a result, local leaders diverted youth before they could encounter the colonial penal apparatus. Decker's study is an important reminder that the very notions of "delinquency" and "justice" have been culturally and historically contingent categories mediated by local actors even when they have purported to be "universal" and international" in their conception. Part II's examination of approaches to policing and punishing youth crime begins with Tamara Myers' chapter. Myers analyzes the Montreal Police Department's (MPD) approach to a juvenile crime wave that began—as it did in other large cites—in the postwar period. The MPD successfully reduced juvenile delinquency by creating delinquency prevention programs and reconceptualizing the role of police officers so that it emphasized mentorship rather than policing. The chapter is not only an important addition to historical scholarship and policy debates about juvenile justice because of its illumination of a locale where delinquency prevention strategies worked, but also because it highlights how important the construction of youth was to this history. As Myers notes, prevention work "necessitated the production of particular construction of youth—one that was deserving of protection" (96). In "Supervising Freedom: Juvenile Delinquency in Paris and Boston in the Mid-Twentieth Century," Guillaume Périssol's comparative study examines the...