Book Review: Geoff K. Ward, The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice

Abstract

Book Review: Geoff K. Ward, The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. ISBN: 978-0226873183 (Paperback). 336 Pages. $32.00.[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www. transiormativestudies, ors O2014 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]Detroit is the most economically depressed large city in the United States. This reality is directly related to the dire economic circumstances of African Americans, who comprise approximately 80% of the current population. Detroit's official unemployment rate is 25%, but considering jobless Detroiters left out of the official count, academics and Detroit city officials estimated the real unemployment rate is as high as 50% (State of the Detroit Child 2010, Skillman Foundation, 10-11). Concurrently, the poverty rate is one of the highest in the nation, and the high school dropout rate is abysmal. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) dropout rate devastating, and he told the Detroit Free Press, DPS is arguably the worst urban school district in the country now (MLive.com, November 18, 2010).Consequently, Detroit has one of highest crime rates, which is likewise reflected in the juvenile delinquency rate. The 2012 Statewide Juvenile Arrest Analysis Report, which was prepared for the Michigan Department of Human Services, Child Welfare Funding and Juvenile Programs and the Michigan Committee on Juvenile Justice, compiled statistics that identified Detroit's Wayne County with 5,485 juvenile arrests, the highest in the state. Of a total 10 juvenile arrests for homicide in the state, 5 were in Wayne County. Wayne County also had the highest arrest rate for narcotics and weapons violations.In order to acquire some understanding of how and why these dismal statistics exist, especially as it relates to black juveniles, Geoff Ward's award-winning The Black Child Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice supplies insight into racialized historical circumstances, discriminatory practices and systemic inadequacies that affected the treatment of black youths in the past and that contribute to similar institutional deficits in the present. Recipient of the Hindelang Book Award from American Society of Criminology and the outstanding book prize from the History of Education Society, the author of The Black Child Savers articulates a meticulous argument that examines how socio-economic forces and dysfunctional juvenile justice systems maintained a racially stratified society by refusing to address the needs and dire circumstances of black youths. Ward not only examines the inadequacies of American juvenile justice systems, he also provides contextual information that reveals oppressive racial practices that have ignored and violated the rights of black juveniles while facilitating white juveniles with institutional and programmatic resources to rehabilitate and prepare them to become full, participatory citizens. Ward relays:Contemporary research and policy have sought to explain the dramatic and disproportionate quantitative increase of black and other nonwhite youths in juvenile and adult detention, jails, and prisons in the post-civil rights period, especially since 1980. I became consumed with the background to these developments, including the relative absence of black youths from early juvenile institutions as well as the question of how black adults experienced and shaped the development of American juvenile justice (Ward, 5).Ward's study begins with the mistreatment of enslaved black youths in the antebellum South and the North. He traces historical developments during the Reconstruction Era, the Great Migration, and during Jim Crow segregation when juvenile delinquency institutions and policies are developed. …