Cops and Kids: Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America, 1890-1940

Abstract

Although scholars have written about the “policing” of juvenile delinquency in a Foucauldian sense, the police themselves have been largely absent from historical investigations into the rise of modern juvenile justice. The scarcity of sources on the police helps to explain that absence, while it also highlights how truly ambitious this book is. David B. Wolcott strove to tell “a national [story] about what happened on a neighborhood and street level” (p. 3). He mined an impressive range of primary sources, including life histories and police department, juvenile court, and corrections records, to study the interactions between police officers and minors from 1890 until 1940 in Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. The result is a clearly written, fresh interpretation of the development of American juvenile justice that shifts the focus from courtrooms to the streets and station houses in order to open “a historical window for seeing how social change affected the regulation of behavior” in urban environments (p. 198). Moreover, his findings offer empirically grounded answers to some of the most elusive and controversial historical questions about juvenile crime and punishment from the Progressive Era until World War II, including the significance of race in the administration of juvenile justice. For instance, Wolcott discovered that the Los Angeles Police Department targeted minority youth, but its juvenile court “treated delinquents of all races with relative evenhandedness” (p. 188).