From Laggard to Innovator: Barbara Fruchter and the 1970s-Era Movement to Deinstitutionalize Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice

Abstract

Abstract: Using diverse archival sources and oral history interviews, this essay examines how volunteer activist women in the 1970s galvanized support to pass major legislative reforms that made Pennsylvania a model for how to implement the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) of 1974 at the state level. Horrified by conditions they witnessed on a tour of a nearby juvenile detention center, three Philadelphia area women created a broad-based coalition—centered in the Juvenile Justice Center (JJC) of Pennsylvania—to improve local conditions of confinement and spearhead novel policies to transform juvenile justice statewide. Focusing on Barbara Fruchter, JJC cofounder and de facto leader of the state’s deinstitutionalization campaign, this essay probes how a now well-accepted idea in juvenile justice—treating the great majority of delinquent youth in small community-based rather than large institutional programs—was first envisioned and introduced into American juvenile justice a half-century ago.