Reviewed by: Youth Squad: Policing Children in the Twentieth Century by Tamara Gene Myers Peter C. Baldwin Youth Squad: Policing Children in the Twentieth Century. By Tamara Gene Myers. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2019. xiv + 258 pp. Paper $29.95, cloth $110. The presence of a police officer in the corridors is now a familiar part of the American high school experience. School policing was part of the growth of the American carceral state in the 1960s and 1970s and has further expanded amid the gun massacres since 1999. But the phenomenon has deeper roots, as Tamara Gene Myers demonstrates in Youth Squad; since the 1930s, public officials have worked to insert police authority into the everyday lives of children across North America. Myers traces the "youth turn" in policing to early twentieth-century concerns about delinquency. Friendly crime prevention efforts, police hoped, might rescue "predelinquent" children before they succumbed to the evil influences of urban social environments. Myers seems to suggest that "rising delinquency and crime rates" were empirical realities and were not simply artifacts of changing police practices (31). [End Page 477] Chapter 2 tells the story of the "Montreal Miracle," a supposed reduction in delinquency achieved by the Juvenile Morality Squad (JMS). The JMS cracked down on sexual immorality, particularly on boys having homosexual relations with men. The JMS sought stern sentences for adult men but lenience for their teenage lovers, who might still be saved from a life of "depravity." Initially composed of Oliva Pelletier and one other man, the squad grew to eighty men and women by the 1950s. Women patrolled parks, schoolyards, and other youth hangouts, chastising misbehavior and visiting the parents of miscreants. Under Pelletier's leadership, the squad enforced a curfew and formed a juvenile club. Myers writes that the squad succeeded in reducing arrests and keeping children out of the court system, taking over functions once performed by juvenile courts. Here and in other sections about Montreal, the argument rests on extensive research in archival and printed sources. A chapter on curfews identifies three periods of expansion: the late 1800s, the 1940s and 1950s, and the turn of the twenty-first century. Children's right to the city was progressively curtailed in an effort to domesticate childhood. The chapter on athletic clubs describes the leading role of New York, whose Police Athletic League was a model for Montreal's efforts. Whether joining clubs voluntarily or through police coercion, youths found their leisure activities removed from public space and placed under official surveillance. A chapter on traffic safety campaigns tells how children were enlisted to perform auxiliary police functions as safety patrol officers; these glorified crossing guards were part of a larger campaign to force children off the streets, a campaign that also included gory traffic safety films. An epilogue takes the story up to today, concluding with the police presence in schools. Though Montreal plays a starring role in this book, there are cameo appearances by cities in what Myers calls "English North America" (the United States and the Anglophone provinces). Myers shows that Vancouver police formed a boys' club in the 1930s, Calgary enlisted children in safety patrols, and Saskatoon developed a recreational program in the 1940s. South of the border, Myers emphasizes New York. For the rest of the United States, she leans heavily on the findings of previous scholars, including David Wolcott, Julia Grant, and Peter Norton. The disproportionate emphasis on Montreal raises doubts about whether this book should claim to be about North America as a whole. To what extent should "North America" even be considered a coherent unit for this analysis? Myers does note direct connections between developments in Canada and the United States. Pelletier, of Montreal's youth squad, cited the Chicago Area Project as a model. There were direct contacts between the Montreal and New [End Page 478] York juvenile athletic organizations, Canadian police studied at Northwestern University's Traffic Institute, and Chicago's school safety patrols inspired those in other cities. The implication is that North American cities participated in a shared culture of public policy toward juveniles, fortified by institutional connections. Yet Myers does not explore this implication in any depth...
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Nov 4, 2024
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