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As you look out this window at the parking lot across the street, you see the site of the world's first juvenile court, a special court, created to provide justice for children. The birthing of the juvenile court involved a radical insistence that children not be crushed for their transgressions nor brutalized for lack of access or opportunity, that society not give up on its children.
The invention of a distinctive court for children here in 1899, called the greatest legal institution invented in the United States , spread like a prairie fire across the country and throughout the world. Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop had an immediate goal: to take children out of the adult prisons and adult poor houses where they were exploited, abused, and roughly treated as tiny adults. They created a unique system of justice that was to be humane and recognizably fair, designed to provide youngsters and their families, then largely immigrant kids, and today, largely, children of color, the opportunity to recover.
These midwives of justice included the militant, determined women of Hull-House, Lucy Flower, Florence Kelly, and Mary Bartlemy, who believed that children are different from adults and that their misdeeds, even grave crimes, must be addressed in a new legal system that takes into account their age, their lesser culpability, and their greater ability to develop, to transform.
The birth of the court for children was intrinsically bound to the abolition of slavery. For if an African American is a person and not property, then what about women? And what about the child? What kind of a person, after all, is a child? And how are the margins between childhood and adulthood shaped, erased, and policed?
Part of the answer for these social reformers included a larger, comprehensive vision of a society fit for children. Without child labor, with free, compulsory public education, with an expanded public space, including playgrounds and the arts, and without war. They campaigned for these goals over four decades. The juvenile court, laced with tension and paradox, emerged as part of this philosophical mosaic. The children's court has always been a dynamic work in progress, like the family, the school or the workplace. The court is both a remarkably elastic legal entity, which continues to sanction the vast majority of young offenders without criminalizing them, and simultaneously, an instrument of crime control, disciplining those who might produce unrest or disturb the social order. Like, for example, wayward girls, or the mythical super predators of our time. Its flexibility remains evident a century later. Each day across the land, hundreds of thousands of children appear in juvenile courts in critical matters which determine their liberty, their family, custody, identity, healthcare, education, asylum, and immigration status. And safety from abuse, rape, neglect, or harassment. Yet also today children are subject to harsh sentences and incarcerated in locked facilities little different from snake pits, far away from their families and legal counsel.
The accelerating arrest of girls for offenses with quaint names, such as incorrigible, unruly, or ungovernable, plus the escalating rate of school arrests, have widened the reach of delinquency charges, even while youth crimes rates have plummeted. As social priorities shift from education to prison construction, so the landscape of the young is transformed. When minor misbehaviors by adolescents are no longer dealt with in stride by teachers and parents, store owners and coaches, neighbors or youth workers, but rather, police are called, arrests are made and petitions are filed, we are all at peril. The terrain of the juvenile court thus functions as a gateway for the failures of other institutions. The consequences are too often the caging of children and shamefully disproportionate arrests and detentions based on race and poverty. We tolerate, in fact, two separate systems of justice for the child. One public, degrading and stigmatizingly lethal, the other for families with resources. Private, effective, and designed to encourage recovery without scars.
“What shall I give my children who are poor?” wrote the poet laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks, “Who are adjudged the least-wise of the land?” Youngsters themselves, being the intelligent and observant people they are, are vividly alert to these issues of fairness that lie at the heart of justice. They have a laser-like bead on adult hypocrisies, and we would do well to welcome their voices, their participation and their opinions, acknowledging their human rights and their full personhood.
History tells us that children have changed the world by their collective action. In Little Rock , in Selma , in Soweto , in Tiananmen. We learn, too, from the wild impatience of the women of Hull-House about the imaginative possibilities of adult mobilized civic will to invest in our common future, our children. |
