Geoff K. Ward is assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
2012 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2012.
Printed in the United States of America
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-87316-9 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-87318-3 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-87316-1 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-87318-8 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-87319-0 (e-book)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ward, Geoff K.
The black child-savers : racial democracy and juvenile justice / Geoff K. Ward.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-87316-9 (hardcover : alkaline paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-87316-1 (hardcover : alkaline paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-87318-3 (paperback : alkaline paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-87318-8 (paperback : alkaline paper) 1. Juvenile justice, Administration ofUnited StatesHistory. 2. Discrimination in juvenile justice administrationUnited StatesHistory. 3. African American childrenLegal status, laws, etc.United StatesHistory. 4. Juvenile courtsUnited StatesHistory. I. Title.
HV9104.W37 2012
364.36089'96073dc23
2011035702
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
INTRODUCT ION
The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow Juvenile Justice
Over a century after the birth of Jim Crow juvenile justice, this book offers the first detailed account of this peculiar institution and how it collided with black freedom dreams to spawn a long movement on behalf of that entity W. E. B. DuBois called the immortal child, in a veiled reference to group fate. The project began with a naive interest in documenting the historical significance of race in American juvenile justice. My initial thought was to make a graph, but in the late 1990s that graph expanded to a time line depicting the historical backdrop of racial inequality in this institutional context. That summary was to be embedded in the brief historical background section of a contemporary statistical study of race and juvenile justice. The history, I thought, would be the easier part, with my overview of historical race relations based on institutional commitment rates of black youths dating to around 1900when the juvenile court movement began. Given the scarcity of government and academic sources concerning this racial history, however, even this proved difficult. And, once I found those numbers, they created more puzzles than they explained. Thus, the central focus of my research became the far greater and more important challenge of conceptualizing and measuring the historical significance of race in American juvenile justice.
In my initial search for statistics, I had barely considered the theoretical and methodological aspects of graphically depicting racial history. The received wisdom on framing race and racial inequality indicated that to capture the salience of race I would need to chart over time the onset and increase of disproportionate minority confinement (DMC) in juvenile institutions and, perhaps, in adult jails and prisons. Disproportionate minority youth contact was fundamental to the race problem, and the conception of racism generally highlighted the significance of race to juvenile justice processes and outcomes. The study of race effects in juvenile justice thus had to assess whether youth racial status mattered in sanctioning.
After determining the beginning of the DMC problem, I intended to assess the statistical significance of youth racial and ethnic status for sanctioning outcomes through a standard cross-sectional study of government data. Using this slice of time in contemporary juvenile justice, I would examine race in relation to structured decisionmaking (SDM) tools. Typically using paper-and-pencil forms to generate case assessments and classifications, juvenile justice officials have often used this device to make sanctioning decisions. Did this actually reduce racial disparities in sanctioning, as proponents maintained? The instruments were believed to regulate individual discretion, including racial bias, thus making juvenile justice systems fairer. Did they really increase racial justice? The answer, I assumed, would be revealed in the insignificance of youth racial status to outcomes in more structured or regulated courts. In the course of writing this book, however, I reconsidered whether race relations in juvenile justice are primarily a matter of youth outcomes, whether institutional racism is rooted in unregulated decisionmaker bias, and whether racial justice hinges on the irrelevance of race to justice processes. Actual history shed an entirely new light on these notions as well as on the problem of DMC, on the advent of SDM, and on much of the way in which we understand past and present racial politics of juvenile social control.
At first the near absence of historical background in the race and juvenile justice research struck me as an oddity and an opportunity. The extant literature on race was substantial, but it barely delved into history. Most empirical studies read as though American juvenile justice was suddenly overcome with race problems in the final quarter of the twentieth century. Aside from the black popular and academic presses, few studies were published within, or focused on, the period before 1970. These trends probably resulted from federal and state policies on DMC, whose funding streams created a flood of research focused on this relatively narrow topic and recent time frame.
Even more surprising was the limited analysis of race in the rich historical literature on the institutional development of juvenile justice. Racial and ethnic status and power relations are rarely subjects of sustained scrutiny in this series of historical studies of white American and immigrant European youth and community experiences. Beyond the absence of a racial politics of whiteness, the histories give little account of nonwhite youths and communities, who also had stakes in the emergence of American juvenile justice. The omission of race in historical work on juvenile justice mirrors the exclusion of nonwhites in the earliest practices of juvenile justice. White adults controlled juvenile justice systems, and those systems were typically reserved for white youths, denying nonwhite youths and adults equal recognition, opportunity, and influence. From the founding of houses of refuge in the early nineteenth century until a decade beyond the Brown v. Board of Education (1956) ruling, American juvenile justice routinely prioritized rehabilitative intervention in the lives of white children and youths. This manufactory of citizens, as Theodore Roosevelt once described enlightened juvenile justice, was organized to reproduce a white democracy. The white-dominated parental state engaged for generations in racially selective citizen- and state-building initiatives through juvenile justice policy and practice. By failing to subject separate and unequal juvenile justice to close or critical scrutiny, research has historically ignored, mentioned superficially, or assisted in this civic arrangement.
