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Violent crime is committed disproportionately by young men, but government never has conducted a coherent, aggressive campaign against serious juvenile delinquency. The fragmentation has been evident since the late 1960s, when federal authority was divided between health and justice agencies. A 1974 law created a federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to take charge. The law set progressive standards, but the administration of Ronald Reagan tried to kill the agency in the early 1980s and downgraded it after Congress refused to end funding. The Reagan Justice Department did forge an alliance with the MacArthur Foundation to start a long‐term study of juvenile crime's causes. Meanwhile, a steady increase in arrests of juveniles prompted to require that more teen suspects be tried in adult courts, even when studies showed the tactic ineffective in preventing repeat criminality. Congressional Republicans helped enact a large “juvenile accountability” program designed to provide federal aid to programs that got tough on young lawbreakers. Some measures failed on a broad scale, such as ‘boot camps’ aimed at instilling more discipline in delinquents. Despite many promising crime prevention programs, the Congress under Republicans control starting in 1995 generally refused to fund them. Juvenile crime arrests declined sharply since the mid‐1990s, but there was no solid proof of what caused the change, whether government programs, the improved economy, or a lower number of teens in the population.

This chapter dissects the effectiveness of antidelinquency efforts—from national to local levels. In the 1950s, the decade of delinquency, the United States committed fully to curbing juvenile delinquency in a way comparable to the Progressive-era child-saving efforts, which led to the establishment of the juvenile court system. Shifts in youth behaviors dominated popular discourse at midcentury, and youth crime emerged to the forefront. Considering that youth criminality intersected race, class, gender, and region, as confirmed by the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1953, many people took interest in prevention efforts. In New York City, various agencies and organizations, both formal and informal, put forth efforts to combat youth crime as they saw fit—some more successfully than others—and they ranged from large institutional endeavors, such as the Harlem YMCA, to on-the-ground organizing by the youths themselves, such as the Harlem Young Citizens Council. Even with all the crime and delinquency prevention efforts that emerged, the number of youths arrested, especially black youths, continued to rise, and although this pointed to a function of policy and practice as opposed to changes in behaviors, it reestablished race as the basis of youth criminality.

In response to the visibility of vice, communities groups, activists, city residents, and government officials came together to fight what they saw as immoral industries destroying their cities. Their efforts produced a complex process of moral regulation in which they sought to define the parameters of proper conduct and to provide solutions to illicit industries in the border cities. This took place through the deployment of three main themes, including urban renewal programs as distinctly anti-vice projects; a fear of transients; and juvenile delinquency. On both sides of the border these themes were formulated through particular class and racial perspectives, which tended to frame urban issues in terms of decay and decline while simultaneously promoting the growth of suburban living, middle-class consumption patterns, good health, and social order. In doing so, anti-vice activism worked to define productive citizenship and community belonging in the border cities.

After the Second World War increased political and economic interconnectedness in the West further promoted the transnational exchange of expertise and ideas of best practice, resulting in the emergence of common frameworks across jurisdictions. This chapter focuses on how religious, civic and official bodies responded to youth in the sixties, giving particular attention to international ideas around youth services and associations. It examines so-called ‘problem youths’. It identifies how debates on juvenile delinquency, which were directly connected with new manifestations of youth culture internationally, featured in an Irish context and explores how these debates contributed to a reframing of what were considered appropriate responses to young offenders and to children and young people who, for a variety of reasons, were housed in residential institutions.

Chapter Five explores the rich and interesting but critically neglected Li'l Tomboy comic book series.Released by Charlton Comics from 1956 through 1960, the series did far more than simply challenge traditional female gender roles in the 1950s; it also challenged the newly established Comics Code.In numerous issues, the title character engages in behaviors that could easily be regarded as delinquent:she commits petty theft, intentionally destroys private property, and sasses adult authority figures, including police officers.Moreover, Li'l Tomboy engages in these activities not simply under the watchful eye of the Comics Code Authority, but, astoundingly, with their official seal of approval.During a time when the censors employed by the Authority office were at their most powerful and restrictive, Li'l Tomboy engaged in antics that far exceeded those that had been forbidden in other publications.Accordingly, this chapter tells the story of how, with the creation of Li'l Tomboy, Charlton Publications demonstrated that postwar gender conformity could be resisted and, even more significantly, so too could the Comics Code.

This chapter looks at the ambitious reform agenda that black middle-class activist residents went on to mount in these outlying city neighbourhoods, encompassing housing upkeep, business revitalization, traffic safety, trash removal, and efforts to reduce liquor availability, juvenile delinquency, vice, and crime – all in an attempt to maintain what they considered an acceptable quality of life. Perhaps the most ambitious effort along these lines was a venture in which a group of African American investors purchased and renovated the Lee-Harvard Shopping Center, making it during its existence from 1972-1978 the “largest black-owned commercial complex in the nation.” Sometimes these reform efforts involved moralizing or exhibited an explicit class bias; upwardly mobile middle-class blacks did not always recognize that less well-off newcomers were motivated by similar concerns with liveability. In the end, however, their various attempts to take charge of their lives and communities contributed to the long-term vitality of these neighbourhoods and the city as a whole.

This chapter gives a brief overview of the impact Illinois’ turn to a punitive form of juvenile justice system had in the decade after the study. This discussion is focused on administrators at the Training School for Girls at Geneva, the Training School for Boys at St. Charles, and the new maximum security prison for boys at the State Reformatory at Sheridan, and their more explicit embrace of new punitive policies in the institution. It also describes the increasingly disproportionate rate at which black children were committed to these institutions. The epilogue ends by tying together the book’s historical narrative and summarizing the ways intersecting notions of childhood, race, gender, and sexuality undergirded juvenile justice practice in Illinois.

The Introduction disputes the gender historiography’s assertion that the primitive, virile, and martial values of Indian lore advocate Ernest Thompson Seton, frontier pioneer enthusiast Daniel Carter Beard, and British military leader and Boy Scout founder General Robert Baden-Powell represented the new dominant form of Anglo-American masculinity in the early twentieth century. Instead, Boy Scouts of America officials combined select Victorian men’s virtues such as self-control and a hard work ethic with masculine values that helped adolescent boys adapt to a modernizing society. The Introduction analyzes how urbanization, corporate industrialization, immigration, women’s rights, and Progressive reform shaped Scouting’s emergence. The organization drew broad popular and governmental support for applying G. Stanley Hall’s child development theories of adolescence and racial recapitulation to create an effective solution to juvenile delinquency and modern society’s “boy problem,” which were created in part by compulsory schooling’s and restrictive child labor laws’ narrowing of teenage boys’ engagement with the broader community and adult work.

The first chapter explores the shifting conceptions of children and childhood, particularly in the context of the criminal/legal systems. Throughout history the emphasis of the child and childhood arouse due to the decrease of infant mortality, the increase of literary rates, and the emerging discourses of human development. Children were no longer seen as smaller versions of adults, but as future adults. However, these constructions also developed along deep racial lines, as the figure of white children were innocent and sentient, and therefore fully human, while black children were excluded from innocence and access to sentience, not fully human, and therefore not a part of childhood.

Wartime America underwent rapid transformation; men, women, and children saw their social roles redefined; and economic and racial divisions grew deeper and sharper edged. Theater was the perfect medium to represent home-front tensions and anxieties as they were manifested on the local level: the congenital civilian thrust into the military life as in Strip for Action and This Is the Army; the family pressured by rapid and dynamic social transformations as in Three's a Family, A New Life, and Men to the Sea; couples pressured by the carpe-diem spirit of the wartime romance as in On the Town and Those Endearing Young Charms; adolescents, often tempted into juvenile delinquency with the freedom of looser rules and mores as in Janie and Pick-Up Girl; men and women balancing patriotism and selfishness, as in The Voice of the Turtle and the shocking Tomorrow the World.