Juvenile Court

Rationale for the Juvenile Court

During the 1800s, the United States experienced rapid industrialization and considerable population growth, mostly due to large-scale immigration. New immigrants found jobs in factories where the pay was low, shifts were often twelve to fourteen hours long, and conditions were dangerous. Most immigrant families found it necessary to live in small apartments not far from the factories where they worked. Those children who were not working spent many hours unsupervised by adults, often in crowded streets and neighborhoods, but many children were also employed as workers in the factories, often doing the dirtiest, most dangerous work.

There was some public concern about the dangerous plight of these children, but it was not until economic recession and depression led to widespread job loss that child labor laws were adopted. These laws removed most children from the competition for fulltime factory jobs until the age of fourteen and restricted the number of hours youths could work in retail stores. Public consensus in support of free public education for all children in the country also grew, and eventually laws requiring children to attend school were adopted in all of the states. Even these legal changes, however, did not totally end the appearance of children left to roam city streets.

Beginning in the mid-1800s, Americans gradually became concerned about these children. Some viewed the children's poverty, ill health, and ignorance as unjust and detrimental to the children as well as the future of the nation. They saw that economic conditions had produced these problems, and they wanted political action to help solve them. Some judges and attorneys from the criminal courts also wanted change. They saw the poor condition of many of the children brought before the court on criminal charges and considered these cases too numerous and troublesome for the court system to handle properly.

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