Juvenile Justice

The first juvenile court was established in Chicago, Illinois, in 1899 as a separate system with jurisdiction over all cases involving minors. Soon the idea spread to all of the states, and now all industrialized nations have juvenile courts. In part, the court was designed to save children from terrible living conditions and criminal influences. Reformers considered it the duty of the state to protect children and to help those at risk for abuse and criminal lifestyles. Others, however, had other motives. They wanted the court to control children who were unsupervised on the streets, engaging in vices, con games, and sometimes violence. The English legal principle of parens patriae, which gives the state the right to intervene in family life to protect children, became the legal basis for establishing the separate juvenile court system.

Informal procedures marked the early court, because the judges decided cases without adversarial processes. Few records were kept, and those bringing cases before the court were not necessarily present or subjected to cross-examination. Children rarely had legal representation, and the judges made decisions based on their interpretation of the complainant's statement of facts in the case and the findings of the probation officer's investigation of the youth. Cases were decided using the same standard as in civil cases: Only a preponderance of the available evidence need suggest that a juvenile had committed an offense for the court to find the youth delinquent.

In time, state legislatures also passed status offense statues that applied only to minors. Children could be taken to court for refusing to obey parents, being truant from school, using tobacco or alcohol, or engaging in sexual activity. Penalties for status offenses and delinquency included the possibility of incarceration in state training schools. At times, penalties ordered in the juvenile court were harsher than those meted out by the criminal court. Beginning in 1966, this disparity led to a series of U.S. Supreme Court cases that reformed the juvenile justice system and made it more formal by recognizing minors' constitutional rights.