Law, Juvenile

The Beginnings of Juvenile Law

Society's treatment of juveniles was transformed beginning in the late 1800s. In 1899, the Illinois legislature established the first juvenile court of Cook County. From the juvenile court statute adopted in Illinois, the juvenile court system has spread to every state in the union, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The juvenile court system was designed to handle the punishment and rehabilitation of juveniles.

Juvenile courts were rooted in social welfare philosophy. The early reformers were appalled by adult procedures and penalties and by the fact that children could be given long prison sentences and mixed in jails with hardened criminals. Reformers saw the need for a nonpunitive parens patriae alternative to the criminal justice system for juvenile criminal offenders. The court proceedings were designated as civil rather than criminal. The objectives were to provide measures of guidance and rehabilitation for the child and protection for society, not to fix criminal responsibility, guilt, and punishment.

Most states prohibited the prosecution of juveniles for crimes, except when permission was granted by juvenile courts. Juvenile court jurisdiction was not limited to merely criminal behavior; instead, juvenile courts were authorized to handle status offenses, which involved noncriminal behavior deemed harmful or inappropriate. In exercising their role, juvenile courts were not concerned with procedural rules employed in traditional criminal courts. Indeed, procedural protections were deemed counterproductive in trying to rehabilitate juveniles and to fashion a remedy that was appropriate to the individual needs of a particular child. Children, unlike adults, had a right to custody, not to liberty. Juvenile courts were permitted to act as they deemed appropriate in their parens patriae role. Reliance was placed on social workers, probation officers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and physicians in providing information to the juvenile court in assessing and treating the needs of an individual child.

Supreme Court Decisions

The unfettered discretion of juvenile courts eventually began to erode. Courts began to question the practices of juvenile courts during the same period of time that the judicial system was vigorously enforcing the rights of defendants in criminal cases. The U.S. Supreme Court began scrutinizing the practices of the juvenile courts in the 1960s. The first significant case was Kent v. U.S. (1966).

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