Juvenile Delinquency

The term juvenile delinquency encompasses much more than a legal definition about violations of law by youthful offenders. Its meaning becomes clear only when one analyzes how society has attempted to define and combat delinquency. Americans first employed the term in the eighteenth century, and since then, although mostly used in a universal way, it has focused on the male delinquent. Authorities have considered the unruly boy and the wayward young man especially dangerous for society. Throughout most of American history, ideas about the roles of young men have been closely connected with notions about the nation's future. The young male delinquent therefore figured as an eminent threat.

One can find examples of delinquent juvenile behavior as early as the colonial period. Both male and female adolescents threatened and violated community norms through vandalism, drinking, theft, and premarital sexual experimentation. While this behavior was often destructive, adults enlarged its meanings and added exaggerated dangers to these acts in order to confirm their authority. Early American communities interpreted such violations in highly gendered ways: While the incriminating behavior of a young female (almost always related to her sexual activity) served as a risk to morality, the aggressiveness and disobedience of male delinquents seemed to threaten the order and stability of the community. At a time when parents and churches were responsible for maintaining discipline, Puritan ministers condemned the unruly conduct of young men and urged them to return to established norms of male adulthood.

In the new nation, the growth of the cities, and the resulting erosion of older community-based mechanisms of maintaining social and moral order, spurred adults' anxieties about male youth. Contemporary commentators strongly associated increasing urban vice and crime with the cities' young male population, and as many chroniclers of urban life observed, gangs were composed largely of boys between the ages of eight and seventeen. Most observers linked the problem of youthful crime and vagrancy to immigration, and many blamed Irish parents for a perceived urban crisis. But as the records of institutions such as the New York House of Refuge reveal, nativeborn children also contributed to gang membership.

The antebellum denunciation of young urban males stimulated a lively debate on youth as a distinct life stage. Reformers addressed the apparent problem by creating extrafamilial institutions to socialize criminal adolescents, settling, in particular, on the reform school. Unlike the older houses of refuge established and managed by local urban philanthropists, reform schools were usually located in the country (away from the presumed corrupting influences of urban life), were primarily state supported, and were aimed at the reformation of juvenile offenders. Although reformers referred to these institutions with the language of benevolence and environmentalism, most of the reform schools were, in fact, prisons. Before the emergence of the old common-law idea of parens patriae, which allowed the state to appoint substitute parents, authorities often committed to these institutions adolescents who were wayward or stubborn, rather than criminal.

Both the discourse on the juvenile delinquent and the institutions built to resocialize them added to and reinforced a certain middle-class perception of working-class masculinity as prone to disorderly behavior—a view which informed a superior notion of Victorian, middle- and upper-class manliness. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this distinction weakened, but the creation of the new academic disciplines of adolescent psychology and criminology reconfirmed the established order by lending scientific legitimacy to the idea of the male delinquent as an identifiable and sharply gendered social type.

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