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Child Savers

The child savers were a group of reformers in 19th-century Chicago who created the first juvenile court in the United States and developed the model for a separate juvenile justice system that is widely in use around the world today. The child savers hoped to care for and reform delinquent, neglected, and dependent children, helping them to lead lives of conformity and thereby preventing future crimes.

Origins

Anthony Platt literally wrote the book on child savers. In The Child Savers (Platt, 1977), he describes the child saving movement as being driven by middle- and upper-class women who had the means, the time, and the political connections to work on philanthropic endeavors. These women were primarily the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant wives and daughters of prominent men in Chicago; as such, they were highly educated and had the leisure time, the resources, and the support to pursue interests outside of their own households.

Working to create new institutions for wayward children seemed to be a natural expansion of the traditional female role as the child savers expanded their duties in the domestic sphere out into the community. Because raising children was largely viewed as women's work, there was little resistance to the child savers as they embraced the role of providing care for and correcting children in need of supervision.

Impact on Children and Juvenile Justice

The child savers created the first juvenile court in Chicago in 1899. It explicitly recognized children and adolescents as more malleable than adults, more open to rehabilitation, and less culpable for their crimes. The juvenile court was based on the idea of parens patriae, where the state—through wise and benevolent judges—would serve as a surrogate parent to children in need of help and supervision. Judges had wide discretion to determine and to act in the “best interest of the child.” The process was meant to be less adversarial than criminal courts, so it was assumed that children did not need due process protections. Children had virtually no rights as their fate was in the hands of the judge.

As it was created, the juvenile court focused on both prevention and control. A primary goal was to control and rehabilitate juvenile delinquents, protecting the community from further crimes. In addition, the juvenile court served a social work function, supervising and caring for dependent and neglected children in the hopes of preventing them from turning to crime to meet their basic needs. Children deemed in need of supervision were frequently sent to reformatories outside of the city where they could learn working-class skills and middle-class, conforming values.

The Legacy of the Child Savers

The child savers undoubtedly had good intentions. They created an innovative juvenile justice system that almost immediately became a model for similar systems in every state and many countries. They managed to separate juveniles from adults in court and in correctional facilities and to change the way the public thought about poor children and adolescent offenders. Critics, however, argue that the child saving movement may have done more to benefit middle- and upper-class women than it did for children. The child savers carved out new roles and careers in social work for women, creating new legitimate opportunities for women to work in the public sphere.

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