A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Centenary

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Abstract
Within the past three decades, legal changes have transformed the juvenile court from a nominally rehabilitative social welfare agency into a second-class criminal court for young offenders. The migration of blacks from the rural south to the urban north that began more than three-quarters of a century ago, the structural transformation of cities and the economy over the past quarter of a century, and the current public and political linkages between race and serious youth crime provided the impetus for recent punitive juvenile justice policies. Two competing conceptions of young people - innocence and responsibility - have facilitated the juvenile court's metamorphosis from a welfare into a penal organization as policy makers selectively manipulate these competing social constructs to conduct a form of `criminological triage'. At the `soft end', states have shifted non-criminal status offenders out of the juvenile system into a `hidden system' in the private-sector mental health and chemical dependency industries. At the `hard end', states transfer increasing numbers of youths, disproportionately minority, into the criminal justice system. In the `middle', states' sentencing policies escalate the punishments imposed on those delinquents, again disproportionately minority, who remain in an increasingly criminalized juvenile justice system. These changes in youth sentencing policy reflect both a change in the social construction of adolescence and in strategies of social control. As a result, very little remains of the Progressives' idea of a rehabilitative juvenile court.