Youth and Justice in Western States, 1815-1950: From Punishment to Welfare ed. by Jean Trépanier and Xavier Rousseaux

Reviewed by: Youth and Justice in Western States, 1815-1950: From Punishment to Welfare ed. by Jean Trépanier and Xavier Rousseaux Tamara Myers Youth and Justice in Western States, 1815-1950: From Punishment to Welfare. Edited by Jean Trépanier and Xavier Rousseaux. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. xvi + 436 pp. Cloth $109, paper $109. The establishment of juvenile courts at the turn of the twentieth century marked a monumental shift in the legal treatment and social lives of children and youth in Western states. This new volume of comparative juvenile justice history offers readers multiple views into this formative history and demonstrates an important point: there was no one juvenile court model that prevailed; rather, juvenile justice reformers across Western Europe and North America adopted the same nomenclature and often subscribed to similar ideals, but what emerged in practice varied dramatically. We can only know this through the painstaking empirical research upon which these chapters are based. In Youth and Justice, we gain keen insight into the institutions and actors that directed juvenile court systems in England, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, and Montreal from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, when the welfare model of juvenile justice came to predominate. As much as the emergence of juvenile justice systems marks a revolution in judicial treatment of children and arguably a conceptual turn toward recognition of their rights, articles in Part II of Youth and Justice show how the question of what to do with juvenile criminals was very much on the minds of lawmakers and reformers from the early nineteenth century. For example, Peter King argues that prior to legislative changes establishing separate courts and institutions, informal customary practice in England reveals a major preoccupation with juvenile offenders in the pre-Victorian period, extending through mid-century Magistrates took matters into their own hands, trying juveniles summarily (for felonies)—that is, differently than adults. This was true for [End Page 161] Montreal as well; in chapters 4 and 5, we see the implications of the establishment of juvenile reformatories in that city, where children were no longer sent to the local jail for short periods, but to reformatories for much longer sentences. These antecedents to the court systems show how juvenile justice thinking and practice long predate the era of the court establishment and the tensions between rescuing and punishing youth. Part III delves into the creation of juvenile courts and the welfare orientation of juvenile justice that will be familiar to historians of children and youth. These richly detailed articles revisit common themes and arguments of the field: delinquents overwhelmingly came from disadvantage (social and economic); new institutions embraced a form of individualized treatment for youth in trouble, in policy if not always in practice; the court and its workers were not a tool of social control because families appear to have collaborated with the authorities; juvenile court judges enjoyed a high level of discretionary power; girls' precocious sexuality was as problematic as the crimes against the person or property committed by male delinquents. Ingrid van der Bij and Jeroen J. H. Dekker, for example, introduce the reader to the processes used, and paper generated, by the Groningen court in the interwar years, explaining how dispositions—especially family supervision cases—occurred and under what circumstances. All chapters underscore to varying degrees the tensions between repression of youth crime and rehabilitation of offenders. Part IV delves even deeper into the relationships between the courts, delinquency, delinquents, and their families. Chapters 10, 11, 12, and 13 provide a window into the negotiations between the families, the juveniles, the state, and the organizations that grew to "save" or "treat" young people. In articles on Belgium, France, and Montreal, careful examination of thousands of case files helps us imagine the lives of girls and boys as they confronted the adult systems designed to reshape their antisocial, sexual, and general bad behavior. This book assembles empirically rich articles that will be of interest to juvenile justice scholars. The case-study approach provides methodological examples that are instructive for researchers grappling with how to treat dense and voluminous material. Tenacious researchers mined statistical and case file sources to reconstruct how...

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