The juvenile justice system's discrimination against poor and minority children has been well documented, but the system's discrimination on the basis of gender has been less widely recognized. Drawing on neglected court records and secondary sources, Steven Schlossman and Stephanie Wallach show how girls bore a disproportionate share of the burden of juvenile justice in the Progressive era. The authors note that during the Progressive era female juvenile delinquents often received more severe punishments than males, even though boys usually were charged with more serious crimes. Schlossman and Wallach conclude that the discriminatory treatment of female delinquents in the early twentieth century resulted from racial prejudice, new theories of adolescence, and Progressive-era movements to purify society.
This article selectively examines a legendary experiment in community-based delinquency prevention during the 1930s and 1940s, the Chicago Area Project (CAP). The CAP embodied the first systematic challenge by sociologists to the dominance of psychology and psychiatry in public and private programs for the prevention and treatment of juvenile delinquency in the early 20th century. While scholars generally recognize the CAP as a pioneer effort in delinquency prevention, we know remarkably little about its operational schema and day-to-day activities in individual Chicago communities. Prior studies have examined the CAP primarily as an episode in the history of changing ideas about crime causation, and as an important skirmish in ongoing ideological battles between sociologists and psycholoists on the proper focus of correctional treatment. By contrast, this article provides the first systematic, empirical study of the CAP in action in its early years.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.