Kids' Court Centennial

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 4, 1999 | by Cheryl Wetzstein

The juvenile-court system is 100 years old, and some say it's time for a change.

In 1827, a 12-year-old boy named James Guild killed a grandmother. The boy, a black servant of a New Jersey landowner, faced an adult jury and was found guilty of murder, punishable by death. On Nov. 28, 1828, at age 13, "Little Jim," as the boy was called, climbed a gallows built just for him and was hanged as thousands of people watched.

Guild was one of untold numbers of children who were tried, convicted, jailed and even executed as adults during the 1700s and 1800s. The only children who escaped punishment were those age 7 or younger, "by reason of infancy." In 1899, however, Chicago social reformers successfully lobbied for a "children's court" to handle wayward children with compassion.

Today, the 100-year-old U.S. juvenile-court system stretches over 3,000 jurisdictions and involves more than 7,000 judges and 100,000 court personnel, according to the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, or NCJFCJ, in Reno, Nev. Each year, the courts decide some 1.3 million delinquency cases and hear nearly 400,000 child-welfare cases. Its purpose, then and now, is "the recovery and rehabilitation of children, rather than their punishment and incapacitation," said Juvenile Court Judge J. Dean Lewis at a recent conference on the court's centennial in Chicago.

But the core issue underlying the birth of the court--what society should do with its violent youth -- remains unsettled. Although the system has its staunch supporters and success stories, it also has garnered harsh criticism for making capricious decisions, keeping children adrift in foster care and releasing murderous delinquents. Some legal experts have begun to call for its end. Congress, meanwhile, remains disposed to reform. Lawmakers are preparing a $1 billion bill to fund get-tough "accountability" programs for delinquent youth in the system as well as prevention programs for at-risk youth and their families.

From colonial times through the 1800s, only the youngest children escaped punishment for their crimes, according to a booklet on the court's centennial published by the Coalition for Juvenile Justice. Teen-agers were just as likely as adults to be whipped, put in stocks, jailed or hanged for their crimes.

Starting in the early 1800s, juries began injecting compassion into the law by refusing to convict children, even though the evidence clearly indicated their guilt. Reformers seized on this wave of "jury nullifications" and created reform schools, which became homes for children convicted of crimes or found to be "vagrants" or "ungovernable." Such schools flourished for several decades until some were revealed to be little more than sweatshops for children. In 1871, the reform school in Chicago burned in the city's great fire. Many of its charges ended up in the city jails.

A few years later, Chicago social leaders Lucy Flower, Adelaide Groves and Julia Lathrop toured those jails and were appalled to find "quite small boys confined in the same quarters with murderers, anarchists and hardened criminals." These women, who believed that children were innately good and that the state had a moral duty to correct and save wayward youth, began lobbying for a separate "children's court" to handle their cases.

Their efforts paid off when the Illinois Legislature enacted a law to allow such a court. On July 3, 1899, Cook County Juvenile Judge Richard Tuthill heard the nation's first juvenile-court case, involving an 11-year-old boy who was accused of larceny.

The new court system was unique in four ways, explains David Doi, spokesman for the Coalition for Juvenile Justice:

* It was "rehabilitative" rather than punitive.

* Its records were confidential.

* It did not place juveniles in adult facilities.

* It allowed informal procedures in court, preferring to act "as a wise parent" with a "wayward child," as Judge Julian Mack, one of the original juvenile court jurists, put it.

Juvenile courts did not bother with "adult" legal rights, such as having a lawyer represent a child. Instead, it was common for the judge simply to talk with a child and, without hearing from witnesses, decide his or her fate.

The "children's court" idea caught on. By 1925, there were juvenile courts in 46 states and the District of Columbia. But the practice came under criticism for being capricious -- sentences were viewed as too lenient or too harsh. In the 1960s, after a judge gave a particularly stiff sentence to a teen-age boy -- six years in jail for making obscene phone calls -- the boy's father sued and took the case to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas ruled in favor of the teen while describing the juvenile court as "a kangaroo court."

Decisions from that and other cases returned many adult legal protections to juvenile court, including children's rights to lawyers, hearings and witnesses who can be cross-examined. Today, juvenile courts remain in flux as they cope with high-profile violence by children and swelling child-welfare caseloads.