Constructing a Black Female Delinquent

This chapter examines the state’s flagship institution for delinquent girls. It reveals the way intersecting notions of race, gender, and sexuality shaped reformers’ and practitioners’ implementation of juvenile justice. African American girls at the Illinois Training School were blamed for the interracial sexual relationships staff members and professionals abhorred and were considered the most violent girls in the institution. They also became subject to a race specific and gendered construction of female delinquency in the institution. Unlike the image of a fixable, inherently innocent delinquent that spurred the child-saving movement, black girls were cast as inherently deviant, unfixable, and dangerous delinquent whose negative influences could contaminate other children in the institution.

Introduction

This chapter describes the arc of the book’s narrative and includes a brief description of each chapter. The overarching argument—that notions of race, childhood, and rehabilitation intersected with the new apparatus of Cook County Juvenile Justice System, and shaped the evolution of juvenile justice in Illinois—is introduced with a case study about a poor migrant boy. His experience foreshadowed the fate of many African American children in Chicago’s juvenile justice system.

Epilogue

This chapter gives a brief overview of the impact Illinois’ turn to a punitive form of juvenile justice system had in the decade after the study. This discussion is focused on administrators at the Training School for Girls at Geneva, the Training School for Boys at St. Charles, and the new maximum security prison for boys at the State Reformatory at Sheridan, and their more explicit embrace of new punitive policies in the institution. It also describes the increasingly disproportionate rate at which black children were committed to these institutions. The epilogue ends by tying together the book’s historical narrative and summarizing the ways intersecting notions of childhood, race, gender, and sexuality undergirded juvenile justice practice in Illinois.

Flight, Fright, and Freedom

This chapter examines how demographic changes at the Illinois Training School for Boys at St. Charles were linked to a punitive turn in institutional policies and state juvenile confinement laws. When the number of African American boys at St. Charles increased over time as a result of migration and discrimination in charity institutions for children in Chicago, the institution’s staff members, state legislators, and residents in the surrounding communities refined their notion in discourse and in practice of what kind of boy St. Charles was intended to house. This hysteria eventually led the Illinois state legislature to mandate that the first maximum security prison for children in the history of the state be built for the “dangerous type of boy” whom the larger public believed was no longer suited for St. Charles.

Boundaries of Innocence

This chapter discusses the way the juvenile court and its ancillary institutions—the Juvenile Detention Canter, Chicago Parental School, and Institute for Juvenile Research—handled black children’s cases. It also delineates the impact the disproportionate number of black children in juvenile court and an artificial inflation of the number of delinquent black children had on the evolution of juvenile justice law. The sympathetic public sentiment that made the Progressive juvenile justice movement viable had begun to wane by the 1930s. As a result, juvenile justice laws began to be more punitive, and the rehabilitative ideal began to be dismantled.

Race-ing Innocence

This chapter elucidates the community milieu in which the nascent juvenile justice system operated. Racialized notions of childhood, Progressive uplift, and the politics of child welfare primed black children to be marked as delinquents even before they formally stepped foot inside Cook County Juvenile Court. The vast majority of public and private agencies for poor, abused, neglected, or abandoned children excluded black children because of their race, even as they readily accepted white and European immigrant children. This dearth of institutional resources for black children was exacerbated by the Great Migration. Chicago’s black community adapted to these realities by doing their own “child-saving” and inserting themselves into a juvenile justice system that began to play a defining role in shaping the trajectory of many black children’s lives.