Platt, Tony --- "The Child Savers Reconsidered" [2008] CICrimJust 18; (2008) 20(1) Current Issues in Criminal Justice 123

• Contemporary Comments
• Introduction
• Revising the Canon
• Conclusion
• References

Contemporary Comments

The Child Savers Reconsidered^[1]

Abstract

The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency was first published in 1969, later re-conceptualised and published in a second edition in 1977. It quickly entered the canon and has become part of the common sense narrative of the American juvenile justice system. A new 40th anniversary edition will be published in 2009 by Rutgers University Press. Drawing upon various critiques of The Child Savers and recent historiography on its subject matter, I revisit the following issues: the significance of the Progressive Era as the starting point of juvenile justice history; limitations of the ‘social control’ perspective; the inter-relationship of class, race, gender, and juvenile justice; the need for comparative and global perspectives on juvenile justice; and a reconsideration of the legacies of neo-liberalism. The article calls for a new round of revisionist scholarship on juvenile justice.

Introduction

The Child Savers was originally conceived and written as a dissertation at the School of Criminology in Berkeley from 1965 to 1966, 40 years ago. It was first published in 1969, later re-conceptualised and published in 1977. It quickly entered the canon and has become part of the common sense narrative of the American juvenile justice system. It is still in print.^[2]

It is ironic that what started off as a critique of the prevailing canon – namely, that the child-saving movement represented an enlightened effort to alleviate the miseries of urban life caused by unregulated capitalism – has itself become canonical. The argument of the book might be summarised as follows: the benevolent rhetoric of progressive juvenile justice masked a class-based system of harsh punishment; the child savers created new categories of youthful crime (status offences), deprived urban youth of due process and increased the role of the state in the daily lives of the working class; while the child saving movement drew its most active support from middle class women’s groups and professionals, their vision was shared and financed by ruling elites (Platt 1969, 1977).

The Child Savers emerged at a time of vigorous debate taking place in criminology and the sociology of deviance in the 1960s. When I arrived in Berkeley to do graduate work in 1963, the university was becoming a site of political struggles – about free speech, the ‘military-industrial complex’, affirmative action, and the third wave of feminism. These movements also shook up established canons of knowledge and challenged state-determined research priorities.

The break with positivism and attraction to labelling theory meant that for some of us the focus shifted from criminality to the socio-legal construction of criminality, from behaviour to institutions, from what made delinquents different to how did the legal system make them different. For those of us interested in historical critiques, the new revisionism – exemplified in the work of Gabriel Kolko (1967), William Appleman Williams (1966) and James Weinstein (1969) – provided a framework for understanding how corporate leaders allied with urban reformers. Marxism was an important resource for trying to understand the systemic nature of inequality. In sociology, the work of labelling and conflict theorists – Edwin Lemert, Howard Becker, Erving Goffman, for example – was in vogue. In addition, Philippe Aris’ (1965) constructionist paradigm of childhood, first published in English in the mid-1960s, was an important influence on my work.^[3] And the grassroots, autobiographical perspectives of Claude Brown, George Jackson and Piri Thomas – to name some of the most popular first-person writers – gave us a focus on agency as well as structure.

The Child Savers has had its share of critics. Some liberal historians see it as one-dimensional, simplistic, even conspiratorial. In 1994, the legal historian Lawrence Friedman referred to The Child Savers as a ‘diatribe’ and a ‘book that ruffled some academic feathers’. He called my viewpoint ‘cynical (and leftist)’. Some feminist writers suspect misogyny lurks behind its tendency to blame women reformers for what went wrong.^[4]

In the original publication of The Child Savers (1969:75, 77) I made an admittedly functionalist and one-dimensional argument that women reformers turned to child saving as a ‘moral enterprise … Philanthropic work’, I observed, ‘filled a void in their own lives, a void which was created by the decline of traditional religion, increased leisure and boredom, the rise of public education, and the breakdown of communal life in impersonal, crowded cities’. But in the 1977 edition, by then benefiting from feminist scholarship, I revised this limited view of women’s roles during the Progressive Era. Quoting from Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden From History, I argued that ‘middle-class women found themselves cut off from production and economically dependent on a man … The rescuers [child savers] persisted in seeing the values of their own class as universal and in seeing the state – their state which enforced their class interests – as a neutral body’ (Rowbotham quoted in Platt 1977:xxiv-xxvi). I concluded that the child savers were both agents of their own ideas and liberation and defenders of ‘existing political and economic arrangements’. I stand by that view today.

Overall, the main arguments of the book have become the conventional wisdom. It seems as though I’ve joined the establishment. An informal survey of current American textbooks on juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice suggests that the child saving paradigm has become widely incorporated into textbook history (Bartollas 2006; Chesney-Lind & Shelden 2004; Davis et al 2004; Kratcoski & Kratcoski 2004; Roberts 2004; Siegel 2002). It is time for another round of revisionism. Here are five suggestions for some new directions in the history of juvenile justice.

Revising the Canon

1. The book’s starting point is the American Progressive Era (1890-1920), which makes sense given that it was an important moment of social reform and the context for the child-saving movement. But I don’t think it was such a decisive rupture with the past as I suggested in the book. There was more of an overlap between 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism and 20th-century social democracy, more continuities and contradictions than I imagined. I say this now with hindsight, understanding how Old and New Right thinking about crime – now in the guise of neoliberalism – has had such staying power. Our focus in the 1960s was to expose and attack social democratic liberalism (Progressivism) – the war on poverty, community-based corrections, and so on – as counter-revolutionary. Therefore we focused on the importance of the Progressive Era as the birthplace of ‘reformist reformism’. The staying power of 19th-century liberalism, however, necessitates a new look at the origins of the modern juvenile justice system.

2. As I noted, The Child Savers was part of a tendency that focused on institutions of injustice, not on individuals and behaviour. (It is possible too that our focus on social control made it easier for the Right to monopolise the discourse about criminal behaviour). As a result there is a tendency to overstate the power of the state, reify the child savers’ victims, and minimise issues of agency, resistance and engagement. For example, historian Eileen Boris (1991) suggests that many immigrant families turned to the child savers for help in controlling their wayward children. The early juvenile justice system, says Boris, ‘was more interactive than the concept of social control suggests’. Similarly, Mary Odem (1995) has documented how working class, immigrant families asserted their own needs and helped to shape the outcome of decisions in the juvenile justice system.

3. The Child Savers discusses the role that racism has played in the contemporary juvenile justice system. As I concluded in 1977, ‘it is impossible to conceive of the juvenile justice system as an agency of “rehabilitation” and social equality in a society where most working-class and minority youths are tracked into dead-end or low wage jobs, where institutional racism and sexism systematically segment people into antagonistic social relations, and where the criminal justice system is blatantly used to undermine and repress progressive political movements’ (Platt 1997:192).

But what is not discussed in the book is the inter-relationship of race, gender, and juvenile justice during the Progressive Era. Fortunately, this significant gap is being filled by feminist historians writing about the racial and gendered dynamics of the welfare system and juvenile justice (Kunzel 1993). Nancy Bristow’s important study of social engineering in the United States during and after World War I explores how a campaign against venereal disease was shaped by attitudes of ‘cultural nationalism’ not unlike those of the child savers. ‘Devoted to their own white, urban, middle-class vision, the reformers clung tenaciously to their assumptions regarding anyone outside their cultural group’ (Bristow 1996:53). The crusade to save working class women quickly deteriorated into ‘more straightforward control and repression through law enforcement’ (ibid:90).

And new work on the history of juvenile justice – such as Geoff Ward of the University of California, Irvine, on the Black child saving movement and by Miroslava Ch‡vez-Garcia of the University of California, Davis on the racist uses of eugenics measures against Chicano youth in California’s early 20th-century history – promises to revise the canon. We also need to pay attention to how during the Progressive Era American Indian youth were forced into boarding schools with the aim of destroying indigenous cultures (also in the name of child saving).

4. After World War II, the Cold War climate made the conceptualisation of American history much more insular and self-centred. In the 1960s and 1970s, leftist sociology and criminology for very different reasons focused their critiques on the internal workings of American power. My motivation to unmask the realities of American juvenile justice limited my frame of reference. The Cold War historians wanted to celebrate the uniqueness of the American system; I wanted to present a critique of the uniqueness of American injustice. Leftist blinders can be as problematic as rightist blinders.

Recently, a new tendency among American historians has called for relocating American history within global histories (Bender 2006). This opens the door to exploring how the child saving movement interacted with other reform movements across the Atlantic, how the American experience was driven as much by the aftermath of industrialisation globally as it was by unique, internal considerations. For American Progressives, writes Alan Dawley, ‘there was no escaping [such] world-historical events’ as revolutionary movements from Mexico to Russia, and the social turmoil unleashed by free market urbanisation. The child saving movement was part of an interconnected world of inequality and reform, influenced by the ideas and policies promoted by socialists, feminists and reformers. ‘A heavy traffic in reform ideas,’ notes Dawley (2003:15), ‘clogged the sea lanes of the North Atlantic and, to a lesser extent, the South Pacific’. Understanding Progressivism and the child saving movement requires us, in the words of historian Daniel Rodgers (1998:7) to ‘rediscover a largely forgotten world of transnational borrowings and imitation, adaptation and transformation’.

5. Finally, The Child Savers argues that in the struggle over ‘nature versus nurture’, the 20th century advocates of the redemptive power of nurture prevailed over their more pessimistic 19th-century counterparts. ‘The element of fatalism in theories of crime’, I observed, ‘was modified with the rise of a professional class of penal administrators and social servants who promoted a developmental view of human behaviour’ (Platt 1977:44).

In my most recent book (Platt 2006), which includes an analysis of the development and influences of American eugenics, I find that the biological imperative had considerable staying power in the 20th and into the 21st century. In her study of social engineering in the 1910s and 1920s, Nancy Bristow (1996:122-123) reports that ‘hard-core biological determinism’ continued to shape public policies addressing women’s sexuality beyond the Progressive Era. The persistence and deepening of social inequality in the United States and around the world has given life to eugenics in new forms – in ideas about intelligence (such as The Bell Curve), sexuality and poverty. I now realise that The Child Savers under-estimated the persistence of social Darwinist ideology.

Conclusion

In my formative years, we paid serious attention to historical analysis. We were close students, for example, of Rusche and Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure (1967) and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977). This was in part because the historical method was so central to Marxism; but also because the anti-war and civil rights, and later, feminist movements compelled us to investigate the historical roots of American militarism, imperialism, racism, and sexism. We needed to know if the ‘isms’ were aberrational and exceptional or, as we suspected, longstanding and structural.

The study of American history has been transformed in my lifetime by social and labour history, and by cultural and global studies. But in American criminology and related fields, I see a turning away from the historical method as graduate schools promote empirical and policy studies of the here and now. Hopefully, in the future we will see a revival of interest in historical analysis among students and intellectuals working in justice studies. It is time for the revisionist Child Savers to be revised.

Tony Platt

Professor Emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, and a member of the editorial board of Social Justice. [e-mail]

References

Aris P 1965 Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life Vintage Books New York

Atwell M May 1996 ‘Review of Mary Odem’s Delinquent Daughters’ H-PCAACA

Bartollas C 2006 Juvenile Delinquency Pearson Education New York

Bender T 2006 A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History Hill and Wang New York

Boris E 1991 ‘Reconstructing the “Family”: Women, Progressive Reform, and the Problem of Social Control’ in N Frankel & N Dye (eds) Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era University of Kentucky Press Lexington

Bristow N 1996 Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War New York University Press New York

Chesney-Lind M & Shelden R 2004 Girls, Delinquency, and Juvenile Justice Wadsworth New York

Cunningham H 2006 The Invention of Childhood BBC Books London

Davis S et al 2004 Children in the Legal System: Cases and Materials Foundation Press New York

Dawley A 2003 Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution Princeton University Press Princeton

Foucault M 1977 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Pantheon Books New York

Friedman L 1994 Crime and Punishment in American History Basic Books New York

Gordon L 1990 ‘The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State’ in L Gordon (ed) Women, the State and Welfare University of Wisconsin Press Madison

Kolko G 1967 The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History Quadrangle Books New York

Kratcoski L & Kratcoski P 2004 Juvenile Delinquency Pearson Education New York

Kunzel R 1993 Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945 Yale University Press New Haven

Odem M 1995 Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 University of Northern Carolina Press Chapel Hill

Platt A 1969/ 1977 The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency University of Chicago Press Chicago

Platt A with O’Leary C 2006 Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, From Patton’s Trophy to Public Memorial Paradigm Publishers Denver

Roberts A 2004 Juvenile Justice Sourcebook: Past, Present, and Failure Oxford University Press New York

Rodgers D 1998 Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age Harvard University Press Cambridge

Rusche G & Kirchheimer O 1967 Punishment and Social Structure Columbia University Press New York

Siegel L 2002 Juvenile Delinquency: The Core Wadsworth New York

Williams W 1966 The Contours of American History Quadrangle Books New York

Weinstein J 1969 The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 Beacon Press New York

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^[1]This paper was prepared for the annual conference of Society for the History of Children and Youth, Norrköpping, Sweden, June 27-30, 2007. Thanks to Miroslava Chávez-Garcia for our discussions about the child saving movement and to Nichole Schulze for research assistance.

^[2]A new edition will be published by Rutgers University Press in 2009.

^[3]For a more recent interpretation of this tradition, see Hugh Cunningham (2006).

^[4]‘I have been frustrated that much of the work on the juvenile justice system by those in the field of criminal justice relies on the misogynist and outdated view of Anthony Platt’s The Child Savers’, wrote Mary Atwell (1996) in a review of Mary Odem’s Delinquent Daughters. A more favourable feminist view of the book can be found in Linda Gordon (1990).