Criminal Justice - Law Essays

Federal Criminal Justice
The creation of the first juvenile court in America, in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, in 1899, marked the culmination of more than a century of effort by social and legal reformers who wanted to see children removed from the jurisdiction of the adult criminal courts. Alarmed by the increasing family disorganization and the increase in antisocial behavior by young people that accompanied the growth of American cities in the 1800's, these reformers sought to create a strong but informal civil court to intervene in the lives of troubled young people. The objective of this intervention was helping, sometimes called salvation many civic reformers were religious reformers as well, and later called by the generic term rehabilitation.
The juvenile court, which emphasized reform of young people over punishment, spread like wildfire. Almost all of the states had established separate

courts for children by the end of World War I. The juvenile courts established under these reform statutes had four main features:
1. Different procedures, more civil than criminal, from the adult court.
2. Different terminology, in what the legal documents and proceedings were called.
3. A different set of actors, emphasizing the role of the juvenile court judge, the police juvenile officer, the juvenile probation officer, and later the juvenile social worker.
4. Different institutions, for short-term and long-term housing, separating juveniles from adults.
The end result would be a process and a system that worked with children generically defined as persons under the age of 17 or 18 as an entity entirely separate and distinct from adult

offenders. While the adult criminal court system emphasized punishment, the juvenile system attempted to follow a different track, emphasizing rehabilitation. This would prove to be a difficult path for the system to follow, and one subject to many inconsistencies in the local and state legal systems of the time. In the South, for example, juvenile justice had to be applied within a social order built on a doctrine of separate but equal institutions for black and whites.
During the early to middle portion of the 20th century, Louisiana, like many other states, still operated under a segregated school system. This applied not only to educational facilities but also to correctional facilities.Abiding by the state's segregation laws, legislation called for a separate facility to house white juvenile offenders. In 1904, the Louisiana legislature approved a bill to build such a facility in Monroe, Louisiana. Called the Louisiana State Reform School for Boys and later Louisiana Training Institute at Monroe, the facility is known today as Swanson Correctional Center for Youth. This facility was built to house white male youth and operated in that capacity until 1969. Act 175 of 1926 created The State Industrial School for Girls. This facility was opened to house white female persons between the ages of 12 and 19, who had been legally adjudged delinquent, neglected, incorrigible, or dependant.
In 1928, with the help of two African American educators, J.D Lafarque and Southern University President J.S. Clark, the legislature was convinced to create a similar institute for African Americans. Before that time, while young white boys were being sent to a

juvenile training school for rehabilitation, young black boys were being sent to the state penitentiary at Angola, where they were treated as ordinary adult convicts serving hard labor in the fields. It was not until 1948 that the State Industrial School for Colored Youth was opened in Scotlandville, on the north end of Baton Rouge. This facility housed African American female and male offenders and was coeducational until 1956, when a separate girl’s dorm was built. In 1969 the Louisiana Supreme Court put into effect a desegregation order, which would end separate but equal correctional facilities forever.