Book review: Barry C Feld, The Evolution of the Juvenile Court: Race, Politics, and the Criminalizing of Juvenile Justice
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618775863 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Author | Miroslava Chávez-García |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480618775863
Theoretical Criminology
2019, Vol. 23(1) 117 –130
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480618775863
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Book reviews
Barry C Feld, The Evolution of the Juvenile Court: Race, Politics, and the Criminalizing of Juvenile
Justice, New York University Press: New York, 2017; 392 pp.: 978479895694, $35.00 (cloth)
Reviewed by: Miroslava Chávez-García, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
A sweeping overview of the evolution of juvenile justice in the United States, Feld’s The
Evolution of the Juvenile Court reflects years of research and writing. By no means lim-
ited to the juvenile court or juvenile justice, as the title might imply, Feld’s study exam-
ines closely and deftly the influence of the social and political context as well as
ideologies about race, class, gender, age, and crime and how they have shaped and
reshaped the nature of the court across the 20th century. As he demonstrates, beliefs
about childhood, crime control, race, class, and gender are socially constructed and oper-
ate through political processes, which ultimately hurt poor children and especially poor
children of color, who are more disenfranchised today than in past generations.
To Feld, the root causes of delinquency that land youths in the juvenile justice system
are childhood poverty and the attendant circumstances of growing up without the basic
necessities to become a healthy, educated, and active member of society. Though child-
hood poverty is on the decline since the post-recession peak of 18 percent in 2012,
today’s rate of 15.6 percent remains too high, especially when you examine children of
color whose rates are triple or more than that of their white peers. For school-age chil-
dren, poverty impacts grades, attendance, nutrition, and achievement. In the long term,
it influences earnings and mortality as well. We must, Feld argues, attend to such struc-
tural inequalities and rethink the competence and culpability of young people, particu-
larly those who end up in the juvenile justice system. As developmental psychology and
neuroscience research has shown, young people are not fully capable of making deci-
sions as are adults. To account for that, Feld calls for a “youth discount” at all levels of
the juvenile justice system.
Feld opens his study by asking the reader to consider how we think about children and
crime control; how ideas about race, gender, and class affect how we think about children
and crime; and, how those beliefs have changed over time. To Feld, the answers are often
less than satisfying, especially as they have impacted African American youths who have
felt the brunt of criminalizing in the juvenile justice system. To track the experience of
775863TCR0010.1177/1362480618775863Theoretical CriminologyBook reviews
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