| Summary: | Using Texas as a case study for understanding change in the American juvenile Justice system over the past century, William S. Bush tells the story of three cycles of scandal, reform, and retrenchment, each of which played out in ways that tended to extend the privileges of a protected childhood to white middle-and upper-class youth, while denying those protections to blacks, Latinos, and poor whites.
On the forefornt of both progressive and "get tough" reform campaigns, Texas has led national policy shifts in the treatment of delinquent youth to a surprising degree. Changes in the legal system have included the development of courts devoted exclusively to young offenders, the expanded legal application of psychological expertise, and the rise of the children's rights movement. Bush argues that despite the struggles of reformers, child advocates, parents, and youths themselves to make juvenile justice live up to its ideal of offering young people a second chance, the story of twentieth-century juvenile justice in large part boils down to "the exclusion of poor and nonwhite youth from modern categories of childhood and adolescence."
"Combining innovative archival research, astute analysis of popular culture, and gripping prose, Who Gets a Childhood? presents a harrowing history of juvenile corrections in twentieth-century Texas. Bush reminds us What happens to young people who are denied a childhood, while demonstrating that American Juvenile justice has become the New American Dilemma that urgently demands our attention."--David S. Tanenhaus, author of Juvenile Justice in the Making.
"Bush draws on a staggering amount of research to introduce a compelling cast of previously unknown characters who put Texas and the U.S. South at the center of mid-twentieth-century juvenile justice reform. Legal scholars and social and political historians will need to read and respond to this novel and intriguing study."--Steven L. Schlossman, author of Transforming juvenile Justice: Reform Ideals and Institutional Realities, 1825-1920 --Book Jacket.
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