Course Description and Objectives
This course introduces the history of delinquency as a legal construct in the United States since 1825. Broadly defined as the adult conception of criminal and problematic youth behavior, we will examine what delinquency meant during the past 200 years. This course also introduces the historical responses to delinquency. We will examine the antidelinquency efforts deployed by families, social workers, police departments, judges, clinicians, politicians, and legislators. They tried out a range of credos, practices, policies, theories, programs, and laws. Their ideas about morality, gender, race, citizenship, and human development informed their attempts to define, understand, and solve the social problem of unwanted youth behavior. The meaning of delinquency changed along with cultural tides, politics, and the social and psychological sciences. This course introduces the legal and institutional strategies that evolved in response to changing patterns of criminal and problematic youth behavior.
Required Reading Materials
On average, we will read and discuss two chapters or articles each week. Our reading list includes primary and secondary sources. In addition to several journal articles listed below in the course schedule, we will read selected chapters from the following books:
Tera Eva Agyepong, The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899-1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
Albert Deutsch, Our Rejected Children (Little, Brown & Company, 1950).
Barry C. Feld, Bad Kids: Race and the Transformation of the Juvenile Court (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Kathleen Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Robert M. Mennel, Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquency in the United States, 1825-1940 (Hanover: The University Press of New England, 1973).
Geoff K. Ward, The Black Child Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)
Kenneth Wooden, Weeping in the Playtime of Others: America’s Incarcerated Children (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1976)
Instructional Methods
Classes will consist of reading discussions with occasional presentations by the instructor for context. Please bring your reading notes and questions for discussion. Please be ready to participate with at least one comment or question each time we meet.
Assignments
Grades will be based on your participation each week and on a total of seven assignments:
Reading Response Papers (4)
Newspaper Article Presentations (2)
One Lived Experience Project (1)
Reading Response Papers – (Four altogether, four to five pages each, 15% each, 60% of total)
Every three or four weeks, take-home essays will (a) compare and contrast each of the assigned authors’ perspectives. Your essays will (b) identify key historical developments, (c) evaluate the authors’ explanations, and (d) analyze what is missing or left unanswered.
Newspaper Article Presentations – (5% of total)
This is a search for great newspaper articles. Each student will present two articles of their choice. It’s a chance to share stories that illuminate contemporary discourse on delinquency and antidelinquency. For each presentation, select one article written during that week’s time period. Articles should relate to a topic from the readings and provide helpful or missing context. Come to class ready to explain the story and how it fits with course readings. Please choose from any of the Thursdays listed in our sign-up sheet (anytime other than Week 1, 2, 8, 13, or 15).
Lived Experience Project – (15% of total)
Use at least one primary source that reveals the lived experience of at least one person. The goal is to tell a story while demonstrating your understanding of key elements of the course. The purpose of this project is to bring historical changes to life by featuring first-hand accounts about the human experience of delinquency and antidelinquency. This can be a multimedia project, but it must include a written textual analysis that utilizes course materials in a way that demonstrates a firm grasp of their content.
Participation – (20%)
Participation means showing up with knowledge of the day’s reading assignment, ready and willing to share your thoughts and questions with the class. If you are afraid to talk in class, we will figure out a way to make it work. Participation will be graded with in-class assignments. Participation also includes a written introduction post on Canvas followed by a reflection assignment on the last day.
Course Schedule
Week 1 – Introduction
Thursday
Syllabus
Week 2 – Foundations
Tuesday
Congressional Research Service, “Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention: Background and Current Issues,” 1992.
Thursday
Barry C. Feld, ch. 1 “The Social Construction of Childhood and Adolescence,” (p. 17-45) in Bad Kids: Race and the Transformation of the Juvenile Court (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Week 3 – Before the Juvenile Courts, 1825 to 1899
Tuesday
Robert M. Mennel, “Introduction,” and Chapter 1, “Houses of Refuge, 1825-1860,” in Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquency in the United States, 1825-1940 (Hanover: The University Press of New England, 1973).
Thursday
Mennel, Chapter 2, “Preventive Agencies and Reform Schools, 1850-1890”
Week 4 – Establishing the Juvenile Court
Tuesday
Feld, ch. 2 (p. 46-78) “The Juvenile Court and the Rehabilitative Ideal”
Thursday
Kathleen Jones, Intro (1-15) and Ch. 1 (16-37) “Constructing the Troublesome Child, in Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Week 5 – Racialized Rehabilitative Ideal, 1890s to 1920s
Tuesday
Geoff K. Ward, ch 3, “Birth of a Juvenile Court,” in The Black Child Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Thursday
Tera Eva Agyepong, Introduction and ch. 1, 1-37 in “Race-ing Innocence,” in The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899-1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
Week 6 – Uplift and Guide, 1900 to 1930
Tuesday
Jones, ch. 4, Popularizing Child Guidance, (91-119) 1920s to 1930s
Thursday
Ward ch. 5, “Uplifting Black Citizens Delinquent: The Vanguard Movement, 1900-1930.”
Week 7 – Constructing Black Delinquents, 1930s
Tuesday
Agyepong, ch. 3, “Constructing a Black Female Delinquent”
Thursday
Agyepong, ch. 4, “Flight, Fright, and Freedom” & Epilogue
Week 8 – Postwar Reformers, 1942 to 1959
Tuesday
Albert Deutsch, chapters 1-4, and 17 in Our Rejected Children (Little, Brown & Company, 1950).
Thursday
Albert Elias, “Highfields: A New Slant in the Treatment of Youthful Offenders,” Crime & Delinquency 2, no. 2 (1956): 163-167.
“The Delinquents, Part One: A Boy Named Bob,” aired January 18, 1959, (25:20), and “The Delinquents, Part Two: The Highfields Story,” aired January 25, 1959, (25:20), The Twentieth Century [Walter Cronkite television program].
Week 9 – Ford Foundation, 1959-1966
Tuesday
[booklet] Walter E. Ashley, The Society of the Streets (New York: Ford Foundation, 1962).
Thursday
LaMar T. Empey, and Jerome Rabow, “The Provo Experiment in Delinquency Rehabilitation.”
American Sociological Review 26, no. 5 (1961): 679-96.
[Two letters to the editor] Whitney H. Gordon, LaMar T. Empey, and Jerome Rabow, “Communist Rectification Programs and Delinquency Rehabilitation Programs: A Parallel?” American Sociological Review 27, no. 2 (1962).
Week 10 – 1960s and 1970s Reforming Juvenile Court Process
Tuesday
Elizabeth Hinton, “Creating Crime: The Rise and Impact of National Juvenile Delinquency Programs in Black Urban Neighborhoods,” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 5 (2015): 808-824.
Thursday
Feld, ch. 3, 79-108, “The Constitutional Domestication of the Juvenile Court”
Week 11 – 1960s and 1970s War on Drugs
Tuesday
Matthew D. Lassiter, “Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs,” The Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 126-140.
Thursday
Feld ch. 5, p. 166-188 “Social Control and Noncriminal Status Offenders”
Week 12 – 1970s Privatization
Tuesday
Preface (iii-v), Introduction (1-2), “Behavior Modification and the Courts: The Legal Background” (3-10), “Behavior Modification Technology” (11-17), and “The Seed” (182-200), in U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Individual Rights and the Federal Role in Behavior Modification: A Study Prepared by the Staff of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, 93rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1974.
Thursday
Kenneth Wooden, chapters 8, 9, and 18 (p. 95-117, 232-248) in Weeping in the Playtime of Others: America’s Incarcerated Children (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1976).
Week 13 – 1980s to 1990s War on Drugs, War on Violence
Tuesday
Barry L. Beyerstein, “Treatment, Thought Reform, and the Road to Hell,” 245-251, in Arnold. S. Trebach and Kevin. B. Zeese (eds.), Strategies for Change: New Directions in Drug Policy (Washington, D.C.: Drug Policy Foundation, 1992).
Thursday
Feld, ch. 6, 189-244 “Delinquent or Criminal?”
Week 14 – Twenty-First-Century Delinquency
Tuesday
Ana Muniz, “Maintaining Racial Boundaries: Criminalization, Neighborhood Context, and the Origins of Gang Injunctions,” Social Problems 61, no. 2 (May 2014): 216-236.
Thursday
Leslie Paik, Preface, ch. 2 & 3, in Discretionary Justice: Looking Inside a Juvenile Drug Court (Rutgers University Press, 2011).
and
Alexandra Cox, Introduction and ch. 4, “The Responsibility Trap,” in Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People (Rutgers University Press, 2017).
Week 15 – Delinquency Today
Tuesday
Daniel L. Hatcher, “Commodified Inequality: Racialized Harm to Children and Families in the Injustice Enterprise,” Family Court Review 61 (no. 2): 341-358.
Featured Image Credit: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Policeman and young boy arguing, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, New York City, 1914” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed August 8, 2025. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c223d760-c55e-012f-e9eb-58d385a7bc34.
Clio and the Contemporary 
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