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CRJS 370 YOUTH JUSTICE COMMENTARY ATHABASCA UNIVERSITY
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CRJS 370 YOUTH JUSTICE COMMENTARY ATHABASCA UNIVERSITY
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CRJS 370 YOUTH JUSTICECOMMENTARY ATHABASCA
UNIVERSITY
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Commentary
The Need for a Separate Youth Justice System
The development and implementation of a separate justice system for youth is a relatively recent
phenomenon in Canada. Up until the enactment of the Juvenile Delinquents Act (1908),
offending youth in Canada were treated similarly to adults under the law. Youth accused of
criminal offending were processed in the same courts and, if sentenced to imprisonment, were
housed with adult offenders. Beginning in the late 1800s, a reform movement was under way that
targeted how youth were dealt with in the criminal justice system. These reformers believed that
youth were less mature and, most importantly, that they were more malleable than their adult
criminal counterparts and more amenable to change, which meant that society no longer
favoured treating them as adults.
In order to better understand our detailed examination of the development of a separate youth
justice system in Canada, Canadian youth justice must be seen in a broader international context,
especially while considering the historical developments of youth justice in the United Kingdom
and the United States. (Please note that you will not be tested on these international
developments in this course and are provided only for additional historical context.)
Historical Developments in Youth Justice
In Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the development of a justice system that
separated youth from adults in criminal matters is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. In
fact, until the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most jurisdictions in these
countries did not have specific legal provisions for handling young people in conflict with the
law—although Canada and the US did prior to this time attempt, unsuccessfully, to create a
separate youth system.
What was it that sparked such change within and across these jurisdictions? The creation and
proliferation of a separate juvenile justice system can be traced to (a) social and economic
changes associated with urbanization; and (b) developments in research on the social origins of
crime and criminal offending (Junger-Tas, 2002). Early youth justice reformers viewed cities as
negatively influencing the morality of young people. As Platt (1977) states, reformers believed
that “the city embodied all of the worst features of industrial life. The city was no place for the
innocence of a young child; it debilitated, corrupted, misled, and tarnished youth” (p. 40). At the
time, the urban environment was believed by many researchers and reformers to contribute to
criminality. It was believed that “a child entering such a social world was impelled by
circumstance, by temptation, by parental neglect, and by a sense of adventure into a life of
crime” (p. 39).
, lOMoAR cPSD| 43283024
During the late nineteenth century, the view was beginning to take root that crime and criminal
offending resulted from innate characteristics and social circumstance—a view that influenced
reformers considerably. The notion of crime as pathological in origin permitted the development
of rehabilitative goals for both adults and young people in corrections. Youth, however, were
seen as particularly amenable to behavioural change. “The ‘rehabilitative ideal’ presupposed that
crime was a symptom of ‘pathology’ and that criminals should be treated like irresponsible, sick
patients. The older a criminal, the more chronic was his sickness; similarly, his chances of
recovery were less than those of a young person” (Platt, 1977, p. 45). Reformers believed that if
a youth at risk was identified early enough, they could remove the youth from corruptive and
immoral influences, thereby preserving and reconstituting the youth’s morality. The major
premise behind the efforts of reformers to create separate youth justice systems, including
correctional reform, was that delinquent youth could be transformed into moral, law-abiding
citizens.
The development of youth justice in Canada, the UK, and the US came out of early reform
initiatives that deemed a wide variety of youthful behaviour as deviant and, thus, worthy of state
intervention. In many instances, young people were processed and committed to institutions for
reasons beyond their control, such as poor parenting and inadequate living arrangements (Platt,
1977). A wide range of behaviours, both criminal and non-criminal, could provide the state with
the justification for official intervention. It is worth noting that, while Canada and the UK
developed nationally-applicable legislation, the US followed a somewhat different route in
granting individual states the responsibility for creating their own youth justice policies. Canada
and the UK each held separate legal provisions for youth by 1908, while most US states had
developed such provisions by 1917.
One of the earliest pieces of legislation formally separating youth from adults in criminal matters
was the Juvenile Court Act of 1899, enacted in the state of Illinois. The Act allowed for the
creation of a separate youth court that would handle youth involved in both criminal and child
welfare matters. The juvenile court in Chicago, Illinois was a special tribunal created by statute
to determine the legal status of “troublesome children.” Underlying the Act was the concept
of parens patriae, the notion that the state should act as a kindly parent, by which the courts were
authorized to use wide discretion in resolving the problems of “its least fortunate junior citizens”
(Platt, 1977, p. 137).
Between 1905 and 1907, amendments were made to the original Juvenile Court Act that
expanded its jurisdiction and “transformed all minors into potential wards of the court”
(Tanenhaus, 2002, p. 56). These changes in Illinois state law meant that “children found to be
dependent, neglected, or delinquent would remain . . . wards [of the state] until they reached the
age of twenty-one or were discharged” (p. 56). While the US developed similar provisions across
state jurisdictions between 1899 and 1917, Canada and the UK each developed their own
national youth justice legislation in 1908. The Juvenile Delinquents Act (JDA) of 1908 in
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