Abstract
Before the Second World War, the majority view of academics and practitioners in the field of juvenile justice in the UK and the US was that youthful delinquency was caused by deprivation, be that in economic, physical or emotional terms.1 These deprivations were ultimately caused by the processes of “Western modernity”, namely the inequalities of capitalism, the drive to acquire material goods and the disruption of traditional family structures and social mores. The solution to this was not to physically chastise the young or to incarcerate them, but rather to prevent future bad behaviour by addressing the problems that caused it. This canonical view of the causes of juvenile delinquency is a persistent one, as the essay by Miroslava Chavez-Garcia in this volume demonstrates.
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Notes
H. Hendrick, Child Welfare: England 1872–;1989 (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 9–11.
E. Clapp, Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of the Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1998)
A.M. Piatt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
B.L.Q. Henriques, The Indiscretions of a Magistrate (London: Non-Fiction Book Club, 1950).
See M. Fry and C.B. Russell, A Note Book for the Children’s Court (London: Howard League for Penal Reform, 1950)
J. Watson and P. Watson, The Modern Juvenile Court (London: Shaw and Sons, 1973), p. 3.
I. Gibson, The English Vice: Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England and After (London: Duckworth, 1978), p. 144.
See G. Behlmer, Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
D. Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 27–28.
J. Pratt, Penal Populism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).
See J. Donzelot, The Policing of Families: Welfare versus the State (London: Hutchinson, 1980)
M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of the Medical Profession (London: Routledge, 1989)
J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).
S. Todd, “Affluence, Class and Crown Street: Reinvestigating the Post-War Working Class”, Contemporary British History, 22 (2008): 501–518.
R. Nilsson, “Creating the Swedish Juvenile Delinquent: Criminal Policy, Science and Institutionalization, c. 1930–;19 70”, Scandinavian Journal of History, 34 (2009): 354–375.
M. Abrams, TheTeenage Consumer (London: London Press Exchange, 1959).
T.R. Fyvel, The Insecure Offenders: Rebellious Youth in the Welfare State (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 24.
G. Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London: Macmillan, 1983)
S. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and the Rockers (St. Albans: Paladin, 1973).
T. Crook and G. O’Hara (eds), Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c.1800–;2000 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), pp. 9–11.
See, for example, A. Thorpe, The History of the British Labour Party, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).
P. Willmott, Adolescent Boys of East London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957).
See B. Abel-Smith and P. Townsend, The Poor and the Poorest (London: Bell, 1965).
P. Jephcott, Some Young People (London: George Allen and Un win, 1954).
J.B. Mays, Growing Up in the City: A Study of JuvenUe Delinquency in an Urban Neighbourhood (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1954).
T. Morris, The Criminal Area: A Study in Social Ecology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957).
Home Office, Report of the Committee on Children and Young Persons, Cmnd. 1191 (London: HMSO, 1960).
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© 2014 Kate Bradley
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Bradley, K. (2014). Becoming Delinquent in the Post-War Welfare State: England and Wales, 1945–;1965. In: Juvenile Delinquency and the Limits of Western Influence, 1850–2000. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349521_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349521_10
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