The Criminalization of Black Children

Tera Eva Agyepong's The Criminalization of Black Children fills important gaps in childhood studies, African American history, and American history. Agyepong traces the roots of what we now call the school-to-prison pipeline by showing how Chicago's impoverished black children were tossed into the criminal justice system as their European immigrant counterparts were receiving social services from the government and Progressive Era activists. Chicago has long been represented as what Agyepong calls “the epicenter of the Progressive child-saving movement” and “the home of the nation's very first juvenile court,” but this agenda was almost wholly limited to white immigrant and U.S.-born children (p. 2). Black children who would otherwise have been categorized as “dependent”—orphaned, poor, or with unemployed parents—and taken into public care were more often than not labeled “delinquent” and sent away from their families to “training schools” (p. 41). Agyepong presents startling statistics. For example, as the number of black Chicago residents grew tenfold between 1890 and 1940, black children's access to settlement houses, foster homes, and dependent care shrank, and the percentage of them in some kind of incarceration grew. By 1930, fully 45 percent of black boys in a single South Side neighborhood had been identified as delinquents, and reform schools were overcrowded with African American children and teenagers. While 40 percent of poor immigrant mothers in 1913 collected a publicly funded “mother's pension,” only 3 percent of poor black mothers did so, in part because they were excluded from sites that would inform them of this (p. 56

Criminalization · Criminology · Economic Justice · Immigration · Juvenile delinquency · Political science · Prison · Sociology · Child Welfare and Adoption · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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