Who Gets a Childhood? Race and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century Texas

In Who Gets a Childhood?, William S. Bush historicizes a thorny issue for those championing the idea that the United States has developed into a color-blind society in which the forces of racial discrimination no longer have a significant impact. If most people generally agree that children and adolescents are not entirely responsible for the predicaments in which they sometimes find themselves, numerous indicators suggest that the juvenile justice system frequently denies this protected status from youths of color. This situation, as Bush's meticulously researched study shows, characterized juvenile justice in Texas for most of the twentieth century. Indeed, Who Gets a Childhood? recounts a tragic story of repeated missed opportunities to remake a juvenile justice system that would “deliver on its promises of treatment, rehabilitation, and most significantly, protection” (p. 5). Even as legislators and advocates for children were creating favorable conditions for reforming the excessively punitive Texas juvenile justice system, particularly in the 1910s and 1920s and then again between the 1940s and 1970s, significant barriers blocked their efforts at every step. In fact, the chronological scope of Who Gets a Childhood? is more limited than its title advertises. Regrettably, we hear precious little about the 1980s and 1990s, a period in which the Reagan revolution took the politics of law and order to a new level. Nonetheless, Bush's multilayered analysis of some seven decades of Texas juvenile justice breaks new ground in a number of ways, and it should be required reading for anyone working at the intersection of race and juvenile justice in the twentieth century

Criminology · Economic Justice · Juvenile · Juvenile court · Juvenile delinquency · Political science · Politics · Punitive damages · Race (biology · Sociology · Education Discipline and Inequality · Gender Studies · Law