In 1899, Illinois created the first juvenile justice system with the pioneering idea that youths needed rehabilitation rather than the punishment found in adult prisons. With this idea, the Progressive Era women of Hull-House, Chicago’s famous settlement house, succeeded in instituting the first “parental court” of Chicago.
Cook County’s juvenile court in Illinois was the first of its kind not only in the nation, but in the world. Since its inception, juvenile courts have been integrated into every U.S. state and numerous countries abroad.
In the century since its establishment, however, Illinois’ juvenile justice system has navigated significant challenges to its ideals.
The court was grounded in the early English common law idea of parens patriae, under which the government acts as the legal protector of children who are unable to protect themselves. Theoretically, youths required more care and rehabilitation than adults, which could be accomplished by a less rigid and complex court system. In practice, however, relying on judges to act in youths’ best interests proved flawed, resulting in the denial of due process rights to youths.
“Limiting the due process rights of kids in the juvenile system is based on the notion that they’re not really being punished, so they don’t need the due process protections that are given to adults, but in fact, they are being punished,” Thomas Geraghty, director emeritus of the Bluhm Legal Clinic and a former Northwestern Pritzker School of Law professor, said.
So, in the mid-20th century, when concerns over the system’s informality grew, new rights were afforded to juveniles through Supreme Court rulings. New due process rights included notice of the charges, protection against self-incrimination, and the right to appeal.
Soon after reforms to juvenile due process were implemented, political rhetoric about cracking down on crime and drug use pervaded the country. The nation was swept by tougher sentencing laws and punitive punishments. Illinois, as a part of a wave of states in the 1970s and ’80s, implemented mandatory transfers from juvenile to adult courts for certain offenses and handed down the first of over 100 life sentences without the possibility of parole to juveniles.
“Illinois is really proud of being such a trailblazer when it comes to dealing with children and youth,” Lindsey Hammond, policy director at Restore Justice, said. “Over time, I think, sadly, we’ve lost track of that with more punitive sentencing that tries to be ‘more tough on crime.’”
Once regarded as too informal, juvenile courts of the ’80s began to resemble the unforgiving adult courts of the mass incarceration era. Youth confinement reached its peak in 1995, the same year the racially-motivated myth of the “superpredator” entered the American lexicon. This concept of the remorseless, juvenile criminal destined to commit felonies paved the way for disproportionately high levels of arrest for Black youths.
In 1996, Geraghty was part of a team representing a 14-year-old so-called “superpredator” in the case of Robert “Yummy” Sandifer, an 11-year-old murdered in Chicago. After being initially charged in juvenile court, Geraghty’s client was moved to adult court, a move which the defense contested.
Because of their age and impressionability, youth in the adult system may be more likely to have their confessions misinterpreted or coerced.
“We lost pretty much all the way through the system, but one of the issues was the admissibility of his confession, and the question of how a young person should be treated by the police when interrogated for a serious crime,” Geraghty said.
Lawmakers now regard the fatalistic thinking as flawed: juveniles’ lack of full development is what sets them apart from adults.
The 1899 ideal of juvenile court emphasized rehabilitation. And in the 21st century, rehabilitation was once again foregrounded in key U.S. Supreme Court decisions like Roper v. Simmons (2005), Graham v. Florida (2010) and Miller v. Alabama (2012), which relied on neuroscience and developmental psychology as evidence of juveniles’ ability to grow and change from their previous behavior.
Scott Main, director of the Illinois Juvenile Defender Resource Center, worked with 100 or so individuals he cites as impacted by Miller v. Alabama, which prohibited mandatory life in prison without the possibility of parole for juvenile homicide offenders. Where a case was, the first time around, “a foregone conclusion,” it could now be re-sentenced.
The decisions are an effort to walk back on the harsh sentencing of decades before.
“The system we have now is wildly different than what was first envisioned when they created a separate court system for kids,” Main said.
The guiding principle of parens patriae, which first formed the juvenile court, still affects the court today — for better or for worse.
“Quite often you see Juvenile Court Judges applying, in fact, a lesser standard of proof because they feel that the consequences of a guilty finding are not as severe as they would be if the case were being tried in the adult system,” Geraghty said.
Another concern is the lack of agency children have in decisions being made on their behalf.
“What was not clearly defined in Illinois,” Main said, referring to the early 2000s, “was whether or not a defense attorney for a kid was a best interest attorney or an express interest attorney.”
Juvenile facilities also face financial limitations.
According to Geraghty, “our local detention center in Cook County for many years was terribly overcrowded and managed very poorly and under-resourced, which resulted in our detention center being sued in the early 2000s.”
The conditions of the court and the prisons, along with disproportionately high numbers of non-white detained juveniles, lead to questions of the future of juvenile detention.
Abolition is a common suggestion. Some advocates believe juvenile cases should be subsumed into the adult court where there would be more oversight. Others suggest juveniles should instead find reform through their communities. Still others say the answer lies somewhere in between.
“If someone is going to be involved in our system, I want to make sure they are getting the best care that they can within that system, and then hopefully speeding their way out of it,” Main said.
The slate of Supreme Court decisions in the early 2000s gave individuals who had previously been sentenced to juvenile life without parole the chance of life after prison.
“We have so many colleagues at Restore Justice who have had extreme sentences, like natural life sentences, that they were given when they were children. Now that they are home, they are changing the world. They are investing in the community,” Hammond said. “I think that is exactly what we need to break the cycle that has gone on far too long.”
Today, the Cook County juvenile justice system, once a pioneer in juvenile detention, continues to face many of the same issues pervading systems across the country.
“No one that I’m aware of,” Geraghty said, “has really solved the issue of the conflict between the promise of the concept and the reality on the ground.”
