Gateway to Justice: The Juvenile Court and Progressive Child Welfare in a Southern City.

Gateway to Justice: The Juvenile Court and Progressive Child Welfare in a Southern City. By Jennifer Trost. Studies in the Legal History of the South. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2005. Pp. xiv, 209. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8203-2671-2; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8203-2664-X.)

This history of the Memphis juvenile court during the 1920s addresses a fascinating set of historical subcategories (urban, legal, Progressivism, gender and family, race, Memphis, and the South) and social contrasts (delinquency/ dependency, girls/boys, blacks/whites, adults/children, public/private, rural migrants/urbanites). With only 161 pages of text, the heart of the book--the case studies of delinquent and dependent children who stood before the court--unfortunately does not begin until page 75. In the first section, which is largely descriptive rather than analytical, Trost provides a detailed but sometimes disorganized background of the social, economic, and political history of the city; the beginnings of Progressive social reform and the establishment of a child welfare network; and the founding of the juvenile court itself. This contextual material is insufficiently connected to the remainder of the book, which deals with the juvenile justice system during the 1920s, when "child welfare service providers formed a coherent and self-conscious network" that provided a "comprehensive system of coordinated service" (p. 66).

Trost chose three years during the 1920s from which to draw a sample of 737 cases in the court minute books and social case files that "chronicle extraordinarily complex stories of individual families" (p. 164). She states that "[t]he Memphis Juvenile Court had two important and distinctive characteristics: first, its domination by women, including the thirty-year tenure of a female chief judge, and second, the effects of racial ideology on court procedures and operations" (p. 34). Trost's thesis that the juvenile court served as a "gateway to justice" and social services for delinquent and dependent children is qualified and at times is contradicted by the evidence, particularly for black children. Private institutions cared for dependent children, only 15 percent of whom were black, while public institutions cared for delinquent children, 56 percent of whom were black. (Memphis's population was 40 percent black in 1920.) Trost concludes that "black families did not seek the juvenile court's assistance to the same degree as did white families, perhaps because the former associated the juvenile court with coercion" (p. 160).

By the 1920s the Shelby County Industrial and Training School, a "crucial part of the juvenile corrections system," had become "a predominantly black institution" plagued by underfunding, overcrowding, poor sanitation, mismanagement, and unsafe conditions (p. 152). Here Trost concludes that "blacks probably suffered the most from the school's practice of paroling boys to local citizens for agricultural labor" without pay, educational opportunities, or follow-up to determine the boys' well-being (p. 38). The largest subgroup of dependent and delinquent children was black boys, who made up nearly half of the sample delinquent cases. Seventy percent of black delinquent boys, most of whom had committed petty theft such as coal stealing, were dismissed or released and 17 percent were institutionalized, the vast majority at the industrial school. Although white women "lobbied for increased state responsibility for social welfare" and black women emphasized private solutions in the face of exclusion from public institutions, white dependent and delinquent children benefited from a much more developed network of white private charitable and welfare organizations as well as state institutions (p. 44).

KAREN KRUSE THOMAS

Florida State University