States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California's Juvenile Justice System / Edition 1 available in Paperback
States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California's Juvenile Justice System / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0520271726
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520271722
- Pub. Date:
- 02/21/2012
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0520271726
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520271722
- Pub. Date:
- 02/21/2012
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California's Juvenile Justice System / Edition 1
Paperback
Buy New
$29.95Buy Used
$20.84-
-
SHIP THIS ITEM
Temporarily Out of Stock Online
Please check back later for updated availability.
-
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520271722 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2012 |
| Series: | American Crossroads , #35 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 314 |
| Sales rank: | 779,108 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
States of Delinquency
Race and Science in the Making of California's Juvenile Justice System
By Miroslava Chávez-García
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27172-2
CHAPTER 1
Building Juvenile Justice Institutions in California
In 1891, Arthur C., an eleven-year-old Mexican American boy from San Francisco, found himself at Whittier State School, a newly established reformatory in Southern California designed to house delinquent and dependent youths between the ages of ten and eighteen. Under California law, delinquents were those convicted of a crime or those who had, in other ways, violated middle-class norms of society, whereas dependents were those who lacked parental supervision and support, and were in "danger" of leading "an idle and immoral life." Like many parents, Arthur's father, Henry C., had committed his son to the reformatory on a charge of vagrancy, suggesting that Arthur refused to obey his father's orders to attend school or stay off the streets. More likely, though, Arthur's commitment to Whittier resulted from his father's inability to maintain the boy, for he had already spent time at the San Francisco Aid Society, a private, state-subsidized organization designed to assist needy children and their families. When the Aid Society could no longer assist the boy's family, Arthur's father sent him to Whittier, expecting relief. Apparently, it worked, for he remained a state ward for six years. Yet for Arthur life was not well behind the walls of the institution.
In his stint at the reformatory, Arthur incurred the wrath of the administrators for blatantly breaking the rules. In 1894, for instance, he escaped and was punished harshly with a strap as a result. Later, a staff member placed him on the "guard line"—standing at attention for an hour or more—for disobeying orders. Although he was regarded as bright, officials nevertheless viewed Arthur as a troublemaker, a reputation he would not shake for years. Indeed, a few months after his discharge from Whittier State School, Arthur ran into trouble with the local authorities. Picked up for burglary and believed to be too old for the reformatory, he was sent to San Quentin State Prison, California's oldest prison established in the early 1850s. After that, Arthur was released but soon ran into trouble again and ended up in Folsom State Prison, opened in 1880. Eventually, Arthur was released, and little else is known of what became of him.
Arthur's on-again, off-again contact with state institutions, though typical of many of the youths who ended up at Whittier State School at the turn of the twentieth century, differed significantly from the experiences of similarly troubled youths who lived only a few decades earlier. Prior to the founding of Whittier State School, families and local communities took much of the responsibility for the care and control of boys and girls such as Arthur C. Prior to the American conquest in 1848, parents, extended family members, and other members of the community dealt with recalcitrant as well as needy children. Under Spanish colonial and Mexican republican rule, from the 1770s to the early 1850s, Californios (Spanish-speaking settlers and their descendants) relied on the family, extended kin, and community networks to care and control youngsters. California Indians, on the other hand, had their own methods of rearing children and dealing with the troublesome in particular. Native peoples in the region used a flexible, loosely structured family and community-based system for keeping the young in line.
For many decades prior to statehood in 1850, Californians of varying cultural, ethnic, and racial origins relied on the family and community to raise, socialize, and, if necessary, discipline youngsters who went astray. Yet by the late 1850s and 1860s, as rates of youthful crime increased—or at least behavior deemed criminal rose—Californians, most of them recently arrived Euro-Americans and Europeans, pressured state representatives to deal with the perceived growing menace to society. State leaders, in turn, took a long, hard look at prison policies and practices around the United States and across the globe to find alternatives that would, at the same time, modernize the relatively young state in the care and control of its population. State officials proposed several cutting-edge approaches, but in the end they adopted less-costly outdated methods, which led to the institutionalization of children and youths, a process that had special implications for ethnically and racially marginalized youngsters such as Arthur C.
Using Arthur C.'s experience as the culmination of a larger process begun decades earlier, this chapter traces the formation of the modern-day juvenile justice system in nineteenth-century California and its impact on Mexican, Mexican American, and African American young people, in particular, and compares it with that experienced by Euro-American and European youngsters. It focuses on the ways in which late eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Californians—Native Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Euro-Americans—handled children who threatened the stability of the family, community, larger region, and, later, the state. Beginning with the Spanish conquest and colonization of California, the chapter explores the experiences of troublesome youths in the Native, Spanish, and Mexican periods and shows the significance of parents, extended family members, and community members in dealing with them. The discussion then probes in detail the approach of Euro-Americans and Europeans in handling the same youngsters and shows that, despite the availability of innovative models across the country and the world, Californians adopted an archaic system. By the 1880s and 1890s, the previous methods for caring and controlling youngsters gave way to an outdated and punitive structure that had long-term effects in shaping the modern-day juvenile justice system in California.
TROUBLESOME CHILDREN IN CALIFORNIA'S NATIVE, SPANISH, AND MEXICAN ERAS, 1770S TO THE 1840S
The Native peoples who inhabited present-day California in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were culturally and linguistically diverse and held a variety of beliefs and practices, particularly when it came to childrearing and dealing with youngsters who, in some way, threatened the stability of their communities. Among most California Indian tribes, parents had primary authority over children, defined as individuals who had not yet reached puberty. Boys and girls who had reached manhood and womanhood, respectively, on the other hand, were treated as adults, subject to one or more chiefs who, in turn, led the tribe collectively.
To prevent children from misbehaving, parents and relatives related moral stories and legends, which at the same time taught them the religious laws and codes as well as the social and supernatural sanctions that came with them. The oral narrative of Delfina Cuero, an elder and descendant of Native peoples in the Mission San Diego region, the Kumeyaay, for instance, relates many of the customs the young had to follow. According to Cuero, the Kumeyaay instructed boys to bathe frequently and to stay away from a pregnant woman or one menstruating. If male children failed to do so, "it would ruin [his] hunter's eyesight and he couldn't find rabbits," thereby threatening his ability to feed the family and sustain the larger tribe. To discourage children from eating certain plants or fruits, likely poisonous, the Kumeyaay warned that they would grow hair, which they believed was a "big sin." The contemporary letters of Hugo Reid—a Scottish immigrant who arrived in California in the early 1800s and later married Victoria Bartolomea Comicrabit, a Native woman from a notable family in Southern California—indicate that parents also taught their children to respect elders and siblings and to reciprocate the kindness and generosity of others, particularly when it came to food because sustenance was scarce.
Some neighboring tribes, on the other hand, invoked mystical beings to keep children in line. The Gabrieleños, natives of the Mission San Gabriel region, for instance, taught their children the precepts of Chinigchinich, a god they revered as the creator, while the Cahuilla Indians, south of the mission, invoked the supernatural power of Tahquitz, who used his force "mischievously and lecherously" upon those who transgressed community norms. Other peoples warned of dire consequences if children—or adults, for that matter—carried out offensive acts. The Pomo of the Northern California region, for example, warned children to behave themselves for fear of poisoning or witchcraft by anonymous members of the community. A member of the same family could poison another for some wrongdoing. The Pomo attributed sicknesses and deaths to poisonings and thus took great pains to avert such spells upon them or members of their family or community. Unruly boys in particular who refrained from heeding such warnings received little training and were not allowed to pick up any wealth in the form of beads or baskets.
By all accounts, Native peoples in California rarely used corporal punishment or other means of physical force to socialize or reprimand the young for breaking rules. Ruby Modesto, a desert Cahuilla medicine woman from the present-day Coachella Valley, affirmed that physical punishment was unknown until the arrival of the Europeans. "We talked to our children, and if necessary shamed them into behaving. Whipping is new, since the white man," Modesto stated. Elders of the Concow Maidu, a tribe situated near the Feather River northeast of Sacramento, also reported that "physical punishment or abuse of children ... [was] virtually inconceivable." To control antisocial behavior, they warned children of supernatural consequences. In Gabrieleño society, Hugo Reid observed, "whipping was never resorted to as punishment" and "robbery was never known among them. Murder was of rare occurrence," yet, he conceded, it was "punished with death."
Contemporary eyewitness accounts told from the perspective of Spanish missionaries, though biased, agree that corporal punishment was used infrequently to discipline California Indian children. In the 1813–1815 interrogatorio, a questionnaire the Spanish colonial authorities issued to the new world—specifically, asking priests to describe Native culture—the friars decried the seemingly lax parenting techniques of the indigenous peoples. Friars at the missions of San Gabriel, San Juan Capistrano, and San Luis Rey, established in Southern California in 1771, 1776, and 1798, respectively, harshly criticized local natives—most of them Gabrieleño and Diegueño or Kumeyaay—for failing to educate and correct their children along the lines of Spanish ideologies and practices. In Spanish colonial society, male heads of households had the obligation to admonish their dependents, including children, when they transgressed patriarchal authority as well as any other Spanish customs and laws. Fathers sometimes chastised, imposed corporal punishment, or in other ways forced their children to obey religious and secular teachings. The California natives held vastly different practices.
When the California Indians showed little understanding of or interest in following or inculcating European gender and family values, the Spanish priests believed that natives lacked the initiative, judgment, and morals to rear their children. The friars at Mission San Miguel, for instance, expressed disdain of the seeming overindulgence bestowed on Native children. "Toward their children they show an extravagant love whom they do not chastise," one wrote. At Mission San Antonio, founded in 1771 along the central coast, the priests too believed that the excessive love the Native parents devoted was "a vice[,] for the majority lack[ed] the courage to punish their children's wrongdoing and knavery." At Mission San Gabriel, the religious officials reported that the natives cared for their children so much"that we might say they are their little idols." In only one report did priests provide an alternative view of Native childrearing practices, and that came from Mission San Diego friars José Sánchez and Fernando Martín. They reported that local indigenous peoples "love[d] their children extremely" and educated them: "when the children [did] wrong the parents admonish[ed], reprehend[ed] and even punish[ed] them."
The majority of representatives of the Spanish crown, however, expressed few kind words toward the Native peoples' parenting. Fray Gerónimo Boscana, a Spanish-born missionary who spent nearly fourteen years at Mission San Juan Capistrano, from 1812 to 1826, for instance, held many of the same prejudices as his contemporaries and wrote about them at length. Boscana criticized Native parents for not instructing youngsters in the arts, making them "ignorant of all useful knowledge to keep them from idleness." Instead, he said, they taught them only how to make the bow and arrow, to procure game, and to defend themselves against enemies. He admitted, though, that they sometimes imposed harsh measures, particularly when children failed to follow religious beliefs. "The perverse child invariably was destroyed, and the parents of such remained dishonored." How frequently this occurred—the taking of troublesome child's life—is unknown, as are the reasons for killing a "perverse" child; few if any sources verify such practices. Boscana's observations, though questionable, are telling of the missionaries' larger rationale for practically enslaving California Indians in the mission system.
The limited use of corporal punishment when dealing with troublesome youths among California Indians is explained, in part, by the larger goals of the judicial process among Native peoples. Vine Deloria Jr., in his account of the American Indian legal system, explains that the goal in resolving conflicts was "to ensure restitution and compensation [rather] than retribution" as in European custom. Councils, whether villages, tribes, or bands, headed by charismatic chiefs "looked to custom and precedent" as well as larger community values to handle discord. Rarely, did they develop new laws. Thus, wayward children and young people whose behavior threatened individuals or the collective good likely received punishment in line with previous generations' notion of mediation.
The oral traditions of Native peoples as well as the observations of European contemporaries suggest regional differences in disciplining troublesome Native children. Corporal punishment appears to have been more common in places such as the northern New Mexico–southern Colorado region. There, elders rather than parents meted out penalties when legends or stories proved insufficient. Among the Jicarilla Apache, grandmothers most often corrected the young. Further south in central Mexico, Aztec parents rather than grandparents used "rigorous corporal punishment" and sometimes forced idle children to "breathe acrid fumes of a fire in which red peppers were burning."
Whether in California or the larger Southwest, Native peoples' customs and beliefs in handling misbehaving youngsters largely gave way to European ideologies and practices with the conquest and colonization of the region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though many indigenous tribes managed to retain key aspects of their cultural traditions, most suffered displacement, death through disease and violence, and severe deprivation. In the colonial world, Spanish priests had ultimate authority over Native peoples, adults and children alike, and particularly those whom they managed to lure into the mission system. The friars derived this power over Christian Indians—neófitos (neophytes)—from a 1773 Spanish decree issued by the Viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursúa, the highest civil and military representative of the Spanish crown in New Spain. That decree granted them the exclusive rights to train, educate, govern, and punish neófitos except in cases where blood had been spilt. In capital cases, the colonial authorities in Mexico City made the final decisions. The priests had much less authority over non-Christian Indians—or gentiles—who managed to elude the Europeans and remained on the periphery and independent of the mission system. In general, priests saw themselves as the literal and figurative fathers of neófitos, whom they believed to be ignorant and childlike and took it upon themselves to punish when necessary. Whether Native children were orphaned or not, the Spanish priests acted as their surrogate fathers and often trained them as apprentices or used them as manual laborers, exploiting them in the process.
Missionaries such as those at Mission San Gabriel in the 1810s, Luís Gil y Taboada and José María de Zalvidea, for instance, regularly used the whip to chastise Native peoples, young and old alike, who refused to learn the Spanish language or follow European notions of time, labor, and leisure. Other transgressions ending in punishment included running away and taking mission cattle, grain, or other basic staples. Father Junipero Serra, the founder of Mission San Diego, admitted to the deep-rooted practice of using the whip in California: "That spiritual fathers should punish their sons, the Indians, with blows (con azotes) appears to be as old as the conquest of these kingdoms."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from States of Delinquency by Miroslava Chávez-García. Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Building Juvenile Justice Institutions in California 2. Fred C. Nelles: Innovative Reformer, Conservative Eugenicist 3. Mildred S. Covert: Eugenics Fieldworker, Racial Pathologist 4. Cristobal, Fred, Tony, and Albert M.: Specimens in Scientific Research and Race Betterment 5. Otto H. Close: Promising Leader, Complacent Bureaucrat6. The Legacy of Benny Moreno and Edward Leiva: “Defective Delinquents” or Tragic Heroes? Epilogue: Recovering Youths’ Voices Notes Bibliography IndexWhat People are Saying About This
"[States of Delinquency] is a tour de force of historical research. . . . A valuable resource for the student and the citizen."—Criminal Law & Crim Justice Bks / Criminal Justice Abstracts
"Recommended."—Choice