Producing Delinquency: The Struggle for Racial Integration in the Foster Care System, 1920s-1950s

• In Event: 2456 - Social Control and Deviance as Mutually Constitutive

Abstract

Using archival materials from the Children’s Court of New York, this article documents the underexplored history of Black children’s struggle for inclusion in the early foster care system. I argue that during the struggle for racial integration, the court system utilized criminal justice as a means to racial justice, and in doing so, engaged in practices that can been see as producing racialized delinquency. I find that Children’s Courts, created in the mid-1920s, enabled visibility of Black children’s need for out-of-home placement after a long history of exclusion. However, judges were often unable to place them because of the exclusionary policies of voluntary foster agencies. With limited options, liberal judges labeled dependent Black children as delinquent to ensure out-of-home placement, and expanded the system of temporary shelters to board them. As decades wore on, judges no longer needed to label Black children delinquent because in the eyes of the court, they became criminal the longer they were warehoused in a system built for short-term needs. Ultimately, the institutional conflict between judges and voluntary agencies produced a racialized pathway of inclusion that left a deep mark on the foster care system.

Author

• Michaela Christy Simmons, University of California-Berkeley