Coordinating to Beat the Devil: Schools, Police, and the Youth Control Complex, 1919-1939.

• In Event: Historical Perspectives on Crime and Punishment

Abstract

The increasing criminalization of youth through the policing of schools since the 1960s has lead to criminological concern with the school-to-prison pipeline. The relationship between schools and police is generally understood in context of other social institutions, whether prisons and punishment (as in mass incarceration literature) or social welfare and policing in an expansive, community-oriented sense (as in Victor Rios’ concept of the youth control complex).
This paper develops a deeper history to school policing and the youth control complex through an examination of the Coordinating Councils in Berkeley and Los Angeles between 1919 and 1940. Founded in Berkeley before spreading across California and the United States, Coordinating Councils were community organizations that brought together decision makers and researchers from police, school, and community welfare organizations to confront and control juvenile delinquency by exchanging information and planning response strategies. I argue that the Coordinating Councils are an early form of the youth control complex and fit into a history of fluidity between welfare and police organizations. As a case study in interstitial, cross-institutional policing, the Coordinating Councils underscore the importance of institutional and organizational relations to the functioning of the modern youth control complex.

Author

• Chase Burton, University of California, Berkeley