BARRY C. FELD

Ideological changes in the cultural conceptions of children
and in strategies of social control during the nineteenth
century led to the creation of the first juvenile court in Cook County, Illi-
nois, in 1899. Culminating a century-long process of differentiating
youths from adult offenders, Progressive Era reformers combined new
theories of social control with new ideas about childhood and created the
juvenile court as a social welfare alternative to criminal courts to respond
to criminal and noncriminal misconduct by youths ( Fox 1970; Platt
1977).

The Supreme Court's decision In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1 (1967), began
to transform the juvenile court into a very different institution than the
Progressives contemplated. Progressives envisioned an informal court
that intervened in the child's "best interests." In Gault, the Supreme
Court engrafted formal procedures at trial onto the juvenile court's indi-
vidualized treatment sentencing schema. Although the Court did not in-
tend to alter the juvenile court's therapeutic mission, in subsequent
decades, judicial and legislative responses to Gault have modified juve-
nile courts' jurisdiction, purposes, and procedure. As a result, juvenile
courts now converge procedurally and substantively with adult crimi-
nal courts.

Since the 1970s, three types of judicial, administrative, and legal
changes have accelerated the convergence between juvenile and criminal
courts. These changes constitute a form of criminological "triage" as
states remove noncriminal youths from juvenile courts' jurisdiction,
transfer increasing numbers of persistent and serious young offenders to
criminal courts for prosecution as adults, and impose punitive sentences
on those "ordinary" delinquents who remain within the jurisdiction of
the juvenile courts. Progressive reformers regarded noncriminal miscon-
duct by juveniles that would not be a crime if committed by an adult,
such as truancy or incorrigibility, as an important part of the juvenile
court's "child-saving" mission. However, recent reforms at the "soft end"
of the court's clientele limit the dispositions that judges may impose on
noncriminal offenders and even remove status offenses from juvenile
court jurisdiction. Simultaneously, as a result of rising public and politi-

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