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David B. Wolcott, The Constitutional Rights of Children: In re Gault and Juvenile Justice, Journal of American History, Volume 99, Issue 1, June 2012, Pages 363–364, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jas094
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In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in juvenile justice in its landmark decision In re Gault. Since their founding in the early 1900s, juvenile courts had used informal procedures to divert young offenders from criminal courts and to offer rehabilitation. Local judges could institutionalize juveniles for minor offenses on the premise of providing treatment. In 1964 a judge in Globe, Arizona, committed fifteen-year-old Gerald Gault to a reform school for allegedly making an obscene telephone call. A habeas corpus petition filed by Gault’s parents and the intervention of the American Civil Liberties Union eventually brought the case to the attention of the Supreme Court. The Court’s decision limited judicial discretion by requiring that juvenile courts adopt more formal procedures to ensure due process.
The key contribution of David S. Tanenhaus’s book is placing the Gault case at the nexus of multiple contexts. He uses external factors to explain the case and employs the case to illuminate larger issues. Controversies in the 1950s over the reform school to which Gault would be sent revealed debates over the purposes of juvenile justice in Arizona: whether the system should strive to rehabilitate young offenders or whether it should apply “a desert vision of punitive juvenile justice” (p. 12). Under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Supreme Court rejected desert justice. The case, however, highlighted tensions among liberals over the degree to which the rehabilitative premise of juvenile courts was at odds with the due process rights of young defendants. The outcome of the case revealed that Supreme Court justices who had issued a series of decisions in the 1960s expanding due process protections for criminal defendants were willing only selectively to incorporate constitutional protections into juvenile court proceedings. The Gault decision nonetheless undercut the discretionary operations of juvenile courts by mandating that those courts ensure such rights as the assistance of legal counsel and the privilege against self-incrimination.
