Urban Removal: The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 and Federal Assaults on Low-Income Youth

From the mid-1960s onward legislation enacted to prevent juvenile delinquency produced an historic upturn in incarceration rates, particularly among those black urban youths this legislation purported to aid. My paper provides a genealogy that considers how the premise of the juvenile detention system rapidly and substantially changed during its early development, shifting from a rehabilitative to a more punitive approach. I view the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, which authorized a major new federal assistance program to address rising crime rate and a rising number of urban youths, as a critical outcome of the bipartisan effort to revolutionize the state’s punitive capacities. While community-based penal models initially emphasized social advocacy and deinstitutionalization, my paper delineates the shift in the basic aim of the nation’s juvenile justice program. The transfer of authority to the judiciary during the Nixon and Ford Administrations meant officials increasingly developed quick response strategies focused on swift and sure punishment as a means of ensuring “domestic tranquility.” This process culminated in the 1974 Act, which formally recast the issue of juvenile delinquency as being not within the purview of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare but within the Department of Justice. At the same time, the Act enhanced the Justice Department’s power over those young offenders both through unifying all aspects of juvenile crime control and by establishing an “Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention,” tasked with administering $350 million in federal grant funds to municipal authorities via state planning agencies. Ultimately, new federal municipal and juvenile justice programs unleashed punitive and juridical mechanisms for social control that laid the groundwork for the mass imprisonment of the late twentieth century.