Who Gets a Childhood?: Race and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century Texas

Notes

NOTES Introduction 1. In this book, the acronym tyc refers to both the Texas Youth Council (1957–83) and its successor agency, the Texas Youth Commission (1983–present). 2. Nate Blakeslee, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” Texas Observer, February 23, 2007 (first published online February 16, 2007). See also Blakeslee, “Sins of Commission,” Texas Monthly, May 2007, 150. 3. “Sex Abuse Reported at Youth Jail,” Dallas Morning News, February 18, 2007. 4. “Sexual Abuse Scandal Rocks Texas Juvenile Prison System,” Associated Press, March 6, 2007; “Texas, Addressing Sexual Abuse Scandal, May Free Thousands of Its Jailed Youths,” New York Times, March 24, 2007; “In Texas, Scandals Rock Juvenile Justice System,” Washington Post, April 7, 2007; “Two Indicted for Abuse at Texas Detention Center,” npr Morning Edition, April 11, 2007. 5. Texas Youth Commission, Texas Youth Commission: Report from the Conservator, prepared by Jay Kimbrough (Austin, 2007); “Youth Abuse Hotline Quickly Gets 1,100 Complaints,” El Paso Times, March 26, 2007; “Juvenile Justice on Trial in Texas,” Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007; “Injuries of Teen Inmates Probed,” usa Today, May 14, 2007; “Feds Knew about tyc Abuse Cases,” Dallas Morning News, August 5, 2007. 6. Joint Select Committee on the Operation and Management of the Texas Youth Commission , Preliminary Report of Findings and Initial Recommendations: A Report to the Lieutenant Governor and the Speaker of the House, 80th Tex. Leg. (Austin, 2007). 7. “$5M Lawsuit Filed in tyc Scandal,” Dallas Morning News, March 19, 2007. 8. “My Case Freed 500 Teens from Prison!” Seventeen, September 2007; see also Howard Witt, “To Some in Paris, Sinister Past Is Back,” Chicago Tribune, March 12, 2007; “Cotton Tells Story to Teen Magazine,” Paris News, August 19, 2007. 9. “Sex Abuse Reported at Youth Jail,” Dallas Morning News, February 18, 2007. 10. Histories of the juvenile court tend to highlight its many contradictions. Among the early works, see Steven Schlossman, Transforming Juvenile Justice: Reform Ideals and Institutional Realities, 1825–1920 (1977; repr., DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (1980; repr., New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002), 236–92; Robert M. Mennel, Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States, 1825–1940 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1973); and Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency, 3rd ed. (Camden, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008). More-recent studies include Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1880–1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Barry C. Feld, Bad Kids: Race and the Transformation 210 · N O T E S T O I N T R O D U C T I O N A N D C H A P T E R O N E of the Juvenile Court (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); David S. Tanenhaus, Juvenile Justice in the Making (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2005); Anne Meis Knupfer, Reform and Resistance: Gender, Delinquency, and America’s First Juvenile Court (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Tamara Myers, Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 11. John J. DiIulio Jr., “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” Weekly Standard, November 27, 1995. 12. See, for instance, Henry A. Giroux, Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth (New York: Routledge, 1996). 13. A good synthesis of the growing literature on the history of childhood is Steven J. Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 14. Ben B. Lindsey and Rube Borough, The Dangerous Life (1931; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1974), 90. 15. “Sex Abuse, Violence Alleged at Teen Jails across U.S.,” cnn Presents (broadcast April 4, 2008), http://www.cnn.com/2008/crime/04/04/juvenile.jails/index.html. 16. See most notably Elizabeth S. Scott and Laurence Steinberg, Rethinking Juvenile Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). One. The Other Lost Generation 1. The names of juveniles in this chapter are pseudonyms only if they did not appear in published or publicly available sources. 2. The following story of Jimmy’s offense is taken from “Mr. Jones” to R. B. Walthall, March 12, 1927; Jones to Governor Dan Moody, March 15, 1927; and court documents attached to Charles E. King to H. H. Harrington, May 14, 1927, in Chairman R. B. Walthall files, 1924–29 (letters) and Chairman H. H. Harrington files, 1917–28 (court documents), Texas...