“We’ll invest in early childhood education because for every dollar we put there, we get seven dollars back in reduced dropout rates, reduced delinquency, and reduced prison rates.”
—Barack Obama, Remarks in Manning, South Carolina: “A Challenge for Our Times,” November 2, 2007Footnote 1Introduction
The above quote from then-candidate for President Barack Obama indicates what has become a commonsense notion in American politics: that schools are critical for preventing delinquency. This impulse to connect education and youth crime extends well beyond Obama, as politicians from both political parties and scholars from a number of different disciplines have all pointed to schools as both partially responsible for and the most effective solution to the problem of juvenile delinquency. Given the widespread agreement that schools are important sites in the fight against juvenile delinquency, policy makers often funnel concerns about delinquency into education legislation. Consequently, the past few decades have seen education policy suggestions ranging from “get tough” discipline, individualized behavioral counseling for problem students, and hyperlocal control of schools to the expansion of private and charter school options as different strategies for reducing youth misbehavior and improving youth outcomes.Footnote 2 At the heart of these approaches is the belief that what happens inside of schools bears a causal connection to patterns of delinquency. How did the tendency to position education as a solution to delinquency become so deeply entrenched in American politics, and what are the consequences of this belief?
Using a historical institutionalist approach, we emphasize the importance of sequencing and timing in the political development of education and antidelinquency policy.Footnote 3 We argue that the belief in education as a cause and solution to delinquency emerged at the federal level in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, lawmakers often justified education budgets in terms of youth crime control. The creation of federal delinquency and education institutions within the particular political context of the late 1960s was a critical juncture in the development of both antidelinquency and education policy.Footnote 4 Connecting these two policy areas proved to be a powerful argument that helped channel federal money toward K–12 education but also enshrined an expectation that schools were particularly effective antidelinquency institutions. Consequently, education institutions became more entangled with federal crime-fighting in the following decades. The integration of education policy as a primary component of antidelinquency efforts later made schools susceptible to the broader punitive turn in crime policy.
We also show that the particular context in which federal interventions into education and antidelinquency developed led to education policies rather than redistributive welfare state policies being the major noncriminal justice response to delinquency. Throughout the 1960s, policy makers pursued an antidelinquency approach that coupled educational interventions with programs that ensured youth had good paying jobs; however, by the 1970s, the latter approach largely fell out of favor. Education policy increasingly became the central strategy through which the federal government sought to solve delinquency. The resulting federal institutions and policies geared toward education and juvenile delinquency prevention were largely independent from a political economic understanding and approach to social problems like delinquency.
The intertwining of delinquency and education policy at the moment of federal institution building has had profound policy effects. An emerging consensus in the American political development literature has demonstrated that the ideological foundations of social policy in the mid-twentieth century often constrained future progressive developments.Footnote 5 As many scholars have noted, Democrats during this period were divided over whether to pursue material redistribution or community-based behavioral approaches for solving social problems like delinquency, poverty, and unemployment. The consequences of policy makers ultimately shifting away from material redistribution facilitated a punitive turn in a number of policy areas.Footnote 6 Elizabeth Hinton’s trenchant work in this vein shows that the Great Society policies of the 1960s were a critical juncture.Footnote 7 Democrats pulled social service providers into crime-fighting efforts, wedding these two approaches by launching the War on Poverty and a War on Crime. Subsequent attacks on the welfare state in the ensuing decades intensified law enforcement strategies and resulted in the emergence of a new punitive model of governance.Footnote 8 This article demonstrates a similar effect in the realm of education. As redistributive programs to combat delinquency were eliminated, policy makers began increasingly to require schools to work directly with law enforcement agencies to address delinquency.
We also build on the work of education scholars who show how social problems become “educationalized.” This process, where the education system is tasked with remediating issues such as unemployment, poverty, or delinquency, minimizes and obscures the role of broader economic forces in the construction of these problems.Footnote 9 Several scholars have shown that the long history of funneling social welfare efforts through the education system has had profound implications for the broader social welfare state.Footnote 10 Tracy Steffes demonstrates that politicians uncomfortable with an expansive welfare state turned to schools as alternatives to the types of redistributive welfare states of Europe. This development created unrealistic expectations for public schools and weakened support for alternative forms of social welfare support.Footnote 11 Our focus on juvenile delinquency further demonstrates the ways in which education policy has the potential to shape, shift, or stunt developments in seemingly unrelated areas of the social state.
In this article, we build on this literature to show that the “educationalization” of social problems not only obscures the structural causes of these problems but also can affect education policy itself. The early politicization of delinquency at the federal level occurred in a context in which policy makers looked to the schools as a central mechanism for dealing with the problem of delinquency. In words very similar to those of President Obama at the start of this article, President Lyndon B. Johnson also argued that the education system could address the problem of delinquency. This belief helped justify federal expansion in the area of public education, particularly with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. However, just as the “educationalization” of the delinquency problem helped build the nascent federal education state, it also eventually helped draw these new institutions closer to an expanding federal criminal justice system. Although much existing scholarship on the ESEA and mid-twentieth-century education policy has focused on its egalitarian approach to addressing educational inequities, we demonstrate how this legislation also pulled schools into the fight against delinquency.Footnote 12 As crime became politicized, the “educationalization” of delinquency meant that the federal education state was increasingly ensnared in the new punitive ethos.
Drawing from the Congressional Record, Presidential papers, and party platforms, this article explores the establishment of federal institutions addressing education and juvenile delinquency, particularly the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Control Act of 1968 (JDPCA), and the Juvenile Justice Prevention and Delinquency Act of 1974 (JJDPA). The article begins with the initial interest at the federal level in the issue of youth crime in the 1950s. Congressional reports during this time emphasized that delinquency needed to be addressed at the federal level and began drawing the connection between schools and antidelinquency strategies. The sections that follow demonstrate how this connection was then institutionalized in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Finally, the article traces the shift of institutional control over federal antidelinquency programs from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the relationship this had to the erosion of policies such as public job creation. These institutional developments left education as one of the main policy realms responsible for addressing delinquency outside of the criminal justice system. Because of the connection drawn between education and antidelinquency developed over the prior decades, by the 1970s, schools increasingly became the location for carrying out punitive approaches to youth crime.
The Emergence of Delinquency on the Federal Agenda
The issue of juvenile delinquency appeared on the federal agenda in the mid-1950s. In addition to the generalized anticommunist fervor, delinquency was the other great fear of the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote 13 The concern of rising youth crime was driven in part by the worry of deteriorating family structures during World War II, but the focus on delinquency extended beyond the War’s end. Although delinquency rates were increasing, the panic over delinquency, declining community standards, and an imminent wave of youth crime served important political agendas as well. The fear of familial breakdown helped drive women out of the workforce and back into the domestic arena in the postwar era.Footnote 14 Parents and politicians concerned about desegregation and changing residential patterns drove bipartisan pushes for preemptive approaches to controlling perceived dangerous youth subcultures and delinquency.Footnote 15 Concerns of delinquency had distinctly racial overtones and led to increased policing in nonwhite areas.Footnote 16 The experiences of discrimination in schools provoked tactics of resistance and protest—making the public school a terrain of conflict.Footnote 17 Media reports and popular cultural works such as Evan Hunter’s book The Blackboard Jungle (1954), and film by the same name in 1955, were commercial successes that sensationalized the notion of “delinquency boil[ing] over into our schools.”Footnote 18 The public perception that juvenile delinquency was a growing problem that was likely to get worse without action prompted demands that the federal government do something to address the new and pressing social problem.
Federal lawmakers reflected these concerns and agendas and warned of skyrocketing rates of youth crime, noting that the number of delinquents had increased by nearly 30 percent between 1948 and 1952, and estimated that the total number of delinquents would double by 1960 unless something was done.Footnote 19 In 1953, the Senate created the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, which held hearings throughout the 1950s. Up to this point, the issue of juvenile crime had largely been left to the states, a strategy that was increasingly questioned in the wake of rising crime rates. Reflecting public concern, a 1954 report from the Senate Committee on the Judiciary determined that there was a “lack of adequate national leadership in the battle against juvenile delinquency.”Footnote 20 The same report concluded that “[t]he time has come to declare all-out war on juvenile delinquency … we must immediately dedicate to the waging of this war whatever efforts and resources are necessary.”Footnote 21
These early reports called for building greater federal capacity to address the problem of youth crime. There was a general agreement throughout the hearings in the 1950s that juvenile delinquency was best addressed outside of the punitive confines of the adult criminal justice system. The 1954 Senate report noted, “both research and experience appears to support the thesis that punitive measures tend to increase rebellion against society rather than diminish it.”Footnote 22 The reports from the 1950s stressed the need to increase the funding for research on the causes of delinquency, as well as increase the number, training, and salary of those tasked with working with delinquent youth. As policy makers were looking to nonpunitive solutions capable of dealing with a large number of delinquent—and potentially delinquent—youth, they quickly turned their attention to schools.
These reports positioned schools as a natural site for combating juvenile delinquency because they were the government institution with the most contact with youth. Samuel Brownell, the Commissioner of Education, testified that “the school is related to juvenile delinquency in three ways: It may produce delinquency; it may help to prevent delinquency; it may deal with delinquent behavior that is encountered within its walls.”Footnote 23 This sentiment was echoed in a 1955 report from the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, which noted that “this Nation’s first line of defense in preventing delinquency is the school,”Footnote 24 and again in the Committee’s 1957 report, which argued that “[a]dequate schools can aid in prevention and control of delinquency.”Footnote 25 School administrators positioned themselves as capable of positively intervening in a youth’s life but argued they needed sufficient resources to do so.Footnote 26 The rise of juvenile delinquency onto the national agenda provided a powerful argument for greater federal involvement not only in the issue of youth crime but also in the realm of elementary and secondary education policy.
The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board also helped distinguish juvenile delinquency as a specific issue of concern during the 1950s and 1960s. Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver warned that integration would make schools into “an environment of switchblades, knives, marijuana, stabbings, rapes, violence and blackboard jungles.”Footnote 27 Staunch opponents of integration frequently cited manipulated statistics, purporting to show higher rates of violence in recently desegregated schools, and suggested that integration represented a physical danger to white students and would lead to more delinquency. Although this extremist argument was ultimately rejected, scholars have shown that policy makers increasingly accepted the framing of a “problem” of Black youth crime. The Brown decision contributed to growing concern about delinquency and tied that concern directly to schools.Footnote 28
The timing of the emergence of juvenile justice as a national issue played a significant role in how federal policy makers understood the problem as well as its solutions and why education became so central to the federal antidelinquency effort. During the New Deal, the Democratic coalition tended to frame problems such as unemployment, inequality, and crime as largely attributable to failures of the existing economic system. As a result, Democratic policy makers pressed for redistributive taxation to fund broad social programs, including publicly funded jobs, as a means of combating the economic basis of these social problems. Concerns about youth crime were therefore funneled into programs that were designed to increase participation within the labor market or ensure economic security for young people. For example, in 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set aside $50 million specifically for youth work relief via executive order. By early 1938, 500,000 young people were participating in various National Youth Administration programs, the bulk of which were work activities geared toward out-of-school youth. In 1941 the budget for these programs had grown to $119 million.Footnote 29 However, as the concern about youth crime was rising, the commitment within the Democratic Party to redistributive economic policies had begun to wane.
The decline of the labor and civil rights movements and the ascendance of business interests post-World War II created a new ideological and political context in which the development of federal institutions addressing both delinquency and education emerged. Policy makers increasingly framed problems like youth crime and unemployment as the result of individual skill or behavioral deficiencies—and therefore looked to schools as particularly promising avenues in the fight against delinquency.Footnote 30 Emerging social science literature, such as Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s influential book Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs, contributed to the consolidation of the cultural understanding of delinquency as well as the significance of schools as intervening institutions.Footnote 31 The Supreme Court also facilitated the turn away from economic interpretations of social problems, as it became increasingly less friendly to a labor-centric notion of civil rights and embraced racial incorporation into the existing institutional landscape.Footnote 32 Consequently, as federal policy makers and agencies began to address youth crime, support for earlier approaches like public jobs for youth was increasingly replaced with growing support for federal education policy to help address delinquency. By the end of the decade, juvenile delinquency had become an important political issue and the platform of both political parties mentioned the need for federal leadership in combating youth crime for the first time.Footnote 33
Building the Institutions: The Kennedy and Johnson Administrations
The election of President John F. Kennedy in 1960 brought a greater focus to the issue of juvenile delinquency. Kennedy had specifically called for “federal leadership to control and prevent juvenile delinquency” during his campaign and quickly made it a priority of his presidency.Footnote 34 In May of 1961, Kennedy announced the formation of the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime (PCJDYC), to be led by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The executive order announcing the new Committee noted a “demonstrated need that the resources of the Federal Government be promptly mobilized to provide leadership and direction in a national effort” to combat the steady growth in juvenile delinquency.Footnote 35 With prominent social scientists, including Lloyd Ohlin, as members, the PCJDYC was an important channel through which cultural understandings of delinquency filtered up to the highest levels of federal policy making.Footnote 36 On the same day that President Kennedy signed the executive order, he submitted legislation to Congress with the goal of providing greater federal support for local delinquency prevention efforts.Footnote 37
Congressional leaders quickly took up Kennedy’s proposed legislation. The House of Representatives’ hearing on Kennedy’s proposal began with a dire report prepared by HEW warning that the volume of delinquency cases had doubled in the past twelve years, a trend that would continue to grow exponentially as the baby boom generation matured into prime delinquency age.Footnote 38 Robert Kennedy, who testified before Congress as both the Attorney General and as the head of the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime enthusiastically supported the proposed legislation. Although the DOJ typically focused on the enforcement aspects of crime (such as arrest, trial, and incarceration), Robert Kennedy argued for a broader view in the case of juvenile delinquency. Kennedy testified that, “the more closely one looks at the cost and deployment of our crime prevention efforts, the more apparent it becomes that we have put too much responsibility at the end of the line, rather than the beginning.”Footnote 39 Kennedy told the committee that if the goal was to prevent and rehabilitate delinquents, education would necessarily be part of the equation, arguing “[w]e cannot say to them ‘You should not be a juvenile delinquent,’ if the school is no good, if they are not going to get a good education.”Footnote 40 Kennedy echoed the testimony of HEW Secretary Abraham Ribicoff, who told the committee, “I do not think we can fully understand the growing seriousness of juvenile delinquency today unless we see it against a background of these increasingly limited educational and career prospects of young people.”Footnote 41 Both Kennedy and Ribicoff pressed for a greater attention to education, the labor market, and housing as primary sites in the fight against delinquency.Footnote 42
The Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offense Control Act (JDYOCA) of 1961, the first broad federal legislation designed specifically to deal with juvenile delinquency, passed in both Houses of Congress by a voice vote in September of 1961.Footnote 43 The Act provided $30 million in federal funds over a three-year period to fund programs designed to provide support for preventing delinquency.Footnote 44 This Act also authorized funding for training personnel, including teachers, who would serve on the frontline in the fight against delinquency. In a reflection of the consensus that juvenile delinquency was perhaps best addressed outside of the law enforcement arena, this new effort was put under the authority of the Secretary of HEW rather than the DOJ. However, the legislation did direct the Secretary of HEW to consult with the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime on issues of general policy and procedure when administering the Act.Footnote 45 President Kennedy’s remarks at the signing ceremony indicated the growing federal role in addressing delinquency, noting that “[w]ith this legislation, the Federal Government becomes an active partner with States and local communities to prevent and control the spread of delinquency.”Footnote 46 The JDOYCA was reauthorized in 1964, and was tasked with coordinating with the public school system to bolster guidance and counseling services to combat juvenile delinquency.Footnote 47 This reauthorization also included an additional $5 million in funding for a national juvenile delinquency demonstration project in the Washington, DC area.Footnote 48
The national focus on juvenile delinquency also helped spur Congressional action in an area that had historically proved resistant to any federal intervention: elementary and secondary education. President Kennedy advocated for a general education aid bill in 1962 in a Special Message to Congress, where he warned that “[e]ducational failures breed delinquency, despair and dependence.”Footnote 49 Kennedy argued that federal spending to increase educational quality was a cost-effective means of combating delinquency, and social problems more broadly. In this particular framing, it was clear that Kennedy also positioned the current schools as an important source of existing maladies. Kennedy’s dissatisfaction was clear in a similar message to Congress in 1963, where he again pressed for passage of an education bill, noting, “[i]gnorance and illiteracy, unskilled workers and school dropouts—these and other failures of our education system breed failures in our social and economic system,” including “delinquency” in particular.Footnote 50
Although President Kennedy had pressed for federal aid to education, it was under President Lyndon B. Johnson that Congress began to address the issue seriously. Johnson viewed the schools as central to the War on Poverty effort, which also targeted delinquency.Footnote 51 Like Kennedy, Johnson argued that the failure to invest in schools ultimately resulted in more delinquency. Johnson claimed that the schools were the clear choice for addressing delinquency, as nearly all delinquents were school dropouts.Footnote 52 In a 1965 message to Congress advocating passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Johnson argued,
We now spend about $450 a year per child in our public schools. But we spend $1,800 a year to keep a delinquent youth in a detention home … we are spending almost as much per month to keep a criminal in a State prison as it costs us to keep a child in our public schools. Education is the most economical investment that we can make in this Nation’s future.Footnote 53
Johnson used the rise in the number of juvenile delinquents as a powerful tool to argue for greater federal involvement in elementary and secondary education. By doing so, he continued to position schools as a solution to, and in part responsible for, the problem of delinquency.
Similar rhetoric connecting schools and juvenile delinquency was pervasive as Congress took up Johnson’s call for a federal education bill. In his testimony before the House committee considering the education bill, Secretary of HEW Anthony Celebrezze proclaimed, “[t]he lack of adequate education for millions of our poorest young people is a major factor in our present high rates of youth unemployment, delinquency, and crime.”Footnote 54 Celebrezze placed the blame for delinquency squarely at the foot of the education system, arguing that “[t]he cause … is not so much that the students have failed education as that education, as they have found it, has far too often failed them.”Footnote 55 The Johnson administration’s call for greater education funding to combat delinquency received a particularly warm welcome from Robert Kennedy, then serving as a Senator from New York. In an exchange with Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel during a Senate committee hearing on the bill, Kennedy noted, “[i]f you are going to judge [the school system] on whether the children … are involved in juvenile delinquency … you would have to say that the school system is flunking.”Footnote 56 Kennedy was a strong supporter of the bill because of his faith that education could serve as a powerful antidote to a variety of social ills, not just crime but also unemployment and racial inequality.Footnote 57
The passage of the ESEA in 1965 established the first broad federal involvement in education. The success of the bill was due in no small part to the expectation that this funding would solve a number of social problems. The connection between the ESEA and juvenile delinquency was made explicit just a year after initial passage as Congress amended Title I, the Act’s main funding mechanism, to ensure that local education agencies would receive more federal funds based on the number of delinquent children within their boundaries.Footnote 58 By the 1967 fiscal year, ESEA expenditures specifically for juvenile delinquents had grown to over $2 million annually,Footnote 59 and Congress authorized nearly $10 million annually in ESEA funds for delinquents by 1968.Footnote 60
Johnson’s focus on juvenile delinquency did not end with the passage of the ESEA. In a 1967 special message to Congress on the needs of the nation’s children, Johnson lamented the continued high rates of juvenile delinquency. Although he praised the passage of the ESEA as a crucial antidelinquency program, he warned that “too many schools and agencies close their doors and minds to a young person with serious behavioral problems, and then pass him on to sterner but frequently less effective authorities.”Footnote 61 In the message, Johnson proposed and provided the outline for a new Juvenile Delinquency Prevention Act. A few months later, in a speech to the members of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, Johnson reiterated the need for new legislation to deal with the fact that one out of six boys were likely to go before a juvenile court before they turned eighteen. Johnson argued for a broad approach that would “prevent careers in crime, not just to punish them,” with schools playing a critical role.Footnote 62 Johnson pushed for increased federal funding for teachers as an antidelinquency measure, claiming, “there are thousands and thousands of boys and girls who are going to be delinquents, unless we can get good teachers.”Footnote 63 According to Johnson, “adequate schools with the right kinds of teachers” were fundamental to providing poor youth with the opportunity to succeed and winning the fight against delinquency.Footnote 64
As Congress took up Johnson’s proposal for new legislation, schools continued to be a central focus of antidelinquency efforts. In his appearance before the House committee considering the proposed legislation, Secretary of HEW John Gardner testified that “anyone concerned to prevent delinquency must be concerned with measures to upgrade education in the slums.”Footnote 65 In 1968, Congress passed the Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Control Act (JDPCA), which greatly expanded the federal role in the fight against juvenile delinquency. The new law was designed to create a national approach to the problem of juvenile delinquency, to be run by HEW.
Once again, the public school system was explicitly enlisted in the effort to “prevent, treat, and control juvenile delinquency.”Footnote 66 The law required states to prepare and implement comprehensive juvenile delinquency plans in order to qualify for federal grants. One of the requirements for states to receive federal funds was that they demonstrated their plan provided, “effective coordination of plans and programs developed and conducted by the State in fields related to juvenile delinquency, including programs under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.”Footnote 67 As Johnson had requested, the legislation also provided funds for training personnel (such as teachers) that dealt with delinquents and “educational delinquency prevention programs in schools, for youths in danger of becoming delinquent.”Footnote 68 Attorney General Ramsey Clark justified the connection between these institutions in a hearing on the legislation, repeating a familiar line that “[a] lack of education breeds crime.”Footnote 69 While Clark supported a broad antidelinquency prevention plan beyond just schools, he was among the chorus of supporters drawing a strong link between schools and crime fighting.
Congress pointed to schools as an important part of the delinquency prevention effort, as it provided specific funds to “assist States and communities to establish special preventive services, including educational delinquency prevention programs in schools, for youths in danger of becoming delinquent.”Footnote 70 President Johnson reiterated the importance of education to the fight against delinquency in his remarks on signing the bill, noting, “Criminals are made and not born. They are made by slums, they are made by bad schools, by bad health, by idleness, and by despair.”Footnote 71 This legislation represented a substantial expansion of the federal financial commitment to the fight against delinquency, as it authorized funding for the bill in the amounts of $25 million for 1969, $50 million for 1970, and $75 million for 1971 (a sevenfold increase over the funds provided by the JDYOCA). As this legislation provided millions of dollars for new juvenile delinquency programs, it reinforced the notion that schools and education were a solution to delinquency.
Even as policy makers increasingly drew education policy into the antidelinquency fight in the 1950s and 1960s, some Democrats continued to push for an approach that also focused on broader economic factors. Throughout the 1960s, some high-ranking Democrats within the executive branch (including Kennedy’s HEW Secretary Abraham Ribicoff, Johnson’s Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, and Sargent Shriver, the director the Office of Economic Opportunity) repeatedly stressed the need for a comprehensive approach to social problems like delinquency that included a focus on youth employment and improving housing for poor families.Footnote 72
One of the concessions to the group of Democrats arguing for a broader approach to the issue of delinquency was the establishment of the Neighborhood Youth Corps (NYC). The NYC was created in 1964 as part of the War on Poverty effort to provide poor youth with publicly supported jobs. Housed in the Department of Labor, the NYC was based in part on Senator Hubert Humphrey’s long advocacy for a revival of a program like the Civilian Conservation Corp to address chronic youth unemployment and “put idle youth to work constructively, and in some cases, to prevent high school dropouts,” which was believed to be an important source of delinquency.Footnote 73 As President Johnson stated in his announcement of the establishment of the program, “[h]undreds of thousands of young Americans badly need the experience, the income, and the sense of purpose which useful full or part-time work can bring.”Footnote 74 The program put the needed income for these youth at the center of the program and initially required that 70% of all funds for NYC be expended on wages.Footnote 75 The NYC became the largest direct job creation program of the 1960s, and it had provided jobs for over five million youth by the early 1970s.Footnote 76
Although emphasizing the structural aspects of the problems facing youth with solutions that directly addressed lack of income and employment, NYC was in many ways an indication of the waning influence of the New Deal ideology when it came to thinking about youth unemployment and crime. The NYC represented the only concession to Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz after President Johnson rejected his proposal for a massive public job training and creation program. While the Department of Labor was advocating for more robust measures of job creation, the Johnson administration instead “focused on promoting the capacity of people, especially young people, to pursue the job opportunities that a healthy economy was assumed to offer—a supply-side view of poverty reduction.”Footnote 77 As an indication of the declining influence of the New Deal approach, the NYC program itself was at times pitched as a way to reduce welfare spending.Footnote 78
Even this more limited vision of an approach to youth crime and unemployment came under attack during the Nixon administration as policy makers aggressively pushed against the interventionist economic approach to social problems. Programs like the NYC and the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) quickly fell out of favor as solutions to juvenile delinquency. Despite the turn against many of the Great Society programs, there was little congressional interest in reducing the newfound role the federal government had in education policy and congressional interest in juvenile delinquency did not diminish. As the programs and individuals associated with interventionist economic approaches to problems like youth crime were increasingly marginalized, the role of education in the fight against juvenile delinquency grew even more important.Footnote 79
Beyond the Great Society: The Shift in the Seventies
The fraying of the Great Society coalition was evident by the end of the 1960s. The 1970s brought a well-organized and unified business lobby that went on the policy offensive and began to more aggressively undo the New Deal consensus to expand public goods.Footnote 80 Faith in government was weakened, and major economic calamity was met with budgetary restraint rather than expansion.Footnote 81 Although there were still many Democratic actors advocating for national economic planning, labor law reform, national health care, full employment, and regulating business, by the end of the decade both parties shifted to tax cuts and a rollback of regulations on industry.Footnote 82 Conservatives emboldened by the powerful business lobby and growing right wing Republicanism sought to shrink and reorient the goals of the welfare state through rollback, retrenchment, and policy drift.Footnote 83 The conservative ascendancy of the decade also ushered in some of the most punitive legislative interventions in United States history with the rise of “law-and-order” politics.Footnote 84 These larger shifts had profound effects on the development of federal juvenile justice and education policy.
As the national mood began to shift against generous social spending for combating social problems and towards punitive solutions, congressional policy makers began to tighten the connection between juvenile delinquency and growing law enforcement agencies. When Congress was considering the 1968 JDPCA, a heated fight broke out over the role of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). A coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans in the House voted for an amendment that explicitly prohibited the OEO from receiving any funding from the bill, over the opposition of a majority of Democrats.Footnote 85 This dynamic would prove consequential for federal policy in both the education and juvenile delinquency realms. As federal policy makers expanded the reach and resources of juvenile delinquency programs during the 1970s, they required youth employment initiatives, public schools, and grassroots organizations to collaborate with juvenile courts, police departments, and correctional facilities to receive funding.Footnote 86
When Congress considered renewal of the ESEA in 1970, it provided more funding for fighting delinquency through the education system. The 1970 Amendments included a new section authorizing grants for projects that aided in the identification of delinquents and special curricula and support for “the academic and vocational education of antisocial, aggressive, or delinquent persons” within public schools.Footnote 87 Before disbursing the grants, the 1970 Amendments required that the Commissioner of Education seek the advice and recommendations of a variety of law enforcement agencies including the Director of the Bureau of Prisons, the Director of the Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development, the head of the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, and the Administrator of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA).Footnote 88 The role of the ESEA in drawing schools into the fight against delinquency was also evident in the increased educational funding directed toward delinquents. Federal support through ESEA for educational programs targeted at juvenile delinquency had grown to over $18 million by 1971 (a ninefold increase from when it had first begun four years prior)—with much of the funds going to increase educational staff specifically devoted to dealing with delinquent children.Footnote 89
As federal policy makers were increasing the role of the education system in the fight against juvenile delinquency, they also began to expand the role of law enforcement agencies. In 1968, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act (OCCSSA), which amended the definition of “law enforcement” to specifically include programs related to the prevention, control, and reduction of juvenile delinquency for the first time. The next year, in its extension of JDPCA, Congress required that HEW work with the LEAA to combat delinquency.Footnote 90 By 1972, the LEAA estimated that roughly $140 million of its budget was being directed toward juvenile delinquency programs, which dwarfed the expenditures from HEW, the agency technically in charge of the federal government’s efforts against delinquency.Footnote 91 The role of law enforcement agencies was made even greater in 1973, as Congress amended the OCCSSA to require that states have a juvenile justice component as part of a comprehensive law enforcement plan when applying for federal funding through the act.Footnote 92
Congress significantly altered the federal approach to juvenile delinquency with the passage of the most far-reaching federal legislation concerning juvenile justice, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 (JJDPA). This landmark legislation removed the issue of juvenile delinquency from the purview of HEW and placed it firmly under the DOJ.Footnote 93 The law established a new centralized Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) which was tasked with leading the expanded federal fight against juvenile delinquency.Footnote 94 Along with the shift in governing authority, the law also greatly increased federal funding in the realm of juvenile delinquency, raising annual expenditure to $150 million by 1977, double what it had been prior.Footnote 95 The legislation, introduced by Democrats, passed both chambers with overwhelming support, even with the Nixon administration firmly opposed to increased spending.Footnote 96 Following the enactment of the JJPDA of 1974, the absorption of social service initiatives by crime control programs rapidly escalated.Footnote 97
Despite the shift in authority from the HEW to the DOJ, the JJDPA relied on the same ideological foundations that had first motivated federal intervention in the 1960s—particularly when it came to the role of education. The Senate report continued in the long vein of proclaiming juvenile delinquency a growing threat and cited a 1973 report from the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals arguing that the first priority in reducing crime nationally “must be given to preventing juvenile delinquency.”Footnote 98 Accordingly, both the Senate and the House committees in charge of writing the bill repeatedly heard testimony that encouraged federal lawmakers to focus on schools as central to the antidelinquency fight. Stephen Porter, an executive director of the County Crime Commission from Kentucky, told the Senate JJDPA author Birch Bayh (D-IN), that “[t]oo often the antisocial child comes hated and unwanted in the school system,” but he argued that “these children can be helped and should be helped at an early age. And I think schools should take prime responsibility for that.”Footnote 99 Oliver Keller, the Director of the State Division of Youth Services for Florida offered similar sentiment in a House of Representatives hearing on the bill, testifying that “[t]he school systems contribute heavily to the delinquency,”Footnote 100 and that “the schools must understand their roles in creating delinquents and in their reformation” in order to effectively reduce delinquency.Footnote 101
The JJDPA reflected this understanding of the special role of schools in the fight against delinquency. The final legislation included language that sought to address problematic disciplinary policies within schools and proclaimed that “juvenile delinquency can be prevented through programs designed to keep students in elementary and secondary schools.”Footnote 102 Throughout the legislation, teachers were specifically grouped with law enforcement and juvenile court system personnel as eligible for receiving training to prevent and treat delinquency.Footnote 103
As the connection between juvenile delinquency and the education system was tightening throughout the 1970s, there was also increasing bipartisan skepticism that comprehensive social programs could effectively reduce delinquency. In 1973, President Nixon attempted to disband the OEO through impounding its funding. That same year, he pushed for the elimination of federal funding for the NYC (which amounted to over $375 million in 1973), the most successful public job creation program from the Johnson era. Although the NYC was not eliminated, its funding was cut, and participation in the program dropped from a high of 863,000 in 1972 to just 177,000 by 1974. When the federal government scaled back its broad approach to the issue of juvenile delinquency, it increasingly positioned schools and education policy as the site for attacking delinquency outside the criminal justice system.
The abandonment of even the limited public jobs program embodied by the NYC was not universally embraced. The very 1973 federal report on crime that Congress used to justify the need for the JJDPA also warned, “[w]hen unemployment rates among youths in poverty areas of central cities are almost 40 percent and crime is prevalent, it is impossible not to draw conclusions about the relationship between jobs and crime.”Footnote 104 However, this sentiment failed to influence policy, as the JJDPA shifted responsibility for delinquency outside of HEW and provided no funding for public jobs for youths. The JJDPA instituted a national system for young offenders and formally labeled all economically vulnerable youth “potentially criminal,” signaling that the effort to fight crime had largely supplanted the effort to wage a War on Poverty.Footnote 105
As the structural analysis continued to lose sway, Republicans began to argue that the comprehensive approach of the Great Society was not only deeply flawed but made crime worse.Footnote 106 The growing belief among policy makers and social scientists that prisons could not “fix” individuals’ criminal propensities opened the space for a rise in “law-and-order” crime policies.Footnote 107 As a result, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s the federal government and most states restructured their sentencing schemes by eliminating indeterminate sentences and passing “truth in sentencing” laws that required those sent to prison to serve the majority of their sentences before being eligible for parole.Footnote 108 The punitive turn in the broader criminal justice sphere paralleled the developments in juvenile delinquency and education. In both instances, a failure to address how economic inequalities contributed to crime and delinquency narrowed the range of policy choices to improving human capital or pursuing punishment. When schools were perceived as having failed to solve problems of delinquency, both political parties supported a turn to punitive solutions. By the end of the decade, the United States had a higher youth incarceration rate than any other industrialized nation.Footnote 109
Given that schools had been so thoroughly interconnected with the fight against delinquency, this emerging punitive approach filtered into federal education policy as well. By the early 1970s, Democrats had begun to introduce legislation designed specifically to support “law-and-order” within schools and proposed amendments to the ESEA reflected this heightened punitiveness. For example, in 1971 and 1973, Democratic policy makers advocated for the “Safe Schools Act,” arguing that “Congress has identified crime as a matter of overriding national urgency and concern in which the Federal government must play a major role. This should be no less the case with regard to crime in the schools than it is with regard to crime in the streets.”Footnote 110 Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers, affirmed the concern over school violence and strongly supported the Act and its proposals to increase security forces within schools.Footnote 111 James A. Harris, President of the National Education Association, unlike Shanker, opposed school discipline measures and in a 1975 hearing argued they were “self-defeating.”Footnote 112 While these major education leaders were split on the role of “law-and-order” in schools, they both agreed that increased funding and lower teacher–student ratios were imperative to reducing disruptions in the classroom. The position of educators during this time illustrates that arguments about school order had become a central framework for arguing for increased educational funding. Although this was an effective rationale for increasing the federal role in education, educators were not able to entirely control the punitive outcomes of the response. Although the Safe Schools Act did not pass, these proposals did indicate a growing concern with “law and order” in relation to schools, one that ultimately contributed to increased punishment.
One consequence of linking antidelinquency and schools in the context of this punitive turn was the expansion of School Resource Officer (SRO) programs. Although SROs had been around since the 1950s, a declaration by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals in 1973 gave SROs their first national recognition. This statement recommended that large police agencies assign a full-time officer to each junior and senior high school in order to teach classes, counsel students, and enforce the law. Reflecting the growing acceptance of a role for law enforcement within schools, in 1975 the New York Board of Education submitted a letter to a congressional hearing arguing that “[t]he school provides an ideal situation to affect a positive prevention program, teachers and counselors are the first to spot pre-delinquent behavior patterns. The school is the logical place for the Police Department to make a significant prevention input.”Footnote 113 Despite being present only in a single school system in the 1950s, a congressional report entitled “The Safe School Study,” found that by 1975, “1 out of 10 senior high schools reported police stationed inside, and 1 out of 5 senior high schools in the largest cities reported the presence of police.”Footnote 114
As Hinton has noted, the efforts around delinquency in the 1970s were particularly consequential for Black children in cities, as state-building activities resulted in “diffused crime control techniques into the everyday lives of [B]lack urban children, yielding new possibilities for supervision in public schools.”Footnote 115 The 1973 report reflected the fact that many of these techniques were first deployed in urban areas, finding that “[b]ig city senior high schools are almost 20 times as likely as all schools together to have police in them.”Footnote 116 The report also found a marked increase in the number of police patrols outside of schools and a substantial number of schools that employed nonpolice professional security personnel.Footnote 117 As early as the mid 1970s, schools were being integrated into the growing “law-and-order” punitive shift in significant ways.Footnote 118 The expansion of programs like SROs was a natural outgrowth of the role of schools in antidelinquency efforts of the federal government.
Conclusion
In this article we put forth three primary findings. First, we show when and how education and antidelinquency became linked at the federal level in the 1960s. Second, we show that the timing of the linkage of antidelinquency and education was significant, as the federal construction of education and antidelinquency institutions occurred when material redistributive policies were losing support. Third, the late 1960s and early 1970s proved to be a critical juncture. Education policy became linked to antidelinquency, and when other welfare state approaches were cut or eliminated, it was increasingly the predominant institution outside of the criminal justice system tasked with addressing youth crime. The lasting effects of these particular developments meant education policy was susceptible to the punitive shift toward “law-and-order” approaches.
From the 1950s to 1970s, federal lawmakers advocated for both materially redistributive policies such as public job creation and behavioral solutions to youth crime such as school-based antidelinquency programs. By the 1970s, those pushing for broad structural approaches to fighting social problems were effectively marginalized and the Democratic Party increasingly embraced policies that centered on behavioral interventions. As Democrats led the way in establishing a major institutional presence in both education and delinquency prevention, they justified the expansion of federal authority through arguing that interventions in schools would be an effective antidelinquency policy prescription. The broader attack on policies geared toward material redistribution to address delinquency elevated education as the primary arena for addressing youth crime outside the criminal justice system. Antidelinquency policies became primarily the purview of the DOJ instead of HEW. This shift facilitated the increasing coordination between law enforcement and educational institutions—such as the growing presence of police officers in schools.
In addition to how these developments constrained future political possibilities, this article also sheds light on why education policy has been pushed in a punitive direction. Drawing education into the antidelinquency effort not only “educationalized” the problem of youth crime but also reshaped education policy itself. While we describe the early expansion of school resource officers, these programs foreshadowed broader changes like “zero-tolerance” policies, rising rates of suspensions and expulsions, and increased law enforcement surveillance techniques used in public schools.Footnote 119 As the public mood turned against funding of programs designed to address “root causes” of social disorder—the arguments connecting education and delinquency began to cut a different way and federal education institutions increasingly became caught-up in the growing punitive, “law-and-order” approach to crime.
Liberals in the 1960s created the ideological foundation and institutional capacity to enable the conservative shift under Reagan’s leadership, and a bipartisan hysteria over school violence ultimately ushered in the widespread implementation of school discipline and “get tough” policies in the 1980s and 1990s. Although some Republicans were resistant to developing federal bureaucratic authority in the realm of education and juvenile justice policy, they ultimately came around to accept these institutions and direct them toward more punitive ends.Footnote 120 By embracing the core belief that schools were a site of antidelinquency policy, Republicans solidified the institutions established under Democratic leadership while injecting a more punitive strategy for how schools would reduce delinquency that centered on increasing school choice and “get-tough” policies.
In the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans both uncritically fueled a moral panic over school violence, which garnered public support for the expansion of punitive school discipline policies. Bipartisan support for punitive solutions coalesced around the passage of the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, which led to zero-tolerance policies that increased suspensions, expulsions, and police presence in schools.Footnote 121 The same moral panic over school violence that facilitated the spread of punitive policies also undermined public education and facilitated a bipartisan embrace of “school choice.”Footnote 122 Ultimately, as both parties embraced an ideological framework that tightly connected schools and delinquency, alternative approaches to youth disorder—such as those that centered on political economy—were increasingly pushed to the sidelines. In an era of neoliberal ascendance, the link between schools and delinquency facilitated the punitive turn and undermined public education. These negative consequences flow from what Steffes describes as the long-standing tendency to place “responsibility for meeting social policy goals and aspirations to schools, which are often ill equipped to actually solve them.”Footnote 123
Today, in a welcome development, punitive zero-tolerance policies in schools are increasingly criticized by stakeholders across the education landscape. Many scholars have called attention to the idea of a “school-to-prison pipeline” (STPP) wherein school practices “push” or “funnel” students into the criminal justice system and have a wide range of negative consequences for students and schools.Footnote 124 Activists and politicians have joined the critique of the STPP, and after years of pursuing punitive policies as a means of preventing juvenile delinquency through schools, some policy makers have pushed to limit these policies and enact behavioral interventions instead.Footnote 125 While the repudiation of punitive school policies is a significantly positive development, proposed reforms largely continue within the paradigm that positions schools as cause of, and solution to, juvenile delinquency. Policy makers from both major political parties frequently debate the merits of different antidelinquency strategies within the education system, but they rarely put forth broader redistributive policies as solutions to the complex problems of delinquency or crime.
The legacy of the 1960s developments is evident today in the commonsense notion that schools are deeply tied to delinquency. As the opening of this article indicates, even nominally progressive politicians like Barack Obama routinely fall back into educational solutions to delinquency and prison rates. This belief burdens schools with a responsibility to solve delinquency without support from a robust welfare state. It also has narrowed the debate about how to address youth crime to either education or incarceration and largely excludes discussions of broader inequalities. Our findings support an emerging scholarship that suggests the politics of the mid-twentieth century subsequently stymied progressive development in a number of policy realms. Ultimately, the embrace of an ideological framework that tightly connects schools and delinquency is indicative of a constrained political vision that contributed to the rise of punitive policies and sets alternative approaches—such as those that focus on material redistribution—as outside the realm of possibility.
