Three Books to Read to Better Understand the Juvenile Justice System and Its Impact on Black Youth

Black youth are disproportionately criminalized in our current, modern juvenile justice system. They are five times as likely to be incarcerated compared to white youth, according to data collected by The Sentencing Project from as recently as 2023.

The reasons why are not a mystery: there is bias embedded deep in the foundations of the system. But, how did these patterns develop? How has this country’s history influenced the way Black youth are treated today? Where do we go from here?

Many qualified researchers and historians have collected the answers to these questions for us. This Black History Month, you can choose to learn more about the history of the juvenile justice system and its role in the lives of many Black youth over the decades. MCYJ has collated a few books to get you started: 

1. The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899-1945 by Tera Agyepong

   • Agyepong details the history of juvenile justice in the U.S. and how racial inequality was baked into its very foundations, leading to the patterns of criminalization and treatment we see today. The juvenile justice system had its start in Chicago, where the progressive movement to treat children differently from adults in court really began to take hold. However, those attitudes were not extended to the children of Black migrants from the South. Agyepong lays out the ripple effects of that on today’s system.

2. The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth by Kristin Henning

   • Many other youth, mostly white, get to experiment with expressing themselves in fashion and testing boundaries in their behavior with few consequences or more grace shown to them. Black children are often not given that same leeway, and many are treated like adults long before they actually are. In her book, Henning explores the ways Black youth in the U.S. are aggressively policed and held to different standards than other youth.

3. The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice by Geoff K. Ward

   • Ward looks at segregated systems of juvenile justice in 20th Century America and its intersections with the civil rights movement. Even as progressives of the time developed a new juvenile justice system, Black youth received a different experience. The creation and then integration of the juvenile justice system happened alongside the civil rights movement, and Ward looks at the advocates and efforts involved.