Prior to the 20th century, Indianapolis juvenile delinquents were treated the same as adult criminals. By the 1890s, local “progressive” thinkers began to object to handling children, who they thought were products of bad environments, in the same manner as adults. They argued that the state had a special responsibility to save wayward children.
Judge , judge of the city police court, spearheaded the creation of the juvenile justice system in Indianapolis. He began holding separate sessions for child offenders in 1901, eventually acquiring secluded offices in the basement of the courthouse. By taking children out of police court, he hoped to protect them from further negative influences, to prevent the stigma of being branded a criminal, and to provide each child with proper guidance and supervision.
After visiting the Chicago juvenile court, Stubbs and local reformers drafted a juvenile court law and successfully steered it through the state legislature in 1903. This state law, which affected only Indianapolis at the time, became the nation’s second juvenile court law.
The Indianapolis court was organized separately with a full-time judge, two paid probation officers, and a system of volunteer probation officers. The judge had the authority to hold informal investigations and hearings and to determine punishment on a case-by-case basis, unlike adult criminal proceedings. The law further prohibited the incarceration of juvenile delinquents with adults. Subsequent legislation in 1905 and 1907 extended the court’s jurisdiction to include cases involving contributory delinquency and neglected and dependent children.
Since the original intent of the juvenile court law was to reform rather than punish child offenders, early judges usually scolded the child and either dropped the charges or sentenced particularly troubled youth to supervised probation. Probation officers were middle-class men and women recruited by the Children’s Aid Association to supervise a single child weekly.
The majority of early delinquency cases involved boys who committed petty larceny or status crimes (truancy or incorrigibility for example), and the court reported few repeat offenders. More serious offenders were sentenced to a state or private reform school, such as the Indiana Boys’ School, where they stayed until they were considered rehabilitated.
Dependent and neglected children became wards of the court and were placed in state institutions or private homes. During its first two decades, the Indianapolis court was emulated nationally, and locally the court received many resources and much community support.
By 1910, the court leased a detention home at 28 West North Street for the temporary care of children whose cases could not be immediately processed. A Citizens Juvenile Court Bi-Partisan Committee, the first of several such organizations, began in 1918 to help oversee the court’s growing operation. In the early 1920s, legislation provided for more professional probation staff, one of whom had to be an African-American.
By the 1930s, individualized informal attention began to give way to impersonal processing of cases. A 1937 study of Indianapolis juvenile delinquency cited major problems with the court: meager investigations, referees hearing cases without the judge, perfunctory probationary supervision, insufficient coordination with social welfare agencies, and inadequate facilities. Despite a growing number of programs for juvenile delinquents conducted by the Marion County Welfare Department, , , and a number of private social welfare organizations, rates of repeat offenders continued to rise.
The social disruption and growth in urban population that occurred during and after World War II brought increased incidence of violent juvenile crimes, which by the 1950s were making the headlines of local newspapers. Citizens began demanding retribution rather than reform of juvenile delinquents. One result was the creation of the Youth Advisory Council of Marion County and the Citizens Committee on Juvenile Delinquents in the 1940s and 1950s. These groups studied the juvenile justice system and made recommendations for improvement. Responding to these suggestions, a new juvenile court law, enacted in 1941 and reenacted in 1945, made the court tougher on juvenile crime.
The law lowered the age at which juveniles could be transferred to adult criminal courts and introduced more formal court procedures, but did not significantly alter the court’s social welfare mentality. With the move to the site of the present juvenile justice center (located at 25th Street and Keystone Avenue) in 1958, court officials promised increased effectiveness in the combined detention home and juvenile court facilities.
During the 1960s, public dissatisfaction continued to mount over what some believed was the Indianapolis court’s too lenient policies. Reinforcing this call for strictness in handling juvenile offenders were several decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1960s that required juvenile courts to ensure due process, but also forced the local court to adopt more of the procedures of adult criminal courts.
A juvenile caseload that topped 10,000 cases annually tended to nullify these conservative reform attempts, since police, social workers, and court officials struggled simply to process cases rather than mete out tougher sentences. Police officers abandoned counseling programs and increased arrest efforts, a circumstance that forced the court increasingly to invoke automatic probation with little or no supervision and counseling. Commitments to reform school also rose but became progressively short and ineffectual. Juvenile delinquency rates in Indianapolis continued to rise, and bewildered citizens blamed families, schools, churches, and “the community.”
When Indianapolis became a Model Cities site in the 1970s, the juvenile court began to sponsor federally funded youth work training, education, counseling, and family programs. But these programs often focused on serious repeat offenders and involved institutionalization rather than prevention as the way to satisfy the community’s need for security.
A new juvenile code in 1978, while it upheld the ideal of the court as child protector and reformer, acknowledged that there was a class of unredeemable delinquents who should be treated as adult criminals. Major changes in the law included forcing parents to participate in rehabilitation programs, regular delinquent evaluation, lowered age limits for youth waivers to adult criminal court, more standardized court procedures, and limited public access to juvenile records.
The number of annual juvenile delinquency cases continued to climb throughout the 1980s, stressing the juvenile justice system’s limited resources and blocking officials’ ability to deal with cases effectively. By the early 1990s, most youth offenders received little personal rehabilitation or counseling unless they were serious repeat offenders. Rates of repeat offenders reached 70 percent, with a rise in the incidence of violent crime committed by younger and female delinquents.
Additionally, the worst areas of delinquency in Indianapolis remained essentially the same central-city neighborhoods as those of the 1930s. Problems within the system were compounded by larger social trends relating to poverty, drug usage, gangs, and changing family lifestyles.
During the early 1990s, a new initiative was formed, starting in Oregon and Illinois, called the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI). This initiative focused on keeping youth out of detention centers by combining public and private investment in community-based alternative supervision programs. The goal was to reallocate public resources towards positive youth development rather than towards mass incarceration. With Indianapolis’ juvenile justice system in need of reform, Marion County adopted the JDAI in 2006. The initiative proved successful, and within a decade, Marion County’s number of juvenile admissions in detention centers decreased by 66 percent.
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