Article review of the Voluntary Delinquents: Parents, Daughters, and the Montreal juvenile delinquents' court in 1918 by Tamara Myers.
In her article, Tamara Myers explained that young delinquent that were introduced to probation officers who investigated their work histories social and sexual behaviors and the family relations have led historians to the notion that the juvenile court was a tool from the Bourgeoisie to control the social moral and sexual lives of the working class. She argues that the working class parents were actually at the core of the new juvenile systems and they had an influence over the definition of delinquent conduct. Also, parents brought to court their children and insisted in their rights to have the state discipline them. To prove her thesis, she analyzes the juvenile systems through an examination of the roles of parents, young delinquents' girls, and court officials in 1918, Montreal. .
First of all, the author explains that the court depended on the reporting of young delinquents girls by parents and that it revealed a contradiction of opinion between the parents who favored incarceration ( reformatory schools) and Judges who preferred probation ( replace punishment by treatment). Therefore parents institutionalized them because they were faced with state resistance to incarcerate their children, particularly daughters. .
Then, there is another sub-thesis emerging in her article. She says that her study joins the growing literature on social welfare reforms as a way of controlling the working class, but that the "clients- and their families played an active role. She also says that the state wasn't as predominant and diffuses as earlier historians argued. Instead, parents joined the state in regulating their daughters. But then she goes to explain that it is the judges who maintained the ultimate authority in sentencing. Sentences were based on the input of court officials, who were mostly women because they wanted to extend the maternal rule in court, which investigated the lives of the adolescent girls.
