Even before the Great Migration got underway, when the black population constituted a tiny percentage of Chicago residents, black children were over-represented in the city's juvenile justice system. The disproportionate presence of African Americans in juvenile courts and institutions and the percentage of black children identified as delinquent only grew as migrants arrived in waves from the South.

How this came to be is the central question animating Tera Eva Agyepong's The Criminalization of Black Children, a study of how ideas about race and childhood influenced the development of Chicago's juvenile courts. In the first chapter, Agyepong argues that black children were over-represented in the city's juvenile courts and institutions in the early twentieth century because their needs were neglected by Progressive Era social welfare organizations, programs, and agencies. The pressures of migration strained and sometimes separated families, making young people especially vulnerable to poverty and its ill effects. Although clubwomen, black churches, and the Urban League worked to provide care for black children, they could not overcome institutional forces that increasingly viewed dependent black children as delinquent. Racist ideas about the inherent connection between blackness and criminality deprived black children of the protective cloak of childhood innocence that assumed white children to be dependent and, conversely, black children to be delinquent. If institutions imagined that the children who needed saving in American cities were white, that left a void in state-sponsored care for black dependent children.

The book's second chapter reveals how interconnected the rise of compulsory education was with the parallel development of juvenile courts in Chicago. The courts became a prime tool of the Progressive effort to coerce young people off the streets and into schools. Agyepong illuminates what the enforcement of compulsory education laws, which categorized wide swaths of young people as delinquent by labeling them truant, meant for Chicago's black children. Agyepong's work challenges the idea that the “school to prison pipeline” was a product of educational policy in the late twentieth century, as this framing elides the extent to which there was ever a clear division between the public education and juvenile justice systems. In fact, the two grew in tandem through the enforcement of compulsory education laws in the early twentieth century.

Although the book is framed as an exploration of race and juvenile justice in Chicago, the last two chapters travel outside city limits to the Illinois Training School for Girls at Geneva and the Illinois Training School for Boys at St. Charles, residential juvenile detention facilities located west of Chicago. These chapters layer analyses of gender and sexuality onto the intersections of race and youth. Officials in both institutions showed particular concerns about policing the sexual expression of their wards. Such concerns about sex, Agyepong contends, led school officials to act in ways that compounded stereotypes about both race and sex. Young black women were labelled as masculine sexual aggressors, particularly when it came to inter-racial relationships, thereby justifying their segregation within the institution. The final chapter, which examines the boys’ school at St. Charles, argues that ideas about race and criminality were central to the abandonment of the rehabilitative ideal via the establishment of the first juvenile maximum security prison. Agyepong attributes a local crisis over runaways to whites’ fears of the institution's black population, arguing that such concerns animated discussions around the establishment of a new facility that would primarily serve to punish those young men who were deemed too dangerous or criminally inclined to succeed at St. Charles.

The book's source base limits the extent to which we can fully understand the individual lives chronicled in juvenile court records; young people appear in the record as they came into contact with the system, but there is often little known about what became of them once they left the orbit of the juvenile justice system. In 1926, police arrested 43% of the black boys in the city for delinquency (46). The shockingly high percentages of young people who came into contact with the juvenile justice system raises questions about how this shaped their lives and the neighborhoods in which they lived. The voices and experiences of these young people are submerged in the record, and so the book is more concerned with how adults talked about these young people and determined their fates. The book is therefore limited in what it can tell us about how interactions with the juvenile courts and institutions changed the lives of young black men and women in Chicago after they left them.

Nonetheless, The Criminalization of Black Children offers a pressing case for how important it is to consider age, race, and gender together in understanding the history of the American justice system writ large.