Tamara Myers

The Voluntary Delinquent: Parents, Daughters, and the Montreal Juvenile Delinquents' Court in 1918

In 1912 the newly created Montreal Juvenile Delinquents’ Court began processing hundreds of adolescent girls for minor infractions such as incorrigibility and desertion. Its reform-minded judge, François-Xavier Choquet, made liberal use of probation introduced by the federal Juvenile Delinquents Act (1908) resulting in the scrutinizing of the home, work, and social lives of the girls brought to the court. This is not simply a story of the state intruding upon working-class girls and their families, however: this article assigns an important role to parents in the emergent juvenile justice system, arguing that families reported and defined delinquent behaviour and often recommended that daughters be sent to reform institutions, especially those administered by religious orders. Parents’ desires to have daughters incarcerated met with resistence in Choquet’s court where he favoured probation as the more modern form of treatment for juvenile delinquency. Having failed to win incarceration through the courts, parents sought to place wayward daughters in reform schools which facilitated parental desires by establishing a ‘voluntary’ class of inmates.

Didactic sudden death: children, police, and teaching citizenship in the age of automobility

This article explores the use of sudden death narratives to teach children lessons of safety and citizenship in mid-twentieth century North America. Police departments deployed images of public child death to warn viewers that accidents, while shocking, were the predictable outcome of the mixing of inexperienced, unskilled children and modern automobile-centric culture. As a linchpin between children and modern street life, officers made their way into North American schools, narrowed the gap between themselves and children, and played a principal role in the mid-twentieth century safety movement. Delivering a powerful message to elementary and high school students in the decades after World War II—that accidents may happen but children could prevent them—local police forces turned to necropedagogy and resituated law enforcement as friend and teacher rather than antagonist to youth.