"Timely and required reading for all interested in the history of California's criminal justice system."
"This book should be required reading for anyone interested in the historical roots of disproportionate minority confinement in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. It makes major contributions by demonstrating the centrality of the eugenics movement to the formative period of juvenile justice history in California; detailing the disproportionate incarceration and sterilization of non-white youth; and, as a result, exploring the extent to which a national reform wave in the mid-twentieth century was propelled by events in California."
"States of Delinquency is on the cutting edge of work in the history of juvenile justice, and Chávez-García's study challenges historians to examine the intersection of science and race in other state systems, with other groups of young people."
"Chávez-García has produced a work of scholarship that pushes readers to historicize and question the disproportionate incarceration of Latino and African American boys and girls in the twenty-first century."
". . . An important and humane study about what happens to young people who are deemed unimportant and are inhumanely punished."
“Miroslava Chávez-García digs into long-forgotten files and humanizes the forgotten victims of injustice. States of Delinquency exposes the hidden racial dynamics of California’s juvenile justice system and makes us re-think the history of the child-saving movement.”—Tony Platt, author of The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency
“Impressively researched and passionately argued, States of Delinquency shows how racial prejudice and bogus social science reshaped early twentieth century juvenile corrections in California. Chavez-Garcia recreates both the everyday world of reform schools and the lives of delinquent youth, especially minorities, who were unfortunate enough to be confined there (or, worse, reassigned to special hospitals for sterilization). This book is an innovative, disquieting, and vividly detailed contribution to historical scholarship on the theory and practice of American juvenile justice.”—Steven Schlossman, author of Transforming Juvenile Justice.
“A fascinating and compelling study that reconstructs the forgotten lives of California's marginalized and criminalized youth. States of Delinquency illuminates the unsettling history of the juvenile justice system and demonstrates its relevance to the disproportionate incarceration of racial and ethnic minorities today.”—Alexandra Minna Stern, author of Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America.
