Bureaucrats and Entrepreneurs: Institutional Responses to Deviant Children in the United States, 1890-1920s

Child welfare was a central item on the Progressive reform agenda. But contrary to the professed goals of leading reformers, institutions for delinquent and dependent children expanded rapidly around the turn of the century. Nationwide, private agencies gres faster than those in the public sector. This article attemps to account both for the general rise in juvenile incarceration and for the trend toward privatization. It begins by exploring potential accounts of institutional expansion based on socioeconomic resource flows and social movement influence. The main concern however, is to develop a political model that focuses, first, on the internecine politics of the national charity organization movement and, second, on variation in patterns of state building among the American states. Dynamic quantitative methods are used to test these approaches. Results suggest strongly that the relative growth of public and private institutions was determined largely by political issues, including previous social policy commitments and patronage.