The nation’s century-old approach to treating juvenile offenders differently than adults originated in Denver through the activism of a feisty judge who championed children’s rights.
Widely regarded as the pioneer behind the country’s juvenile justice system and its rehabilitative focus, Colorado Judge Ben Lindsey crusaded for reforms along a career arc that took him from probation officer to lawyer to Denver judge to gubernatorial candidate. History books refer to Lindsey as “The Kids’ Judge.”
The philosophy of Lindsey, who grew up in a low-income, working-class family, was profoundly shaped by his visit as a young man to a Colorado jail. As most accounts go, he was startled to find two young, indigent boys serving time with an adult horse thief and a safecracker.
“This became the inspiration for his lifelong determination to improve the lives of children and create a juvenile justice system,” said Annie Robb, assistant director of the Molly Brown House Museum, which chronicles some of Lindsey’s social and political alliances with Brown, a social activist. “…He believed the courts should ‘deal with persons and not merely with what they do.”‘
Lindsey believed prisons were merely schools that taught youths crime, and he railed against poor conditions that exposed jailed juveniles to abuse.
He ultimately assembled the governor, politicians and the press for a summit to talk with kids serving time in prison, some of whom had fled abusive homes.
That meeting convinced his opponents that reform was necessary and led to the creation of a separate court system and rehabilitative housing for teen offenders in 1903.
About the same time, Illinois officials adopted many of his ideas and launched their own juvenile system – sometimes credited with opening before Denver’s. Over the next 20 years, most states in the nation seized on the approach.
Gilpin County District Judge Fred Rodgers, an author of legal articles about Lindsey’s life, said Lindsey would be upset to see how Colorado’s justice system has done a “180-degree turn,” sending kids to prison. Since 1998, prosecutors have convicted kids as adults in more than 1,200 cases, sending most of them on a path to prison.
“The theories upon which he created the juvenile court are being rejected and cast aside in favor of a more punitive system,” Rodgers said.
Jerry Adamek, former head of Colorado’s juvenile system, agreed. “Clearly, Lindsey is rolling over in his grave.”