It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region,

and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

I'm Quinn Myers, and this time on Curious City, we're taking a look at one of Chicago's most influential exports, the juvenile justice system.

Today, if you're under 18 and get arrested in Cook County, you'll usually go through a separate legal system designed for young people.

But until the beginning of the 20th century, many children who ran into trouble with the law were tried and jailed alongside adults.

That is, until the world's first juvenile court was established in 1890, right here in Chicago.

It's the origins of that court that Andrea Krieg, a criminal justice professor at Elmhurst

College, wants to know more about. So with every juvenile delinquency textbook, I would say, there is one sentence that says the first

juvenile court was created in Cook County, Illinois, and then it just keeps moving on. And for

most people across the U.S., they probably don't think anything of it, but us being in Chicago

in Chicago land, I started to

wonder kind of, wait, I want more information. More information like where exactly was the first

juvenile court? How did it function? Who was eligible? And why did it start here in Chicago?

The answers to Andrea's questions are rooted in the progressive era when a group of impassioned

activists in Chicago, most of them women, developed the model for the first juvenile court.

But as it spread and evolved over the 20th century, the court started to move away from how it was

originally conceived. It ended up looking more and more like the adult criminal system it had hoped to replace.

Today, those shifts have presented a wide range of challenges for the juvenile justice system.

But they've also inspired new efforts to reevaluate how we detain and rehabilitate children and young adults,

efforts that in some ways harkened back to what the reformers had in mind over a century ago.

Let's start back in 1882.

By one count, there were at least 20 kids under the age of 11 in the Cook County Jail.

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