Not To Punish But To Reform: Annotated Bibliography

The article "Not to Punish But to Reform': Juvenile Delinquency and Children's Protection Act in Alberta” was written by Dr. Rebecca Coulter. This article was originally published in Studies in Childhood History: A Canadian Perspective in 1982. I accessed this article from the textbook Social Welfare Policy in Canada: Historical Readings by Raymond Blake and Jeff Keshen.

Dr. Coulter is a retired professor at the University of Western in London, Ontario. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Alberta. To date, Dr. Coulter has had many publications and her work is focused on her theoretical and activist interests in class, gender, political consciousness, agency and progressive social change (University of Western). She has worked

Coulters thesis statement in, ‘Not to Punish But to Reform': Juvenile Delinquency and Children's Protection Act in Alberta is, “It is not clear whether Police Magistrate Primrose’s intervention on Albert’s behalf resulted in a suspended sentence but this anonymous youth’s life, revealed in some fragmentary correspondence, serves to illustrate the conflicting views of childhood and juvenile delinquency prevalent in the early part of this century”. (Coulter, R. 1995, pg. 138 as found in Blake and

Coulter’s article, the human condition establishes that children are vastly different from adults. Thus, children are automatically viewed as delinquent until they prove themselves wrong. There is a complex relationship between children and adults, especially between 1909 and 1929 with the development of child welfare legislation. People felt inclined to help the youth, yet the approach was largely inconsistent. This displays the biases that people were inclined to use, with disregard for their actions. Consequently, this was a time where there were minimal resources surrounding this topic, as it was relatively new. The human condition encompasses key events and situations that allow us to create our own beliefs and