In 1906 Harvey Humphrey Baker, a special justice on the Brookline, Massachusetts, Police Court, was appointed Boston's first juvenile court judge. Eager to resolve the problems of youth through the juvenile court system, Baker also advocated clinics where social workers and others could try to resolve the more "baffling cases" of troubled youth.

In 1903 Simeon E. Baldwin, a Connecticut lawyer and a founder of the American Bar Association, attended an international congress on prisons in Budapest. The following year he was vice president of the Universal Congress of Lawyers and Jurists in Saint Louis, and in 1905 he was president of both the Association of American Law Schools and the American Historical Association.

In 1908 Kate Barnard, Oklahoma's commissioner of prisons, investigated prisons in Kansas, where some Oklahoma prisoners were being held. Shocking revelations of conditions in Kansas penitentiaries led to revelations from other states...