Within the past three decades, legal changes have transformed the juvenile court from a nominally rehabilitative social welfare agency into a second-class criminal court for young offenders. The migration of blacks from the rural south to the urban north, the structural transformation of cities and the economy over the past quarter-century and the current public and political linkages between race and serious youth crime provided the impetus for recent punitive juvenile justice policies. Some States have shifted non-criminal status offenders out of the juvenile system into a “hidden system” in the private-sector mental health and chemical dependency industries. Other States have transferred increasing numbers of youths, disproportionately minority, into the criminal justice system. A third group of States have escalated the punishments imposed upon these delinquents, again disproportionately minority, who remain in an increasingly criminalized juvenile justice system. These changes in youth sentencing policy reflect change both in the social construction of adolescence and in strategies of social control. As a result, very little remains of the idea of a rehabilitative juvenile court. Figures, references, cases cited