Watch: “Morality Squads, Curfews, and the Sports Solution: Policing Youth in Mid-Twentieth Century Canada” by Tamara Meyers
This paper speaks to the symposium’s main aims of “rethinking conceptualizations of marginalized youth identity” and of exploring “the history of policing and surveillance of young bodies over time and across national spaces” through an examination of a watershed moment in the history of policing youth in Canada. Faced with a deepening public crisis over youth in the 1940s Canadian police forces invented new technologies of surveillance and discipline and in turn reshaped their role in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Focusing on Montreal, this paper investigates critical developments in urban policing including fresh ventures like the creation of the Juvenile Morality Squad (later the Delinquency Prevention Bureau), a juvenile nocturnal curfew, and the Police Juvenile Club. It charts the work of male and female officers as they enforced juvenile curfew regulations and launched the ‘Sports Solution’.