History from Here

  North Idaho District Council of Probate Judges Sandpoint, Idaho,  Spokane Chronicle , January 15, 1959 About Frances Sleep Updated September 22, 2025 Colleague In mid-January, Judge Sleep, who had been sworn in as Bonner County Probate Judge three days earlier, hosted her colleagues in juvenile justice at a meeting of the North Idaho District Council of Probate Judges and Juvenile Workers in Sandpoint. According to an article in the January 15 edition of Wallace's  North Idaho Press , the Council was formed in 1958 "to fill a need for better understanding and more uniform enforcement of the Youth Rehabilitation Act;" it also served as a means of assisting juvenile workers in acquiring information about new ways to treat juvenile offenders and prevent delinquency.  ( North Idaho Press , January 15, 1959, p.1) In its coverage of the meeting, the Sandpoint News-Bulletin reports that more than 70 judges and other juvenile workers from the 10 northern counties attend...

Trend in Juvenile Court Delinquency Cases and Child Population 10-17 years of age 1940-1958 Juvenile Court Statistics - 1958 , pdf page 16 About Frances Sleep Expert During 1958, Judge Sleep emerged as an expert on juvenile delinquency, a topic that concerned many Americans at that time. Efforts to understand what historian James Gilbert called “the sudden postwar burst of delinquency and youthful viciousness” took many forms in the United States during the Eisenhower years, from the establishment of a Congressional subcommittee to investigate the influence of comic books on young people to forums in small towns where local criminal justice experts shared their knowledge of what juveniles were doing in their own back yards with interested citizens. (Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s , p. 3) By its own admission,  Juvenile Court Statistics - 1958 , a report published by the U.S. Children's Bureau in 1960, did "not measure ...