ABSTRACT
A backwash of social ferment was felt in California towns that lost much of their adult male population to the mines, leaving no one to maintain public order and control crime. The California Club of San Francisco, which took the lead in getting the bill first introduced, was directly patterned after a comparable women's organization in Chicago. Under the administration of juvenile probation by the Department of Welfare, attempts at control through conferences and published reports were continued. The C.Y.A. Act and its subsequent amendments, while deliberately staying the hand of the state in juvenile court matters, nevertheless assigned certain limited powers of control to the C.Y.A. director. The main purpose of the C.Y.A., as it came to be called, was social protection—"to protect society by substituting training and treatment for retributive punishment of young persons found guilty of public offenses".
