Peter S. Prescott

The Child Savers

The 1982 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award was presented to Peter S. Prescott for The Child Savers. The Child Savers is hailed as a definitive analytical and historical study of the juvenile justice system. Platt's principal argument is that the "child savers" movement was not an effort to liberate and dignify youth but was instead a punitive and intrusive attempt to control the lives of working-class urban adolescents.

Peter S. Prescott was an American author and book critic, serving for more than two decades as senior book reviewer at Newsweek. In addition to The Child Savers, Prescott published A World of Our Own: Notes on Life and Learning in a Boy’s Preparatory School. He died in 2004.