Punishment, Reformation, or Welfare: Responses to ‘The Problem’ of Juvenile Crime in Victorian and Edwardian Britain

Abstract

The contours of the modern juvenile justice system were arguably fully formed by the early twentieth century (Garland, 1985: 2). The 1908 Children’s Act which established juvenile courts, and the approved school system of 1933, were points of formalisation in a system which had its roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Thus in 1788, the Philanthropic Society was founded by Robert Young in London, and in its earliest prescriptions it developed the Reform for delinquent children, and the Manufactory for orphan children or children of convicted offenders (Carlebach, 1970: 4–15; Shore, 1999: 6, 99). The later fusing of state and voluntary sector approaches would see the division between the Reform and Manufactory reflected in the evolution of the industrial and reformatory schools. Thus vagrant, vulnerable and semi-delinquent children were to be sent to the industrial school, and children convicted of felony were to be sent to the reformatory school. A series of acts pushed the evolution of these institutions during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. However, evolutions are rarely straightforward, and testament to this is a continual debate about the issue of juvenile delinquency and the particular form that punishment should take throughout our period.