Staying in Control? Youth Reformatories, Social Fears and Social Change Under Francoism

Abstract

This article explores continuity and change in Spain's reformatories. Looking at legal and normative documentation, we could argue, on the one hand, that the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) found little need to change how the reformatories worked. The juvenile court system, on which they depended, displayed strong similarities to those operating elsewhere in the West, and my empirical study of 2,300 personal and administrative records indicates that the reformatories were always characterized by archaic practices and were chronically underfunded throughout Francoism. On the other hand, after analysing the evolving profiles of adolescents confined under Francoism, we can see the connections with both specific processes of regime-sanctioned change from the end of the 1950s – in particular massive, accelerated, internal rural-to-urban migration – and the goal of the dictatorship of preserving a particular form of social order by maintaining tight control of those sectors of the population it considered a danger (i.e., predominantly marginalized, male adolescents living on the edges of Spain's cities – in the shanty towns ( chabolas) or poor suburbs ( banlieues)). The article also looks at how families from different social classes interacted with the reformatories to achieve their own goals, which overlapped with the dictatorship's while remaining partly distinct.