Reforming the Juvenile in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England

In a recent Green Paper on punishment, rehabilitation and sentencing the coalition government promised a ‘rehabilitation revolution’ in relation to its plans for dealing with offending by young people, ‘We must do better so that we can stop the young offenders of today becoming the prolific adult offenders of tomorrow’.1 An emphasis on prevention, on restorative justice, and on informal intervention points to successive governments concerns about the juvenile prison population. The proposed alternative to youth custody, the Young Offenders Academy, will instead focus on community and localism, harnessing integrated education, mental health and family services in order to focus on the education and development of the children.2 However, the ethos of a more child-centred approach to the penality of juvenile delinquents is not an innovation. Historically, the development of juvenile penal institutions has weaved a course between the needs of the children and the potential for reform on the one hand, and the political and public demands for retribution in the form of custodial sentences on the other.

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