Resistance, Identity and Historical Change in Residential Institutions for Juvenile Delinquents, 1950–70

Abstract

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, children and young people given custodial sentences by the courts in England and Wales were committed to dedicated, age-specific residential institutions. The belief in the diminished responsibility of juvenile delinquents relative to adult criminals meant that such institutions were conceived primarily as reformative environments, aimed at fulfilling the welfare needs of their residents rather than the punitive requirements of ‘justice’. Through a combination of education, trade training, religious instruction, physical exercise and wholesome recreation, residential institutions sought to restore errant children from ‘unsatisfactory’ home backgrounds to productive citizenship (Hyland, 1994; Bailey, 1987). In practice, however, this stated humanitarianism concealed more ambiguous motivations for institutionalising errant children. Historians of the subject have emphasised in particular the power-suffused nature of institutional regimes, and the way in which they sought to inculcate a ‘hidden curriculum’ of class and gender norms into their working class charges. Mahood argues in her study of the Scottish ‘child-saving’ movement that institutions constituted a ‘social system of domination’ creating ‘female proletarians to take up distinct positions in the class and gender order’ (1995: 3).