ABSTRACT
Remembering the circumstances surrounding his own court appearance and placement in an industrial school for truancy in 1908, a former inmate of a Glasgow industrial school reveals a knowledge of the logic of the reformatory and industrial school system that was shared among the urban poor by the end of the nineteenth century. “They would take you quicker then, than they would do now”2 is a sentiment that was shared by many families, who lived on the look-out for the parish inspectors and truant officers: the agents of institutions that called themselves “homes”. By the early twentieth century a network of juvenile reformatory and industrial schools had emerged that contemporaries described as being analogous to a set of sieves. It was hoped that the first sieve, the day industrial school, would “retain by far the largest number; a smaller will pass to the second sieve, or certified industrial schools; a still smaller on to the reformatory, and few, if any, to the prison”.3 After 1907, probation was added to the list, and it replaced the day industrial school as “the first step”.4 This chapter will shift attention away from the popular concern over the causes of juvenile delinquency and focus on the treatment of convicted children. Peter Squires argues that where the integrative function of social institutions like the church, the school or the police appear eroded and the least secure, the liberaldemocratic regime becomes all the more punitive and disciplinary. Hence, around society’s key “social divisions-the ‘fault lines of the social’—a whole array of mechanisms and procedures…are deployed-with profound consequences for some sections of the population”.5 The purpose of this chapter
is to examine the modes of social intervention and how contemporary discourses on juvenile delinquency were translated into legislation for the classification, surveillance and disciplining of poor families. First, it examines the prevention era, the first pioneering experiments in the treatment of juvenile delinquency; secondly, the reformatory era, the period spanning the introduction of the Youthful Offenders Act 1854, Dunlop’s Act 1854, the Reformatory and Industrial Schools Act 1866 and the Education (Scotland) Act 1872. Finally, the protective era is examined-that is, the period from the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the Probation of Offenders Act 1907, the Children Act 1908 and the Children and Young Persons (Scotland) Act 1932, which resulted in the transfer of reformatories and industrial schools in Scotland from the Home Office to the Scottish Education Department.6
