ABSTRACT
The punishment of juvenile delinquents outside domestic settings and apart from adult offenders is commonly portrayed as a phenomenon of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A typical view is that of LaMar T. Empey, who has written:
Asylums for abandoned children had been used in Europe for some time, but the idea that places of confinement could be used effectively to reform criminals or to substitute for family and community as the best method to raise children was entirely new. It was no accident either that the first houses of refuge and asylums appeared around 1825 in the most populous cities and states...Houses of refuge were to become family substitutes, not only for the less serious juvenile criminal, but for runaways, disobedient children or vagrants.1
