ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a group of people who had one experience in common: they spent part of their childhood in reform schools. Since histories of European reform schools are now reasonably well established, it focuses on their longer term impact upon individual children and their families. The children in question were mainly working class. They were judged as successes or failures by those adults concerned to monitor them, depending upon how 'well' they adjusted to society. The chapter discusses them in these terms - as conformists or rebels - but also as young people trying to negotiate given rules in order to make sense of their own lives. Some of the children had certainly had a largely joyless childhood and the reform schools did little to change this. In after-care programmes continual moral rescue, achieved through regulation and control, remained a priority. Girls' reform schools aimed to inculcate idealised female behaviour.
