ABSTRACT
From the late eighteenth century onwards, there was a marked shift in attitudes towards and policies directed at juvenile offenders (King and Noel, 1993; King, 1998). It is prudent to note that the concern about juvenile crime has a much longer history, at least to the sixteenth century, when specific concerns about young offenders can be identified (Griffiths, 1996), but a body of research which focuses predominantly on the late eighteenth century through to the mid-Victorian period suggests that, despite the exact origins of this concern, by the nineteenth century there was an expanding discourse about juvenile crime and methods to tackle the problem. Why exactly this occurred is debatable. Juvenile crime had not been regarded before the nineteenth century as a separate social problem, but by then it was ‘a major focus of anxiety among the propertied classes’ and separate policies were developed to respond to it (King and Noel, 1993; King, 1998: 116). This may not have been the ‘invention’ of the problem of juvenile crime, as some have suggested (Magarey, 1978) but, as Shore (2000) argues, more a reconceptualisation, in which a new language emerged, with a particular response to, and understanding of, the juvenile offender. As Radzinowicz and Hood put it, ‘the concept of the young offender, with all that implies for penal policy, is a Victorian creation’ (1990: 133). This chapter will discuss the concerns about and responses to juvenile crime and will focus in particular on Victorian penal policies directed at young offenders and the development of separate policies and institutions for their punishment.
