Reformatory school

A reformatory or reformatory school is a youth detention center, or an adult correctional facility most prolific in the early 20th century. Throughout the United States, most reformatories were renamed correctional centers. The term reformatory (or reformatory school) was also commonly used during the 19th century throughout the United Kingdom in reference to penal facilities for children. Reformatories like the similar industrial schools, were certified by the government from about 1850. As societies values changed, the use of reformatories declined and they were coalesced by an Act of Parliament into a single structure known as approved schools.

Reformatory schools were provided for criminal children whilst industrial schools were intended to prevent vulnerable children becoming criminal. There was a perceived rise in juvenile delinquency in the early 19th century; whereas in a rural economy very young children could gain paid employment doing tasks such as bird scaring and stone gathering these opportunities were not available in the cities. Youngsters were very visible on the streets. In 1816, Parliament set up a ‘Committee for Investigating the Alarming Increase in Juvenile Crime in the Metropolis’, in 1837 the writer Charles Dickens published Oliver Twist a story about a child involved in a street gang. and in 1847 it was recognised in the Juvenile Offences Act of 1847, that children under 14 should be tried in a special court not an adult court. Begging and vagrancy was rife, and it was these low level misdemeanours that caused the magistrates to send vulnerable youngsters to industrial schools to learn to be industrious, and learn skills that would make then more employable.

More serious crimes, required an element of punishment in an environment away from older prisoners, who would have a further negative affect on the youngster, before the task of reforming their ways. The power to set up such an establishment was given in the 1854 Youthful Offenders Act (the Reformatory Schools Act). This provided financial assistance and support for reformatory schools for convicted young offenders as an alternative to prison. Industrial schools were regularised three years later by the 1857 Industrial schools act.

The first juvenile prison was the 1838 Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight. Separation of youngsters has been proposed earlier by Peel’s Gaol Act of 1823, but implementation had generally failed. From 1824- 1826 some boys were housed on the prison hulk, Captivity (the former Bellerophon). Even earlier in 1817, Samuel Hoare the Quaker banker and philanthropist and the architect James Bevan, had proposed a new suitable prison: there was no consensus as to whether a prison should be for deterrence, retribution, punishment, removing a cause of nuisance or reforming the prisoner. Parkhurst aimed to reform the prisoner, provide some education and prepare the youngster to be transported as a free man to the colonies in Australia.

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