By Farah Sayeed
Juvenile delinquency gradually emerged at the forefront of legal debate during industrialisation, where property laws governing a new urban society caused a rise in the number of juveniles being prosecuted. Peter King notes that juvenile delinquency was, “[…] given a further boost by the strategic use that urban magistrates made of the increasingly wide discretionary powers these summary Acts [such as the 1822 Vagrancy Act] gave them.” Parliament had given the magistrates the right to deal summarily with minor thefts; however, these magistrates found a way to extend the scope of their powers in order to punish at least a small minority of potentially indictable offenders. Later on, transportation of convicts to the Australian colonies was abolished in 1852, leading to new societal tensions. These national legal changes contributed greatly to the fear of juvenile delinquents and to some extent, created a wider divide within the class system with the upper/middle classes seeking to protect their property from the “children of the dangerous and perishing classes.”
Mary Carpenter was from a middle-class household. She was educated in her father’s school where she was taught norms and values that were heavily based on religion. This shaped her agenda when she set out to help children who had fallen foul of the law. She often reasoned and expressed herself using religious teachings. She founded schools for needy and delinquent children and in the 1850s, during the Juvenile Justice conference, her views influenced legislation on education and juvenile offenders. She advocated for the abolition of corporeal punishment for children as it was degrading and did not prevent reoffending by the children.
Although Carpenter was a woman who was going against the gender stereotypes of the time by speaking out against society’s wrongs, she was well received by the public in her time. Schroeder suggests that gender may have played in favour of Carpenter’s speeches as “[…] audiences may have responded more readily to a female advocate of children, since the protection of the weak was understood to be a natural component of normative femininity.” This idea that women are selfless and possess certain qualities such as compassion for the weak made Carpenter’s aims justifiable not only in the eyes of the public, but also in her own eyes. Schroeder notes that, “Carpenter herself resolved the problem of the public professional woman when she advised her readers that publicity for the sake of reform work was not a contradiction of Christian femininity, but a God Given test of it […].” It becomes clear that as Carpenter became more involved in public debate, her attitudes about femininity were shifting. She moved from acknowledging the domestic setting as the normal place for women, to accepting that when a worthy cause arises women should speak out in the public sphere. However, her values were still coherent with social expectations to a large extent. This is evident in the fact that she did not wish to speak at a conference on juvenile justice, “[…] because at the time she felt that to speak at a gathering of men would be ‘tantamount to unsexing herself’.”
The Conference on Juvenile Justice was held in Birmingham on the 9th and 10th of December 1851. There was no specific mention of Carpenter in the reports, as she did not speak there, but it was clear that the evidence used was greatly influenced by her publications. However, unlike Carpenter, the conference lacked a sense of strong moral obligation towards the children. Instead, it mirrored the distant and reasoned tone of the law by focusing heavily on the practical side of enforcing reformatory schools rather than on understanding the situations of the children who committed the crimes. Although there was an occasional story about a delinquent who had been successfully reformed and re-introduced into society, the sole purpose of these examples was to generate conference that the introduction of reformatory schools would cut the costs of prosecuting and detaining offenders and thus would not be a waste of public money.
The conference concluded that there was an urgent need for Parliament to pass new legislation for the establishment of reformatory schools. This legislation would allow magistrates to enforce attendance at these institutions for children who had been convicted of crimes. As a result, the Youthful Offender’s Act 1854 was passed. It aimed at creating a separate category of the criminal justice system for young offenders, where children would be sent to reformatory schools [i]. This change in the law was significant in representing children as separate legal entities who were very different from adults and thus required different rules. This was significant because society began to realize that children could not be held to be as accountable as adults for their acts. Previous legislation had viewed children as equal to adults in the eyes of the law when being sentenced and punished.
Parkhurst Prison is an example of the previous legal and political attempts to address the issues of punishment. It was set up specifically for young offenders and aimed at reforming them in a prison environment. After the introduction of the Youthful Offender’s Act 1854, young offenders were sent to the prison for a short period of time as a form of punishment and were then later sent to a reformatory school. Some reformers were pleased with the Act but had argued that the punishment should be longer so that the reform could be more effective.
However, Carpenter opposed the idea of children being sent to Parkhurst Prison for punishment before being reformed. She did not believe that a cruel and unloving environment would be successful in reforming a child. When carrying out her research, Carpenter opened her own reformatory schools and visited the homes of ‘juvenile delinquents’. This gave her a more personal and in-depth outlook on the experiences that offenders faced. Her extensive research and findings portrayed juveniles as individual children who are victims of their parent’s lack of affection and moral teachings. This is evident from her analysis of a 12-year-old boy who was sentenced for theft: “Until he was ten years old, he was employed to watch when his father was at work, and he was then promoted to the higher office of uttering the base money his father had coined.” She goes on to state that, “The law as it now stands punishes the obedient child, and lets the parent go free!”
It is clear that Carpenter’s experiences as a child, growing up in a middle-class environment, greatly influenced her outlook on how the problem of juvenile delinquency should be tackled. As Schroeder writes, “the reformatory was thus imagined as a surrogate middle-class home and family for the outlaw child, who would come to experience the pressure of law not as a set of moral strictures […] but as a feeling of love.” Furthermore, Carpenter now believed she was developing a sense of individuality when expressing her findings rather than her previous view that she was unsexing herself when speaking publicly to men. Therefore, by contributing to a change in the values of society she was able to develop as an individual.
Although Carpenter’s research attempted to understand the experiences of working class delinquents, it is apparent that her own influences of social upbringing, religious beliefs and education may have clouded her interpretations of the findings. Selleck notes that, “Carpenter relapsed into the common contemporary habit of interpreting crime or poverty solely as a failure by an individual, as something for which juvenile delinquents or the poor […] were personally to blame. But she struggled to go beyond this interpretation.” It is evident from her findings that the criminal justice system creates injustices when it fails to punish criminals who engage in white collar crimes such as fraud but convicts a child who is homeless and starving, for theft of food. Carpenter herself states, “Such anomalies bear the name justice in our days!” Yet she fails to address class divisions in the prosecution of juvenile delinquency.
As a result, the importance of having individuals from different backgrounds contributing to social reform and development of the law becomes clear. Mary Carpenter as a middle class social reformer experienced law differently from a poor working-class woman whose child is a delinquent.
In conclusion, Carpenter’s research substantively shaped the way in which the law views delinquent children as dependants who should be given the opportunity to redeem themselves. The social, political and legal debates have been effective in showing the criticisms and stereotypes that many female reformers face when going beyond the gender stereotypes and norms of society.
Further Reading
- Carpenter M, Juvenile Delinquents their condition and treatment (Patterson Smith 1970)
- Carpenter M, Reformatory Schools for the children of the perishing classes and for juvenile offenders (The Woburn Press 1968)
- King P, The Rise of Juvenile Delinquency in England 1780-1840: Changing Patterns of Perception and Prosecution (Oxford University Press 1998)
- Schroeder J, Self-Teaching: Mary Carpenter, public speech, and the discipline of delinquency (Cambridge University Press 2008)
- Selleck R, Mary Carpenter: a confident and contradictory reformer (History of Education 1985)