Revival: Young Offenders (1938)

Yesterday and Today

Geraldine S. Cadbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351343855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

This unusual book tells vividly the story of children who have broken the law and their treatment from the time of King Athelstan to present day.

With few exceptions, they suffered for centuries the same harsh treatment as older men and women, and it was only gradually that the terrible conditions in the prisons in this and other countries improved

The early experiments in wiser treatment are graphically described and the efficacy of modern reformative measures is clearly demonstrated

Legislation affecting young offenders is explained and the book should prove most valuable to all those who have responsibility for dealing with difficult children

CHAPTER I

ATHELSTAN AND EARLY TREATMENT

925–940

ONE thousand years ago, Athelstan was on the throne of England. His grandfather, King Alfred, girded him with his sword in scabbard and gem-studded belt when he was a boy. He became a great king, gallant and gentle, generous to enemies who fell into his power, and a wise ruler, thus fulfilling the wish of his grandfather, to leave to the men who came after “remembrance of him in good works.”

Athelstan’s influence stretched far beyond the boundaries of his own country; his three beautiful sisters, Eadgifu, Eadhild, and Eadgyth, married the chief continental rulers of the day.

He added to the laws framed by Alfred. One of his enactments—now in the British Museum—foreshadowed the probation system of to-day. This law, made by a Saxon king a thousand years ago, shows clearly that the desire to discriminate between the treatment of adult criminals and of young offenders is no product of twentieth-century sentimentality.

“The King said now again at Witlan burgh to his witan and bade tell to the archbishop by Theodrede biscop, that to him seemed pitiful that men should slay men so young, or for so little, as he heard that everywhere was done. Said that to him seemed and to those with whom he took counsel, that men should slay none younger than a fifteen winters’ man, unless he would defend himself or flee, and would not yield, then let men force him, the greater as the less, whoever it were. And if he then will yield, let him be set in gaol, and so let him be redeemed.

“If his kindred will not take him, nor be surety for him, then swear he as the bishop shall teach him, that he will shun all evil, and let him be in bondage for his price. And if after that he steal, let men slay him or hang him as they did to his elders.”¹

The care and teaching of the Church is comparable to our present-day system of probation, with a bishop as probation officer!

Alas, Athelstan was before his time. Mutilation, torture, imprisonment, the stocks, the pillory, transportation and death, the common judgment for burglary, was meted out to men and boys alike for hundreds of years. One exception, a boy of twelve years was spared in the reign of Edward I.²

1780

More than eight hundred years after the time of Athelstan, up to 1780, the death sentence might be inflicted for two hundred different offences and children as well as adults were hanged for thefts, often very trivial ones, and for many other misdemeanours. Felling a tree, stealing five shillings, robbing a rabbit warren, pickpocketing and “associating for a month with gipsies”³ were all capital offences and in 1831, death was still the punishment for 1831 coining, forgery and horse or sheep stealing.

KING ATHELSTAN

(Reproduced by courtesy of the Society of Antiquaries, London)

“THE EFFECTS OF INTEMPERANCE”

By Jan Steen

(Reproduced by kind permission of the Right Hon. The Viscount Allendale)

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were many overcrowded gaols. Originally these were places of detention only, where prisoners were kept till the infliction of punishment or till their release. Sometimes old castles, dungeons under the court-house or even the cellars of a public-house were used. The keeping of a gaol was carried on as a business by the gaoler who lived by the fees and charges of many kinds which he extracted from the prisoners. Generally prisoners had to find their own food, sometimes helped by charitable persons.

The house of correction, or bridewell, was nominally under the care of the Justices of the Peace, and there, after 1609, persons were set to work, partly with an idea of reformation, partly to deter others; gradually the distinction between the bridewell and the common gaol disappeared, indeed, both were often to be found in the same building.

Conditions in gaols and bridewells were terrible. In these filthy dens “felons and debtors, convicted and untried, young and old, with no more distinction of age, condition, or sex than they could afford to buy from the gaoler, were herded together, chained, starving, and half naked in the most pestilential conditions of disease, debauchery, lechery, brutality and extortion.”¹

1682

In 1682 in Bristol, when a number of Quakers were in prison, the Sunday Morning Meeting consisted mainly of children. Some of the boys were put in the stocks, and on one occasion, when fifty-five were present, many of them were unmercifully beaten on heads, necks and faces with a twisted whale-bone stick, few of them escaping without some mark of fury.

Perhaps these children should not be mentioned in a book dealing with delinquents for they certainly thought they were doing right in disobeying one of the laws of the day. It is good to know that when beaten “they bore it patiently and cheerfully.”¹ Sometimes children like these were sent to the bridewell, but popular sentiment was against such treatment and they were generally released quickly.

SIR JOHN FIELDING

1754

In 1754 Sir John Fielding, brother of the novelist, and chief magistrate at Bow Street, sent five boys to prison for stealing. He wrote “there are at this time in town some hundreds of this kind of boys, who might be made useful to society if they were collected together before they commence thieves and placed either in men-of-war, or the Merchants’ Service.”²

He was always loath to commit young offenders to prison, where men, women and children were herded together indiscriminately and disease and vice reigned supreme.

When two boys, the eldest twelve years old, came before him, charged with pilfering meat, he made the parents correct them in his presence rather than imprison them.

Fielding describes how: “in the latter end of the year, 1755, it appeared that there were a vast number of wretched boys, ragged as colts, abandoned, strangers to beds, and who lay about under bulks, and in ruinous empty houses, in Westminster and its environs.”¹ He did not see how this evil could be removed until the idea of sending them to sea came to him.

1756

In January of the following year, Lord Harry Paulet, commanding H.M.S. Barfleur, asked him to send him thirty boys to act as officers’ servants in his ship. He did so, and Lord Harry paid the expenses of the boys’ equipment and journey to Portsmouth.

As these boys were on their way to Portsmouth, they were met by Mr. Fowler Walker of Lincoln’s Inn, who was struck by their appearance and thought that if a subscription was raised, a larger number of poor boys could be fitted out in this way. He put this scheme before Fielding, offering a small donation to open the subscription list. Fielding thereupon collected enough money to clothe three or four hundred boys.

John Fielding and Saunders Welch undertook the administration of the fund and the Admiralty co-operated. Before July 1756 about four hundred boys had been rescued from destitution, given an outfit of clothing and sent off to Portsmouth. Applications were received from captains of ships more quickly than they could be dealt with. In that month, “The Marine Society for the redemption and reform of younger criminals” was formed, under the Presidency of Lord Romney, “to give bounties of clothing to landsmen joining the navy.”

Fielding was appointed a member of the committee. From the beginning of 1757, the boys went direct to the Society to be clothed, for there was not enough room in Fielding’s house “except in the open yard.”

“The Society was generously supported by the King and City Companies and between 1756 and 1762, 5,451 young men and 4,787 boys were clothed and sent to sea at a cost of over £22,000.”¹

Sir John Fielding and others realized that the sisters of the boys needed help. Many of them had become prostitutes at a very early age, numbers being no older than twelve. In February, 1758, he published a pamphlet describing his “Plan for Preserving Deserted Girls,” appealing for support particularly to “ladies whose tender feelings would give them a much juster idea of the sufferings of these poor creatures than anything the warmest imagination can suggest; for really some of their cases, as Shakespeare says, beggars all description.”²

A reformatory for these girls was founded in August 1758 in Whitechapel, under the name of the Magdalen Hospital. Eleven years later, it was moved to Southwark, and in 1868 to Streatham, where it is now an Approved School under the Home Office.

JOHN HOWARD

1726–1790

John Howard (1726–90) was the outstanding prison reformer of the eighteenth century. His interest in the whole question of prisons was roused by the hardships he witnessed in a French gaol, when his ship was taken by a privateer during a journey to Portugal in 1754.

1773

In 1773 he rode through England visiting prisons and bridewells everywhere and found the most appalling state of thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• CHAPTER I. ATHELSTAN AND EARLY TREATMENT
• CHAPTER II. CHILDREN IN NEWGATE AND OTHER PRISONS
• CHAPTER III. TRANSPORTATION
• CHAPTER IV. NEW EXPERIMENTS
• CHAPTER V. MARY CARPENTER AND OTHER PIONEERS
• CHAPTER VI. JUVENILE COURTS IN AMERICA
• CHAPTER VII. PROBATION OF OFFENDERS ACT, 1907, CHILDREN ACT, 1908, EARLY JUVENILE COURTS IN ENGLAND
• CHAPTER VIII. INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS AND REFORMATORIES
• CHAPTER IX. A BELGIAN OBSERVATION HOME
• CHAPTER X. CHILDREN AND YOUNG PERSONS ACT, 1933
• CHAPTER XI. THE JUVENILE COURT TO-DAY
• CHAPTER XII. CAUSES OF JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND FUTURE METHODS OF TREATMENT
• APPENDIX
• CHRONOLOGY
• INDEX