Juvenile Delinquency In 19th Century Britain

The fear of juvenile delinquency in early nineteenth century Britain became a fast spreading debate, politically and publicly (Shore, 1999), this was during the era of the industrial revolution and the beginning of a technological world. It is evident that the introduction to this new world had an underlying effect on the policing towards children and how the working class children were treated similarly to social parasites. The main focus in the first half of the century was on the rise in juvenile delinquency and punishment where as the second half was focused on reformation and education. The traditional apprenticeship system in the UK was collapsing during the early years of the century, therefore the youth had a lot more free time to themselves …show more content…
Henry Mayhew, a journalist, mentioned that the majority of cause was due to the ‘brute tyranny of parents’. A majority of the young offenders were runaways which forced them onto the streets, instigating the inevitable direction of a criminal future and also causing the increase of juvenile criminal behaviours. Other causes are as such; parental neglect and drunkenness, irresponsibility, decreasing respect for order, and breaking off the old traditions (Maguire, Morgan, Reiner, 2002). The mindset of British adults towards children in the nineteenth century was tremendously harsh, the common opinion about a child’s age and their classification as a juvenile delinquent in the eyes of the criminal justice system, was based on the understanding of doli incapax; “the capacity to do ill, or contracting guilt, is not so much measured by years and days, than the strength of the delinquents understanding and judgment” (Muncie et al., 2002.p.99). the doli incapax age was initially, 14 years old originally but then dropped to less than 7 years old which created a whole new group of criminals, criminal laws and societal reactions, which aided certain policies to be implemented (Shore, …show more content…
Carpenter had introduced the ‘Ragged School’ in 1846, to which the school in Bristol provided literacy for the poor, helping educate the poor through the Bible and teach them the life lessons they needed to cope in the world (Gehring, Bowers, 2003). It also served its purpose to help steer the pupils away from the streets of Britain. This later in 1849 became an nationwide movement, the ‘Ragged School Movement’ (Smith, 2002), meaning this was preventing an large amount of criminals from being born. Having a impressive impact on the current, and near-future, of crime. Looking at the information gathered, her work had strong results as juvenile delinquency was on a