‘The Child Condemned’: The Imprisonment of Children in Ireland, 1850–19081

Abstract

In the 1850s, tens of thousands of children were imprisoned in Ireland. At that time there was a growing concern internationally that incarceration of children with adult criminals was inappropriate. This concern resulted in the passage of legislation in 1858 which facilitated the opening of reformatory schools in Ireland. By 1870, ten reformatories had opened, yet, as this article argues, three quarters of children given custodial sentences in that year were sent to prison and not to the new institutions. In the second half of the nineteenth century, there were attempts to improve conditions for children in prison; however, as the century drew to a close, there was a general agreement that any form of imprisonment was unsuitable for children. New laws, culminating in the Children Act of 1908, gradually brought about the removal of children from prisons, so that by 1912 there were only five children imprisoned in Ireland.