Juvenile Justice in Victorian Scotland by Christine Kelly

Reviewed by: Juvenile Justice in Victorian Scotland by Christine Kelly William S. Bush Juvenile Justice in Victorian Scotland. By Christine Kelly. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. viii + 246 pp. Scotland is one of only a handful of countries today that maintains a largely decriminalized, welfare-driven approach to juvenile justice. In place of juvenile courts and secure detention facilities, Scotland utilizes children's hearings and community-based interventions for all but the most serious cases of youth offending. Many observers trace this system to a "revolution" fifty years ago, promulgated by Scottish judge Lord James Kilbrandon. In 1964, the Kilbrandon report decried Scotland's overuse of prison-like residential reformatories and industrial schools. As a result, Scotland abandoned its existing system for a community-based justice model that remains distinctive, both within and beyond the United Kingdom.1 Juvenile Justice in Victorian Scotland argues that the Kilbrandon reforms represented a culmination of, rather than a radical departure from, the previous century. Compassion fueled the Victorian-era reformers who founded Scotland's first juvenile justice programs in response to rampant child poverty in its industrializing cities (43–8). In the "pre-statutory" first half of the nineteenth century, explains author Christine Kelly, city governments developed policing practices that ensnared growing numbers of children and youth. The problem of children jailed with adults quickly elicited a humanitarian response from a generation of reformers in the 1840s, led by Sheriff William Watson of Aberdeen, "the most eminent reformer of juvenile justice in Victorian Scotland" (65). Watson invented and popularized the industrial day school, which fed and cared for neglected, destitute, and nonserious youth offenders. Funded locally, these schools offered academic and vocational training but, importantly for its leaders, also sought to inculcate middle-class habits of "respectability" (66). Unlike the influential reformatory in Mettray, France, emulated across England, the Scottish industrial day schools not only allowed their charges to return to their families each evening but also sought to uplift the family unit through its children. By the 1850s, other towns and cities were launching industrial day schools with Watson's guidance. This generation of reformers embraced an emergent notion of protected childhood that called for a shared social responsibility to [End Page 307] care for rather than punish impoverished and delinquent youth. "If society leaves them knowingly in the state of utter degradation," asserted Watson's contemporary, English reformer Mary Carpenter, "I think it absolutely owes them reparation, far more than they can be said to owe reparation to it" (74). This philosophy soon gave way to more punitive and carceral approaches, largely imported from England. Kelly guides us through complex legislative developments in Scotland and the United Kingdom that by the 1870s resulted in the expanded use of secure, residential training schools for youth increasingly viewed as "the dangerous classes" (80). The growth of imprisonment departed from Watson's approach, separating children from their families while billing parents for the expense of their children's incarceration (87–88). Between 1864 and 1884, the number of children held in industrial schools throughout the United Kingdom exploded from 1,668 to 18,780 (188), while the daily regime of those schools shifted from education to prison-style labor. Kelly intersperses her policy discussions with brief case studies of individual children that illustrate her larger points. She also recounts struggles into the twentieth century to restore the original humanitarian vision of Scotland's early reformers, with some local judges resisting pressure to abandon an individualized approach to juvenile cases. By the passage of the Children's Act of 1908, which established Scotland's first separate juvenile courts and removed most children from prisons, Scottish children were being "criminalized" on "an immense scale" through extended incarceration for nonserious offenses (166). This law ended widespread use of imprisonment, introduced juvenile probation, and acknowledged the special place of children within the criminal justice system. However, it did not significantly alter the individualized approach first introduced by the Victorian-era reformers. Moreover, overincarceration and neglect persisted, culminating with the Kilbrandon inquiry and report in the 1960s. The twentieth century receives much less attention here, as it falls beyond the scope of this study; however, non-experts on this...