Making Youth: A History of Youth in Modern Britain Chapter 2: Troublemaking and Imposing Order

What is it about?

‘Inventing’ juvenile crime The juvenile criminal justice system Trends in the treatment of delinquency The ebb and flow of punishment and rehabilitation Major changes in the treatment of juvenile crime from the end of the eighteenth century were accompanied by new conceptualisations of youth offending and delinquency. This chapter examines why these changes took place and considers how specific legislation and institutions to deal with juvenile offenders emerged, as the young began to be differentiated in new ways by age. Efforts to tackle youth crime and delinquent behaviour were shaped by broader social and cultural preoccupations not only in Britain but in Europe and the United States. The growth of urban life inspired apprehension among the middle class and exacerbated worries about juvenile criminality, although these imaginings were often more significant than reality and complicated by the varied and changing ways in which youth crime figures were recorded. Youth offending, frequently characterised by a ‘discourse of control rather than care’, became one of the most familiar debates about the condition of young people over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and gave rise to persisting tensions between punishment and rehabilitation. By the end of the twentieth century, England and Wales were the only countries in western Europe to imprison children under the age of fourteen and had one of the lowest ages of criminal responsibility in the world, which was ten.

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