Young Offenders: Children and Crime in Ireland, 1850-1908

In the middle of the nineteenth century thousands of Irish children were imprisoned or transported to penal colonies. Children as young as two years old were arrested and sent to jail for begging. In 1858 a new law was passed which facilitated the opening of reformatory schools for the incarceration of young offenders. Over the next five decades many changes were made to the way that the criminal justice system in Ireland treated children.

In the first detailed historic examination of the reformatory movement in Ireland, this book draws on previously neglected sources such as prison registers, photographs and newspapers, as well as official reports, to examine the lives of young offenders from 1850 to the passing of the Children Act in 1908. It looks at the first reformatories that were established after 1858 and considers what life might have been like for the children who lived in them. While most descriptions of these institutions come to us from officials and reforming visitors, one letter survives from an inmate of a school for girls who writes that her heart is breaking. Children continued to be sent to jail after the opening of the reformatories and their treatment and the crimes for which they were imprisoned are examined. Newspaper accounts of trials are used extensively to describe the reaction of the children and their families to their sentences. The treatment of children who were imprisoned changed over time and new laws were introduced which gradually removed children from the adult criminal justice system. Woven into the narrative of this book are the stories of the children, women and men who shaped and were the subjects of the juvenile justice system in Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Written in an accessible style, this book will appeal to general readers, students and academics with an interest in nineteenth century Ireland, criminal history and the history of childhood.