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116 Part 2 / Into the Light of a More Modern World neglected, and delinquent, and they rapidly gained the attention of reformers and child savers. Neglect, vagrancy, delinquency, and crime in nineteenth-century North America were subject to the economic and social pressures of a young, evolving society. As American society became more industrial and urban, the mounting problems of disruptive and fractious elements became strikingly visible. When the simplicity of pioneer life ceded to the greater complexity of commercial civilization , the cities became the crucibles of delinquency. Children all too easily slid toward the cesspool into which the human refuse of an intensely competitive society drained. Many dangers stalked unwary youngsters: rootlessness, the harsh demands of premature adulthood for those whose families needed their earnings, loosened parental controls, the increased variety of activities in which children could indulge, and, for many, a growing dependence on street play groups and gangs. Urban Americans became alarmed by the apparent upsurge in the numbers of vagrant and delinquent children, many of whom roved the streets in gangs to wage an unending assault on the mores and manners of the rest of the population . Not only did social planners object to the presence of so many rough youngsters on the public byways, but the increasing visibility, especially among the urban working class, of impoverished, delinquent, or recalcitrant children symbolized a breakdown of the family and a direct threat to the social order. Reformers further feared that constant exposure to the harsher elements of life would turn vulnerable children into vile and irresponsible adults. Moreover, the numbers appeared to be on the rise. The children who were arrested were sent to state reform schools, farm schools, nautical branches of state reform schools, and the houses of the Angel Guardian (E. Wright, 1865). The hordes of clamorous scarecrows on the streets made the problem visible to such a degree that governmental failure to act was interpreted as contributing directly to social and economic dereliction. Reformers believed that the impending social disaster could be averted only through a concerted effort to change the child's environment. Reforms could take two forms-rebuilding working-class families or establishing alternate families in the form of institutions that would at least save some children. The public schools, largely designed to improve and uplift working-class youth, proved unhappy environments to many potential clients, especially in urban areas. "Such children," observed Henry Barnard (1857), "cannot be safely gathered into the public schools; and if they are, their vagrant habits are chafed by the restraints of school discipline. They soon become irregular, play truant, are punished and expelled, and from that time their course is almost uniformly downward, until on earth there is no lower point to reach" (pp. 5-6). The failure of the public schools to prevent juvenile crime and vagrancy generated arguments in support of the establishment of more specialized institutions through which to attack the problem. The first decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the expansion of correctional institutions. The focus rested on the correctional act, not the individual 's social context; treatment was founded on the traditional goals of incarceration -isolating the criminal, preventing crime, and gaining retribution for past crime. The central idea of the Victorian penitentiary, as proposed by Chapter 3 / The Rise ofInstitutions, Asylums, and Public Charities 117 Jeremy Bentham and first tried in Philadelphia, was that prison should be a place of isolation, discipline, and systematically used punishment alleviated by precise injections of hope. Measures to control delinquent youth, following this same correctional pattern , were punitive and aversive, despite the fact that some children were committed to the common jails and the penitentiaries, not in response to any criminal activity, but in response to their highly visible need, destitution, and neglect. Few people gave credence to the notion that children differed substantially from their adult counterparts. Child offenders were dealt with in much the same way as adults-they were subjected to the same laws, their cases were heard in the same courts, and they suffered the same punishments (McGrath, 1962).. Children were sentenced by judges of the police courts and could be sent to county jails (E. Wright, 1865) or even state prisons. In 1859, for example, the penitentiary and the common jails of the Canadas housed 585 persons under the age of sixteen years, a little more than 5 percent of the total prison population (Canada, Sessional Papers, 1860). Reformers held grave concerns about children's subjection to the demoralizing...

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