Francesca Ashurst, Couze Venn (Auth.) - Inequality, Poverty, Education - A Political Economy of School Exclusion (2014, Palgrave Macmillan UK) PDF

Inequality, Poverty, Education
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Inequality, Poverty,
Education
A Political Economy of School Exclusion
Francesca Ashurst
Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University, UK
and
Couze Venn
Visiting Research Professor, Goldsmiths, University of London and
Associate Research Fellow, University of Johannesburg
© Francesca Ashurst and Couze Venn 2014
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
1 Introduction: Elements for a Political Economy

of Exclusion 1
The problem of exclusion 5
Genealogy and governmentality: elements for a
counter-history of exclusion 13
Reform and the political economy of exclusion 23
2 Pauperism, Delinquency and Learning to Labour 29
Threats and victims 29
Threats 32
Victims 36
The case of Frances Colpit: 1819–1829 37
Conclusion 47
3 Labour, Poverty and the Export of Destitute
Children As ‘Waste’ 49
The traffic in children 51
The Children’s Friend Society 1830–1840: from charity
to trade 54
The Hackney kidnappers: parish, parents and children 57
The children speak 62
Legitimating the ‘traffic’ in children 65
Conclusion: legalising exclusion and the
governmentalisation of pauperism 68
4 Security, Population and the New Management
of the Poor 70
Blaming the poor 71
Malthusian realism, Miles and moral entrepreneurship 74
The ‘moral entrepreneur’ and the formation of policy 77
5 Disciplining and Punishment: The New Exclusionary
Regime Emerges 83
The new prisons: Parkhurst, The Penitentiary Model
and a clash of values 87
Parkhurst: the reality of the new regime 91
vii
viii Contents
6 Ragged Schools, Child-Centred Education and the

Struggle for Egalitarian Politics 99
Including the poor: Carpenter, Unitarianism and
alternative schools 100
The project of reform through education 107
Concluding remarks: punishing, normalising
and biopolitics 116
7 Mettray: Normalisation or Rescue? 118
Demetz’ Mettray: healing, holding, guiding, teaching 120
Foucault’s Mettray: normalisation through the Carceral 125
8 The Institutionalisation of Exclusion within Education 132
Reconceptualising the pauper child 134
Education as ‘Remedy’ for the ‘Disease of Pauperism’ 136
Prevention and correction: industrial and
reformatory schools 144
Conclusion 151
9 ‘No More Excuses’: Neoliberalism and the New Exclusion 155
Misspent youth and the new criminalisation 157
Context: the present 161
No More Excuses 168
Conclusion 173
References 178
Index 191
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank librarians and archivists from Westminster

Archives, London, The Templeman Library, University of Kent and
Cardiff University Library for their assistance and guidance. Ms Wendy
Walker, County Archivist, West Sussex, has been particularly helpful,
and we thank her for sharing her expertise and for her friendship.
Colleagues and friends have been generous in giving their time and
support. Heike Doring, Mel McMahon and Scarlett Thomas have pro-
vided encouragement throughout for which we are very grateful. We are
grateful to Valerie Walkerdine for advice and encouragement with the
research and the project, and we thank her and Simon Dawes for com-
ments on part of our early draft. Professionals currently working within
the education sector provided valuable insights and information, and
we thank them for sharing their experiences.
Andrew James, our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, has been enormously
helpful and we thank him for his support. We thank Beth O’Leary and
Maryam Rutter, our editorial assistants for their patience and help.
ix
1
Introduction: Elements for a
Political Economy of Exclusion
A key issue which has been associated with low well being
in the UK is inequality. Amongst wealthy nations, the UK
has some of the highest levels of inequality. Even before the
recession, inequality had reached the highest levels in the
UK since records began in 1961. (Nairn, 2011: 7)
… health and social problems like violence, mental

illness, teenage births and educational failure … are all
more common among the poor than the rich … almost
all the problems which are common at the bottom of the
social ladder are more common in more unequal societies.
(Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010: 11 and 18)
The analysis of school exclusion in this study aims to show that the
problem of school exclusion raises economic, political, social and his-
torical issues which go to the heart of questions about an equitable and
just society. Our starting point is the apparent conundrum that although
it is widely recognised that exclusion does not work, and is immensely
costly, it has continued to be the principal means for dealing with dis-
ruptive behaviour in schools in England and Wales. One is led therefore
to enquire about the forces and values which operate to fix exclusion as
the default position. Equally, the fact that the practice largely affects a
specific category of children, namely those who are poor, disadvantaged
or troubled, predominantly belonging to a precarious section of the
population, motivates a search for answers that transcend issues relating
narrowly to schooling or the conceptualisation of child development
and childhood. Our argument is that such a search reveals the school to
be a site where underlying struggles about inequality, poverty and ideas
1
2 Inequality, Poverty and the Education of Children
of the good society that have roots in the 19th century have been and
continue to be fought out. Our study will show that exclusion as a prac-
tice is the abiding legacy of how these conflicts evolved in England and
Wales, a legacy that has been brought into sharp focus in the present
period of economic crisis and growing inequality.
We have set out our analysis in the form of a political economy of
exclusion. We have been guided in this by research which has con-
sistently found wealth and income inequality to be a key factor in
determining both educational achievement and juvenile delinquency.
The magnitude of the problem is striking when one reflects that recent
analyses point to the likelihood of 25 per cent of children in the UK liv-
ing at or below the poverty line by 2020 (Brewer et al., 2011). We present
below well-established evidence showing the correlation between exclu-
sion, disruptive behaviour, poor achievement and importantly delin-
quency. Whilst this link may not be surprising, what is more intriguing
is the long history showing the extent to which inequality and poverty
are the common factors that connect the one with the other, and it is
this set of interconnections that has informed our argument that a his-
tory of exclusion is interwoven with a history of inequality.
We are encouraged in this approach by Stiglitz who, in The Price of
Inequality, examines the recent massive growth in inequality worldwide
to reveal how the ‘money-inequality political/economic nexus’ (2013:
xxii) has operated to further disadvantage those already suffering from
the consequences of poverty. He highlights the findings that link the
worsening in income and wealth inequality to inequalities in health,
lower educational attainment, as well as drug abuse and deterioration
in family life, and notes the increasing gap in test scores of American
children that can be attributed to this increase in inequality over the
past 25 years (op. cit: xiii, xv). The costs affect society as a whole since
increases in the rate of crime correlate with both the poorly educated
and inequality (op. cit: 19). Whilst such interconnections have been
well known for some time, what is striking is his claim that ‘… inequal-
ity is the result of political forces as much as of economic ones’ (2013: 38),
an implication in the USA being that ‘… in the absence of government
support, many children of the poor would not be able to get basic health
care and nutrition let alone the education required to acquire the skills
necessary for enhanced productivity and high wages’ (op. cit: 38).
Stiglitz’ analysis of the causes and consequences of inequality finds
support in Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level where they provide
ample evidence from international comparisons confirming the links
between inequality, children’s educational performance, health, mental
Introduction 3
illness, delinquency, imprisonment rates, life expectancy (2010: 19).

With regard to education they present evidence relating to measures
of memory and attention, levels of confidence and trust, and problem-
solving ability displayed by children to show that stressors arising from
inequality ‘have a direct and demonstrable effect on our brains, on our
learning and educational achievements’ (op.cit: 115). Their explana-
tion takes account of the fact that social inequalities in early childhood
development are entrenched long before the start of formal education,
citing in support a UK study that found that by the age of three years,
children from disadvantaged backgrounds were already educationally
up to a year behind children from more privileged homes (2010: 110).
Furthermore, income inequality adversely affects level of aspiration in
cross-national comparisons. Importantly, by arguing that the intertwine-
ment of these ‘diseases of poverty’ (op. cit: 10) produces vicious circles in
which the poor are caught, they show that inequality has consequences
that damages society as a whole, for ‘the truth is that both the broken
society and the broken economy resulted from the growth of inequality’
(op. cit: 5). Recent studies of the effects of stress associated with the dis-
eases of poverty indicate that physiological and psychological changes
that often result from these stressors could be transmitted across genera-
tions, further aggravating the costs of inequality (Coghlan, 2013).
What is clear from the studies of Stiglitz and Wilkinson and Pickett is
that for a significant population of children in poverty, a revolving door
exists that connects poor and troubled families with low levels of their
children’s educational attainment, delinquency, exclusion, and further
down the line, prison and unemployment. The implication is that what
is at stake in understanding the processes at work in producing these
iniquitous situations is not only improvements across all these measures
but improvements in the wellbeing and quality of life of all citizens.
That ultimate goal, which has motivated both studies, is made explicit
in their repeated conviction that the analysis of inequality is an integral
part of addressing the question of ‘the fundamental causes of inequity’
(Stiglitz, 2013: lvii) in order to find ‘positive solutions to our problems’
(Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010: xi). At stake is the need to redefine the
idea of prosperity and wellbeing, as Jackson (2009), looking at similar
economic and socio-cultural patterns in Prosperity Without Growth, also
emphasised.
What one learns from these studies, and what the standpoint of
political economy illustrates, is that the story of inequality and its con-
sequences, including about education, is inextricably mixed with the
longer history of wider political and economic developments (see Glyn,
2006; Sen and Nussbaum, 1993). Guided by this ‘big picture’, our nar-
rative of school exclusion will show that underlying the different and
shifting practices from the emergence of liberal capitalism in the 19th
century one finds conflicting views of the good society and human
beings. These can be broadly separated into, on the one hand, utilitar-
ian, instrumental, economistic and punitive approaches to poverty,
disruptive behaviour and education generally, and on the other hand,
radical and universalist approaches tied to a commitment to changing
the rules of the game to benefit equally the quality of life of all citizens.
The former then and now has tended to privilege the interests of busi-
ness, governance and self-interested individuals, the latter value the
general good and the interest of the people as a whole and their social
and spiritual wellbeing. It is sobering to reflect that exactly the same
values are identified by Stiglitz as at stake in his devastating critique of
the ‘market fundamentalist ideology that serves the interests of the top,
often at the expense of the rest of society’ (2013: xxv), an ideology which
he blames as the root cause of the current economic crisis. He makes his
own commitments clear when he approvingly cites Cornel West’s view
that it is not a matter of the proper understanding of self-interest, but of
‘strong moral forces, strong spiritual forces, linked to …what it means to
be human…(and) rich stories of the art of living, loving, serving others’
(2013: xxi).
The story of exclusion that we tell will illustrate the extent to which
similar values and political commitments were already at play in the
19th century when the role of education in breaking the link between
extreme poverty and crime was being differently developed by reform-
ers. We argue below in our examination of these conflicts within 19th
century liberalism that the lines of battle have often been messy and
confusing, as the implications of emerging policy were often not clear.
By relocating school exclusion within the wider framework of political
economy, we show why this longer history is relevant today, as well as
chart the determining place of the management of inequality, poverty
and labour in the development of state educational and social policy;
this approach combining political economy and genealogy enables us to
open up a space for displacing the focus towards the care of the child as
primary objective of intervention.
It should be clear from what we are arguing that part of our aim is
strategically to displace the problem of exclusion away from a purely
educational one relating to disruptive behaviour in schools, though
obviously it is such behaviour that triggers interventions on the part
of teachers and policy-makers. Whilst the immediate objective of the
Introduction 5
latter is the restoration of order and discipline conducive to a good

learning environment, the displacement we propose aims to show that
unless the problem is framed within the wider context we are suggest-
ing, one by default allows the technical issues and existing regulations
to define the problem, to the detriment of being able to imagine radical
solutions that would be more effective from the point of view of the
better, longer term interest of children, and indeed, of education and
costs. The evidence we will present will establish the seriousness of the
problem as well as highlight the constant failure of existing strategies
to find lasting solutions either in terms of institutional practice or in
terms of rescuing and helping the large number of disturbed and trou-
bled children involved. Our problematisation of the exclusionary and
the punishment regimes imposed for disruptive behaviour and juvenile
delinquency arises from these failures; instead of ensuring that educa-
tion functions as the route out of deprivation and wasted lives for all
children, current practices only succeed in confirming the targeted
children’s negative expectations of the educational system and their
negative evaluation of their own ability or place in society.
The problem of exclusion
But where should one start in problematising exclusion, and in estab-

lishing the parameters for a different analysis that would open up dif-
ferent paths for dealing with the underlying problems? We are of course
not the first researchers to be concerned about the inadequacy of exclu-
sion as a policy. Many important studies already highlight these inad-
equacies, for instance, two reports from the Children’s Commissioner
for England (2012; 2013) which examine the effects of legal and illegal
or hidden exclusions, whilst Carl Parsons’ (2009) analysis in ‘Strategic
Alternatives to Exclusion from School’ suggests involving a wide team of
specialists and providers at the local level to develop and implement a
non-punitive response. We would like to also note the work of Roger Slee
(2010) who in his analysis of the principle of ‘inclusive education’ has
argued that a different approach to education altogether is implicated if
the new regime is to be more than an assimilation of marginal groups
into existing practices. Inclusion in his account widens the scope to
include disability, which raises specific problems that we do not address
in this study. However, we do examine in the concluding section of the
book the contradictions between the rhetoric of inclusion promoted by
current policy and the reality of practices and resources in the context
of a strategy of austerity, and the increasing privatisation of provisions.
Let us start by clarifying what school exclusion is and why it is a prob-

lem. As a practice it exists within the disciplinary framework of schools
and is used to punish children who consistently break rules. The pro-
cess involves stages and procedures that have been set up and regularly
altered to deliver, in principle, a fair system that teachers and specialists
can manage. Fixed-term exclusions are usually for three to five days,
depending on the severity of the behaviour – although it should be
noted that for the most part the disruption would be ‘low level’, talking,
moving around the classroom, laughing, talking back to the teacher,
swearing, refusing to work and so on. However, this kind of behaviour
is particularly challenging for staff who may not have received any
additional training or support (Osler, 2000; Reay, 2006; Warnock, 2006).
Frequent short-term exclusions means that it is permissible for a child
to miss out on a significant amount of education. As regulations for
fixed-term exclusion allow for a total of 45 days in any one school year,
most of those at risk could be out of school for almost a term each year.
Those who are excluded are meant to have alternative provisions put in
place to ensure their continued education. In practice and for complex
reasons which have much to do with the cost of adequate provisions
and monitoring, these alternatives are sadly inadequate in most places.
In addition, the constant disruption to a child’s education results in fur-
ther disaffection and alienation as they struggle to keep pace with work
missed. Yet, as Parsons pointed out, ‘most of the literature on disaffec-
tion and behavioural problems is about putting in place strategies which
“work” in the management of challenging behaviour, and increase the
chances of young people remaining in touch with education and the
life chances it brings. The focus is often on “fixing the child”’ (Parsons,
2005: 188), namely, through measures that are meant to encourage the
excluded to conform to the norms of ‘normal’ behaviour.
In this regard, it is important to recognise that many teachers and
specialists involved in the process try and put the interest of the child
foremost, often having to battle institutional and regulatory obstacles;
thus, conflicting views of what education is for are at stake in this situa-
tion. So, the critical question is: why has exclusion been institutionalised
as a central part of the disciplinary process for schools, when it is widely
recognised that it does not work and is far more costly than other solu-
tions? (Sodha, S and Margo, J, 2010). These costs include not only those
borne by the excluded in terms of lost opportunities and life chances but
also the costs arising from the resources of the various agencies involved
in the process, and long-term costs because of future problems related to
the greater likelihood of unemployment, poor health and crime.
Introduction 7
Let us look at the hard data to gauge the extent of the problem. Every
year in the UK there is an annual cycle of statistical releases produced
by Department of Education. The most recent report, published in
2013, reveals that 5,170 pupils were permanently excluded and 162,400
pupils received fixed period exclusions in schools in England and Wales.
Publication of statistical data recording permanent exclusion from
school had first appeared in 1992, whilst the ‘explosion’ of school exclu-
sion has been identified as a cause for concern from the 1990s (Parsons,
1996; Gilborn, 1998; Vulliamy and Webb, 2000). The annual increases
thereafter were interpreted, particularly in the media, as evidence of
large-scale deterioration in behaviour amongst school children. Hayden
(2003: 631) remarked that responses included ‘the perceived “dangerous-
ness” of children in the community without schooling’, whilst Parsons
(2005) documented how the media selected and sensationalised specific
cases of children excluded from school as ‘evidence’ which worked
to confirm a punitive and retributionist set of responses which, he
argued, reflected the ‘understand a little less and condemn a little more’
approach which emerged in the mid-1990s. Furthermore, these sensa-
tionalised accounts ignored any underlying contributory factors, prefer-
ring instead to produce representations which demonised what were
often vulnerable children and young people. Parsons concluded that
‘the result is that these negatively defined groups experience oversight,
neglect and punishment’ (Parsons, 2005: 198).
Indeed, the ‘oversight, neglect and punishment’ has catastrophic
results, for, as recent statistics from the Youth Justice Board show, more
than 80 per cent of young boys and girls in young offender institutions
had been excluded from school and that more than half ‘had last been
at school when they were under 14’ (Youth Justice Board, 2009: 9).
This was further reinforced in a recent report from HM Inspectorate of
Prisons which reported that 46 per cent of young male offenders were
last in school when they were aged 14 or under, and 86 per cent had
been excluded from school (HMIP, 2011). The former Chief Inspector
for Prisons, Anne Owers, pointed out in the foreword to the 2009 Youth
Justice Board report that ‘most children and young people who end up
in prison come from sadly predictable backgrounds’ (2009: 7). The crimi-
nalising and punishment of disadvantaged children and young people
has a lengthy and complex history which is central to the account that
we present; exclusion, we argue, serves as an index for wider underlying
problems in society.
Although the data for permanent and fixed period exclusions could
be interpreted as representing the failure of policies which set tough
targets for reducing exclusion, it has instead become a point at which

the Government and the media attack disaffected children, ‘feckless’
parents, ‘failing’ schools and a whole range of agencies for their inabil-
ity to contain and control those who are ‘persistently disruptive’, these
being the most common reason given for exclusion (both fixed term
and permanent). The stories and representations which accompany
exclusion statistics construct the excluded as feral children, existing
on the margins, criminals in waiting and unworthy of sympathy or
understanding, the product of bad parenting and failed families. It is
a narrative used to incite or justify calls for harsher punishments and
more control of the young generally. Informing the debates, whether
in parliament or the popular media, is a set of assumptions around a
particular population of children which seem calculated to avoid fore-
grounding the effects of poverty, neglect, abuse and so on. Yet, these are
often the dominant features for those who transgress.
It is significant too that social class is not a feature of the statistical data
collected. Whilst this could be explained as a ‘technical’ difficulty reflect-
ing the shifting nature of descriptors used to measure class, it is more
difficult to understand the silence around such an absence. Instead, the
concept of ‘social exclusion’ (Levitas, 2005) has been increasingly used
to describe those once categorised as disadvantaged, a rhetorical shift
which has successfully transferred responsibility for poverty from one of
systemic inequality and class to one of individual failure. As Kate Gavron
has pointed out: ‘… the rhetoric of politicians and commentators has
tended to abandon the description “working class”, preferring instead
to use terms such as “hard working families” in order to contrast the
virtuous many with an underclass perceived as feckless and undeserving’
(Gavron, 2009: 1). Underlying this shift are important changes regarding
the governance of poverty generally, for, as Wacquant (2009) has argued,
neoliberal approaches to poverty have instituted the integration of wel-
fare and criminal justice such that the regulation of the poor is organised
in terms of a government of social insecurity that rewards those who
abide by the rules of the game and punishes the transgressors.
There is a long history associated with dividing the working class
into the categories of deserving and undeserving that Gavron identi-
fies, whilst today other categories have been proposed both to describe
recognisable gradations and differences in the class composition of the
population and to make visible the values attached to these categories.
However, the Department for Education relies instead on using ‘free
school meals’ as an indicator for deprivation although a recent survey
carried out by the Children’s Society provided evidence to suggest that
Introduction 9
more than a million school children living in poverty do not get free
school meals and pointed out that ‘700,000 are not even entitled to this
vital support because they are from poor, working families’ (Children’s
Society, 2012).
The problem is that whilst the management process assumes the exist-
ence of unproblematic norms of ‘normal’ behaviour and that strategies
or programmes can be devised largely focussed on the normalisation of
the child as the goal, this is at the expense of addressing the underlying
issues which contribute to disruptive or ‘abnormal’ behaviour. Matters
have been made worse in the wake of the implementation of practices
driven by conflicting demands such as the targets and objectives of
audit culture (Rose, 1999b). This culture tends to override the effects of
inequality for those children most in need (Piachaud, 2001; Armstrong,
2005). Yet, as Hayden (2003: 629) pointed out, ‘relatively poor socio-
economic circumstances are the common factor in exclusion’.
Poverty and trauma, the latter produced through a range of factors
which include bereavement, physical and sexual abuse, parental sub-
stance use, being ‘looked after’ by substitute parents or agencies, and
acting as main carer for a parent, are all common factors for children
excluded from school. In many cases more than one factor is implicated.
A study undertaken for the DfES (now the DfE) of young people perma-
nently excluded from school pointed out that ‘...the data revealed com-
plex and often disadvantaging social factors impinging on the young
people’s lives outside school, often throughout their lives’ (Daniels
et al, 2003: 15).
It is important additionally to note that the children and young peo-
ple most negatively affected by the focus on punitive responses have
been those with special educational needs (SEN), particularly those who
are identified as having an emotional and behavioural disorder. This
group has always formed the majority of those excluded from school –
the Back on Track White Paper (DCSF, 2008a) recorded that 75 per cent
of children in Pupil Referral Units had special educational needs and
that most of these were identified as ‘Behavioural and Social Disorders’.
This recognition is not new; in 1998 the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU)
had identified that ‘children with special needs are six times more likely
than others to be excluded’ which was the same proportion as children
from African Caribbean backgrounds and smaller than children in care,
who were ten times more likely than any other group to be excluded
(SEU, 1998; Blair, 2001). The most recent statistics record that ‘pupils
with SEN are over nine times more likely to be permanently excluded
than those pupils with no SEN’. (DfE, 2012). However, whilst the SEU
(1998) report contained sections on why African Caribbean children

and ‘looked after’ children were disproportionately represented and sug-
gested strategies to counter this, there was a notable lack of attention
to the over-representation of children with special educational needs.
Hendrick pointed to the ways in which ‘some groups become more
marginalised than others’ as education has become restructured under
the New Labour ‘education project’ (2003: 219).
It may be that the over-representation of children with special educa-
tional needs could be understood as an effect of the ‘inclusion agenda’
which had resulted in the closure of much of the separate provision for
children with special educational needs (DfEE, 1997; Armstrong, 2005).
These were the ‘special schools’ which provided education for those
children with a range of conditions which included emotional and
behavioural disorders as well as physical conditions. A Committee of
Enquiry which investigated Special Educational Needs provision, Report
of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and
Young People (The Warnock Enquiry, set up in 1978), has been seen as
contributing to the closure of ‘special schools’ because its recommen-
dations placed an emphasis on including more children with special
needs in mainstream schools. However, Mary Warnock later pointed
out the flaws in the system when she declared that ‘the policy with
regard to closing special schools is unclear and inconsistent; the process
of awarding children statements of special needs is deeply flawed; the
training of mainstream teachers who are supposed to identify and man-
age the education of children with special needs is wholly inadequate’
(Warnock, 2006: 1).
The problem is that whilst schools were more able to adapt both the
environment and provision to support children with a visible, physical
disability (Armstrong, 2005), children with behavioural and emotional
disorders were much more likely to be adversely affected largely because
frequently their condition was ‘hidden’. The result was that their behav-
iour was more likely to be interpreted as ‘naughty’ or ‘bad’. Warnock
addressed this by suggesting that ‘the purpose of such support must be
to allow the child to learn; … the support will not be easy to find or to
afford … And if the support is inadequate, then the chances are high
that the child will be excluded from a school that finds his irrational
and demanding behaviour impossible to manage’ (Warnock, 2006: 10).
One important effect of this has been a shift towards pathologising
and medicalising emotional and behavioural disorders. There exists
a long history of discourses that have attributed disruptive or delin-
quent behaviour to innate tendencies and inherited characteristics, for
Introduction 11
example, in eugenics discourse (Rose, 1985), and that lends credibility

to medicalisation as an approach to ‘abnormal’ behaviour (Foucault,
1979a). In recent years there has been a marked increase in children
identified as suffering from conditions such as Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)
and Conduct Disorders (Southall, 2008; DCSF, 2008a). Munn and Lloyd
(2005) have suggested that this illustrates a shift which
locates responsibility for behaviour and therefore for exclusion with

the individual child and increasingly attaches medical diagnoses
to such behaviour, thereby removing blame from the child or fam-
ily or school. We have seen, for example, a massive increase in the
numbers of children identified as having ADHD, and claims of the
co-morbidity of ADHD with a range of other ‘disorders’ such as
Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Conduct Disorder and Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder. (Munn and Lloyd, 2005: 208)
One of the effects of this process of medicalising behaviour is the

increased use of medications such as Ritalin and other mood-stabilising
drugs. Southall (2008) has pointed out that ‘… those who are most
likely to attract a label of ADHD are children who have certain charac-
teristics in common – and it’s very much to do with the lives they and
their families are living … I think we’re talking mostly about children
who have suffered deprivation of various sorts …’ (Southall, 2008: 12).
Thus, what Munn and Lloyd (2005) and Southall (2008) point to is
the way that behaviour which could be understood as a response to
deprivation caused by economic and psychosocial factors and their
consequences is transformed, through pathology, into an individual-
ised medical condition. The result of pathologisation and individuali-
sation is that the child becomes the target for intervention whilst the
wider social and political conditions are rendered invisible. It is worth
noting the combined effects of the multiplication of categories of ‘dis-
orders’ generated by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorder (DSM) and the interests of the pharmaceutical industry in
providing ready ‘solutions’ for such pathologisation, based in any case
on biological, psychometric and genetic reductionisms; they undermine
the search for answers in terms of educational and socio-economic
interventions (for a critique of the DSM, system, see Greenberg, 2013,
and Frances, 2013).
All of this suggests that a modern education system could and should
have found a more positive and productive set of responses for dealing
with disaffected children and young people; indeed, many European

countries deal quite differently with the problem of disruptive school
children, as Parsons has pointed out: ‘most other countries don’t do it
like this – France, Germany, Holland, Belgium. In Scandinavian coun-
tries, this would be called child abuse – to remove them from an insti-
tutional setting designed to meet their need’ (Parsons, BBC Newsnight,
16th January 2012).
One thing is clear and provides a partial explanation, namely the way
in which the discourse around school exclusion had become increas-
ingly tied to that of the juvenile offender (Graham and Bowling, 1995;
Audit Commission, 1996; Munn et al., 2001). This link has always been
tenuous but appeared credible because it resonated with the moral
panic about youth in the 1990s (see, for example, Pilcher and Wagg,
1996; Scraton, 1997, and Pitts, 2003). The effects of this was to position
the excluded as ‘feral’, ‘out of control’ and proto-criminal. This con-
struction was further reinforced through accounts in the media which
worked to confirm common sense understandings and which ensured
that alternative accounts were (and still are) silenced (Parsons,2005;
Barnardo’s, 2009). Hodgson and Webb (2005) have argued that:
Indeed, whilst there is no doubt that some excluded school children

are involved in delinquency, there appears to have been a concerted
effort by the media and politicians to establish a link between school
exclusion and crime. This sets up that easy victim of social ills –
‘education’ – as the villain of the piece, with all manner of images
about excessively liberal education and failures by teachers to exer-
cise authority emerging as the real reasons for ‘the trouble with kids’
today. Yet the basis of the generalisation that exclusion and crime are
inextricably linked ignores the complexity of both issues. (Hodgson
and Webb, 2005: 13)
Indeed, their empirical research challenged the accuracy of the link:
However, in the year that the fieldwork for this study was undertaken
7,720 recorded offences were committed by juveniles in the county
area where the research took place. Of these, 557 were commit-
ted during school hours of which a total of 149 (or 1.9 per cent of
recorded juvenile offences) were committed by 83 pupils who were
either subject to a fixed term or permanent exclusion at the time
of their arrest. Such data possibly challenges exclusion as a primary
cause of school-time crime. Further support for this claim comes
Introduction 13
from the findings of research conducted on behalf of the Youth

Justice Board. (Hodgson and Webb, 2005: 22)
Nevertheless, widespread acceptance of the link between school exclu-

sion and crime has become so firmly embedded that legislation intro-
duced in 2008 and restated in 2013 (DCSF, 2008: 22; DfE, 2013) has
made it an offence for excluded pupils to be in a public place during
school hours. Furthermore, an additional and significant effect of the
link between crime and school exclusion has been to make ‘invisible’
the experience of girls within the exclusionary process (Osler, 2002).
Official statistics record that girls are much less likely to be excluded
than boys, with boys being three times more likely than girls to receive
a permanent or fixed period exclusion (DfE, 2012). The result of this has
been that the majority of research, policy and provision has prioritised
boys’ needs. As the genealogy in this book will show, this focus emerged
in the early 19th century when, as Shore (1999) has argued, juvenile
crime was constructed as a ‘masculine’ problem. Indeed, the acceptance
of a correlation between exclusion and crime, despite research such as
that undertaken by Hodgson and Webb, has ensured that authoritar-
ian and punitive responses have become dominant. One result of this
association in policy-makers and the general public mind has been to
make exclusion appear reasonable and effective or as the only recourse.
Recent shifts in school funding policy in England has resulted in
many inventive and hidden ways of achieving the same end of keep-
ing disruptive children and young people away from the classroom
(Children’s Commissioner for England, 2013). Medicalisation makes
children docile, but the dulling effects of chemicals, including on cog-
nitive performance, amounts to a virtual form of exclusion. What then
is the answer? The argument we are developing is that only a longer
history and the wider perspective of a political economy can bring into
view the underlying political, economic, ideological and ethical issues
at stake in exclusion, and thus open a space for alternatives.
Genealogy and governmentality: elements for a

counter-history of exclusion
In order to do this, we here outline the reasons for turning to the

work of Michel Foucault as the next step in our development of our
approach to school exclusion; this is because of the usefulness of the
link he established between what he calls governmentality and political
economy. The logic of the thinking in making this link is that for him
governmentality is an historically specific form of the exercise of state

power that from the 18th century takes individuals and populations,
that is, life, as targets for apparatuses of formation and disciplining; the
objective of this shift towards a biopolitics is the maximisation of the
productive capacities, and thus the value of individuals and the popula-
tion as a whole measured in terms of the wealth they are able to create.
From the point of view of power, the displacement is from the juridical
form of sovereignty founded in obedience to the law, grounded in and
exemplifying the principle of sovereignty itself, to one in which the
object of good government is conceptualised in terms of an economy
and the range of techniques and strategies that take the creation and
management of wealth to be the main goal. This, for Foucault, meant
a displacement of the aims of government onto ‘men, but men in their
relations, their links, their imbrications with … wealth, resources, means
of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation,
fertility, etc.; men in their relation to … customs, habits, ways of doing
and thinking; lastly, men in their relation to … accidents, and misfor-
tunes such as famines, epidemics, death, etc.’ (Foucault, 1979: 11).
The focus on governmentality and the range of relations noted in
Foucault’s approach suggests that in examining any social practice such
as education one should be looking at the intersections of a number of
broader fields and processes. For example, in relation to his research
on prisons, he argued that ‘studying penal institutions meant studying
them first of all as sites’ of such intersections (2008: 34). Similarly, for
him the study of ‘sexuality’ as an object through the role of particular
institutions in constituting it ‘meant trying to identify in things like
confessional practices, spiritual direction, the medical relationship,
and so on, the moment when the exchange and cross-over took place
between a jurisdiction of sexual relations, defining the permitted and
the prohibited, and the veridiction of desire, in which the basic arma-
ture of the object “sexuality” currently appears’ (2008: 35).
As a standpoint, governmentality is a ‘general project’ conducted
through a particular kind of genealogical analysis that proceeds through
three specific displacements, three ways of ‘moving outside the institu-
tion … This kind of method entails first of all going behind the institution
and trying to discover in a wider and more overall perspective what we
can broadly call a technology of power’ (2007: 117). Such an approach,
he says, ‘allows us to replace a genetic analysis … with a genealogical
analysis … which reconstructs a whole network of alliances, communi-
cations, and points of support’ (2007: 117). Thus in his genealogy of the
prison in Discipline and Punish (1977), he tried to understand its place
Introduction 15
by looking at the functioning of the body, the role of crime, the remak-
ing of the family, the regulation of population, and in this way relocate
the prison not simply by reference to crime and punishment, but by
reference to its place in the emergence of the new form of power he
calls governmentality. Similarly, the study of the medicalisation of the
‘abnormal’ uncovers the constitutive links between concepts of crime,
‘degeneration’, heredity and social defense (2003a).
The second displacement, relating to the first, concerns the prob-
lematisation of the function of institutions like the prison to search for
an ‘external point of view of strategies and tactics’ instead of focussing
on ‘the internal point of view of the function’ (2007: 118). Similarities
with the problem of exclusion as we have introduced it are striking.
As he notes, ‘the prison is undoubtedly not governed by the successes
and failures of its functionality’ because the degree of success or failure
is secondary to the wider strategies framing governmentality as ‘a gen-
eral economy of power’; it is this wider transformation which is more
important (2007: 117, 118). This position seems apposite when one
thinks of the resilient character of exclusion in spite of the recognised
inadequacies in terms of costs and failure to deliver expected goals.
Besides, the shift from functions to wider relations enables one to ask
questions about what is at stake in specific practices; as Foucault points
out: ‘(B)y de-institutionalizing and de-functionalizing relations of power
we can grasp their genealogy, i.e, the way they are formed, connect up
with each other, develop, multiply, and are transformed on the basis of
something other than themselves, on the basis of something other than
relations of power’ (2007: 119). Thus, with regard to the management
of poor children including their education, one would have to examine
the changes in forms of schooling, discipline and punishment by refer-
ence to the wider context of problems and policy such as labour and
skills demands, issues of security, calculations of costs, effects of pres-
sure groups, levels of crime, the clamour from dissident groups for more
equitable and fair policies, and so on.
The third shift ‘concerns the object … refusing to give oneself a
ready-made object, be it mental illness, delinquency, or sexuality’ (2007:
118). For, the question is: how did these objects come to be constituted,
which discourses and apparatuses conditioned their constitution, under
what circumstances, and what effects did they have on subsequent
developments? So, in relation to exclusion, one is led to its problema-
tisation, because questions such as constitution and stakes take us out-
side educational practice as a given, such that the genealogical search
directs attention to the conditions and developments that made school
education a central concern for the state, and leads one to locate prac-
tices of exclusion and inclusion in terms of the goals they were intended
to achieve over and above the intrinsic values of education. One needs
to bear in mind too that some of these goals are less visible or implicit,
for example, the maintainance of class relations.
There is another aspect of genealogy which has informed our approach,
relating to its functioning as archive and as critique. We find the earli-
est formulations of this dimension in Foucault’s classic essay, ‘Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History’ (1991 [1971]) which starts with a statement about
genealogy that emphasises its open-ended search for conditions of pos-
sibility grounded in archival and archaeological explorations: he says
‘Genealogy is grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates
on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that
have been scratched over and recopied many times’ (1991: 76). The
consequence is that genealogy requires ‘patience and a knowledge of
details, and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material. Its
“cyclopedian monuments” are constructed from “discreet and apparently
insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method”. Genealogy …
opposes itself to the search for “origins”’ (1991: 76,77). Such a history is
important because, as he claims, the alternative account it produces has
the value of critique.
The critical perspective of this counter-history is advanced through
the archival research which reveals that, in spite of the profusion of
events, there is the possibility of picking out exemplary cases, specific
developments or documents, that can act as point of entry or signature
event for genealogy. For instance, in Discipline and Punish it was the
torture and execution of Damiens in 1757 which Foucault examines to
tease out of it the features that exemplify the juridical power of the sov-
ereign, who legally owned the subject’s body and had the right to kill as
sign of his power, in contrast with a disciplinary form of power that is
more concerned with normalisation, re-formation, good habits, though
the two forms co-existed and continued to be deployed until adequate
new apparatuses had been invented to suit the function of a discipli-
nary regime; in practice there is both continuity and discontinuity.
Similarly, the panopticon is deployed as signifier of the ideal device for
a perfect technology of surveillance consistent with the shift towards
biopolitics, that is, the form of power that brought every individual as
well as the mass of people within the parameters of the distinct popula-
tions biopolitics constitutes (Foucault, 2007). The panopticon is thus a
metaphor for a disciplinary society, and still operates today at the level
of the idea of an all-seeing eye, or ideal surveillance, even if through
Introduction 17
different devices such as CCTVs, monitoring internet traffic and other

techniques inscribing the centralised gaze of a controlling power. As
exemplar, the panopticon gives the archive its meaning by pointing to
the existence of alternative series of connections, alternative rationali-
ties and underlying practices. Such cases justify the work of genealogy
as a history of the present, since they provide evidence to show at what
point, under what circumstances, through which new apparatuses and
discourses, and by way of which agents, a shift occurs and a new regime
of power emerges, here a disciplinary one, that continues to have effects
in the present, even if different institutions have been put in place
since. School exclusion would occupy a similar place in the history of
the present which we are reconstructing, and its genealogy would throw
light on both the political economy of liberal capitalism and on the
political economy of schooling in the UK.
In order to do this, we need to add elements which are absent or
undeveloped, or misjudged in Foucault’s account of governmentality
and biopolitics because his genealogy is framed by a greater focus on
discourses, whilst our approach includes key events, interventions and
figures acting as points of intersection for relaying disparate develop-
ments, or functioning as hubs where political and ideological differ-
ences were played out. Equally, the focus on the point of view of power
can slip into allowing the standpoint of governmentality to locate too
much on the side of normalisation and control, leaving no room for an
historically grounded grasp of the terrain of struggle in which power
intervenes. Thus, our own attention to the efforts by many reform-
ers in the 19th century to set up alternative schools and alternative
approaches to the education and rescue of poor children has led us
to reject Foucault’s interpretation of one such institution, Mettray in
France, discussed in Discipline and Punish. Where Foucault sees yet one
more, if more totalising, institution working to normalise the excluded
or delinquent children, we detect a more radical goal, at odds with the
then dominant utilitarian intent of biopolitics to produce docile and
useful bodies. This ‘more’ points to distinct features of the relation of
political economy, and the economy generally, to the state and to the
‘outside’ of state institutions; by uncovering these features, analysis
reveals power struggles, thus resistances and alternatives. The recogni-
tion of the conflictual or agonistic terrain in which power intervenes,
that Foucault himself underlines, is strategically central to the narrative
of exclusion we present, for it makes visible the sometimes undecid-
able effects, especially at a time when the apparatuses of discipline and
regulation are emergent. A summary of our analysis of the tensions in
the relationship of liberalism, capitalism and political economy will

illustrate the analytical difference we are making.
We stress the tensions and conflicts at the heart of liberalism because
they have had profound effects on the reorganisation of the role of
the state in constituting subjects and specific populations and in
instituting appropriate administrative and regulative mechanisms,
including the formulation of educational and prison policy throughout
the 19th century. As we go on to outline, they continue to be reflected
in the debates today relating to neoliberalism and the role of the state
post the providential state, particularly regarding redistribution and
inequality, the latter normalised once more within the neoliberal frame-
work which regards it as having a ‘regulative’ role, as Foucault (2008) has
pointed out (see Venn, 2009). By bringing these dissensions to light we
are better able to understand several interrelated developments, namely
classical political economy and its role in the emergence of govern-
mentality; the effects for policy of the profound ambivalence amongst
liberals in their perception of the role that the state should or could play
in mediating and protecting individual liberty against constraints deriv-
ing from both a capitalist economy and the wider remit of the state to
promote the general interest; and the premium placed on generating
new knowledge of social phenomena to enable the state to operate on
the basis of rational information, supported by the development of new
tools for transforming this knowledge into technologies of government.
An increasingly important public sphere, supported by a growing middle
class (around 10 per cent of the population of Britain in the 1820s, newly
empowered by the Reform Act of 1832), became the site where the con-
flicts and differences were fought out. At the level of political economy
and political discourse, these tensions took the form of a balancing act
between the demands of political and individual liberties and the gen-
eral interest and those of market capitalism and individual self-interest.
As we establish in the chapters, the same conflicts underlie the reforms
and alternatives that emerged in relation to education and prisons.
It should be pointed out however that for many at the time, and still
today, the Smithian solution by way of invoking a deus ex machina in
the form of the invisible hand secured the reconciliation of individual
self-interest with the general interest; as Smith had put it: ‘every indi-
vidual … neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows
how much he is promoting it … he intends only his own gain, and he
is in this … led by an invisible hand to promote an end which is not
part of his intention … By pursuing his own interest he frequently pro-
motes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends
Introduction 19
to promote it’ (Smith, 1812 [1776]: 354). The reformulation of Smith’s

optimistic solution in terms of the utilitarian principle of maximising
the happiness of the largest number, and maximising the production of
wealth, appears to satisfy the contrary demands of, on the one hand,
the moral economy informing Smith’s work which preserved the idea of
the greater good, developed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1757),
and, on the other hand, the claims of both self-interested individuals
and the need to act against those who threaten the security and good
order of society, that is, those whose conduct upset the pleasure–pain
dynamics. In this respect, John Stuart Mill’s work is central in under-
standing the abiding tension between the ethical basis of social action
and the instrumental motive of policy aligned to the interests of market
capitalism. Mill’s account is noteworthy for defending the theory of
utility and supporting the market yet qualifying it in such a way in his
discussion of the quality of pleasure that it leaves the way open for an
‘ethics of utility’ that enjoins one ‘to do as one would be done by, and
to love one’s neighbour as oneself’ such that ‘ laws and social arrange-
ments should place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may
be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly as possible in har-
mony with the interest of the whole’ adding that a condition should be
‘that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human
character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every
individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and
the good of the whole; especially between his own happiness and the
practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard
for the universal happiness prescribes’ (Mill, 1991 [1861]: 148). The
ambivalence in Mill’s liberalism, where both self-interest and a univer-
salist goal appear to co-habit and that in a sense reconciles capitalism
and the privilege of private property with the requirements implied by
the greater good founded in the principle of equity, has generated much
debate and confusion to this day. Indeed, Nick Gane, in his insight-
ful genealogy of the evolution of neoliberal thought, has highlighted
the importance of the criticism of Mill by one of the key founders of
neoliberalism, Ludvig von Mises, who berates Mill for his apparent
dilution of classical liberalism, especially in what Mises saw as Mill’s
‘slip’ into ‘socialism’ and his ‘thoughtless confounding of liberal and
socialist ideas’, a shift he attributed to the influence of the Unitarian
universalist views of his wife, Harriet Taylor (Mises, 2005: 153–154,
cited in Gane, forthcoming). Mises, as Gane reminds us, was one of the
key founders of the neoliberal think-tank the Mont Pelerin Society in
1947, along with his colleague Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman
(see details in Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009). Their project was the rejec-
tion of Keynesianism (or compassionate capitalism), the defense of
private property, the promotion of competition and individual choice,
and resolute opposition to socialism. Mises’s attack on Mill thus goes
to the heart of what was at stake amongst reformers from the 1830s,
reflected in the work of key figures we examine in the book, and in the
uneasy compromise, at work in the idea of the Welfare State, between
capitalism as a zero-sum game and socialist egalitarian and redistribu-
tory goals, and the conflicting values they defend. It goes to the heart
too of the central contradiction in liberalism, encapsulated in Mill’s
writings, for liberalism essentially wants to run with the hare of human-
ism and hunt with the dogs of capitalism, whilst neoliberalism of course
prefers full-blooded capitalism; the quarry are the poor. The extent to
which these entangled histories shaped the reforms and changes that
are the subject of the various chapters will add evidence in support of
the importance of this politico-ideological background for our location
of exclusion as a genealogy of the present.
For now, we would like to focus on the political or public sphere level
of debate where the conflicts took the form of the division between the
‘radical liberals’, which included many Unitarian and Dissenters, and
the classical liberals that included Malthusian utilitarians. So, on the one
hand, one finds advocates of the principles of the fundamental equality
of all citizens and the prioritising of equity as the goal of state policy,
that is, principles that have informed radical reforms based on the uni-
versalist assumptions of (radical) Enlightenment (Venn, 2006b), tied to
the idea of a social contract binding the state and the citizen, and on
(non-Protestant, non-punitive) Christian convictions; such principles
are reflected in many reforms up to the Welfare or providential State.
On the other hand, one finds the instrumental and legalistic approach
to both the economy and the role of government, founded in the dys-
topian view of humans as incorrigibly selfish, a view long inscribed in
Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798–1826), repeated in the
neoliberal writings of people like Hayek, and even more doctrinally in
Milton Friedman’s praise of self-interest and free-enterprise capitalism
(or Ayn Rand’s moralisation of self-seeking individualism in The Virtue
of Selfishness, 1964).
Our archival search will show that at the root of the contradictions
within liberalism are divergent theological commitments and conflict-
ing understandings of the implications of Enlightenment philosophy,
though a longer history of emancipation that includes movements
such as the Levellers should remain as backdrop. The extent to which
Introduction 21
these differences were played out in the activities of the Social Science
Association and their effects for social policy has lessons for today that
we draw out in the various chapters. In particular, it will become clear
that the differences correlate with conflicting views about ultimate
ends, split between the belief in the possibility of the progressive ‘per-
fectibility’ of human beings through collaborative, collective, altruistic
communities, and the assertion that social formations are instead
founded on the primacy of individualism, selfishness and competitive-
ness, allied to an instrumentalist reason. However, in practice, as we
have indicated, the terrain and the politics of liberalisms have been
messy, lacking the clarity of a position such as the more recent ‘social-
ism or barbarity’ scenario. A summary of the development of the new
‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ or ‘expert’ knowledge in the formulation of
policy and laws will illustrate for now the propositions that we establish
in detail later.
Interestingly, the genealogy of school exclusion we have recon-
structed has revealed that all the key figures central to our narrative
have also been precisely those most prominent in the elaboration of
these knowledges, apparatuses and programmes. They were the public
figures who went out to prisons, schools, slums and hospitals to inves-
tigate through surveys, ethnographic work, interviews and statistical
analysis, the extent and reality of poverty, crime, schooling, the spread
of diseases and patterns of behaviour amongst the labouring classes.
These were discussed in open meetings of the learned societies and asso-
ciations, and policy advocated in the light of the evidence. Our archival
research reveals another crucial element generally missing or ‘forgotten’
in conventional accounts of the social sciences, or the sciences of the
social in Foucault’s vocabulary, which have informed the elaboration
of the apparatuses of biopolitical power from the 19th century, namely
the conflict over ultimate ends and values that were central for politi-
cal economists and social scientists at the time, reflected in the works
and correspondence of key figures such as Adam Smith, Th. Malthus,
J. Bentham, D. Ricardo, J. S. Mill, A. Comte and others such as Mary
Carpenter, William Miles and F. Demetz whose interventions we detail
as part of our genealogy.
Foucault well understood the importance of this new knowledge for
governmentality when he pointed out that statistics was understood in
the early 19th century as ‘the science of the state’ (Foucault, 1979: 14),
and was described by one of its key founders, Adolphe Quetelet, as a
‘social physics’. For the emergent social sciences, borrowing such terms
from the natural sciences was meant to clothe their claims to rationality
with the authority of the natural sciences; the application of mathemat-

ics and the resort to metaphors from physics and biology have since
become endemic in the generation of knowledge useful for the exercise
of state power. It should not come as a surprise that figures such as Th.
Malthus, A. Quetelet and C. Babbage were founders of the Statistical
Society of London, 1834; Florence Nightingale and William Beveridge
were later members (the latter president of the Society); note also the
continuity in terms of today’s Office for National Statistics which is an
important arm of policy-making. Ian Hacking, in his study of statistics
in relation to the human sciences, which he says were still ‘Newtonian’
at the time, points to the search for regularities in human affairs in
terms of ‘economic laws, laws of mortality and so forth’, aided by the
theory of probability that Laplace had systematised (Hacking, 1981: 20).
These new instruments made it possible to produce an ‘avalanche of
numbers after 1820 (which) revealed an astonishing regularity in sta-
tistics of crime, suicide, workers’ sickness, epidemics, biological facts.
Mathematicians attempted an analysis of such phenomena. Poisson
invented the term “the law of large numbers” in 1835 as the name of
a mathematical fact, that irregularities in mass phenomena would fade
out if enough data were collected … Meanwhile Quetelet, in addition
to his propagandist work for statistics … had convinced the world that
Gauss’ bell shaped “law of errors” was precisely the type of law for the
distribution of human, social and biological traits’ (op.cit: 1981: 20).
He adds that advances later in the century after 1860 by James Clerk
Maxwell and Ludvig Boltzmann in statistical mechanics in the wake of
thermodynamics confirmed the ubiquity of the normal (or bell-shaped)
distribution.
What Hacking highlights is the obsession with measuring and calcu-
lating everything and establishing tables of numbers for every subject:
‘between 1820 and 1840 there was an exponential increase in the num-
ber of numbers that were being published … Only in the nineteenth
century did numbers assume their paramount role’ (1991: 19). He points
out that in spite of Comte’s criticism of statistics because of the reduc-
tion of knowledge to numbers, by the end of the century most social
and natural scientists agreed with the physicist Lord Kelvin that only
measurement provided a secure basis for knowledge (ibid.). We draw
attention to this priority granted to measurement and the search for
regularities because of the fascinating similarities with today’s fixation
with the calculable and the regulatable, evident in the current accu-
mulation of ‘big data’ and the application of algorithms to all kinds
of information to bring the apparently chaotic within the order of the
Introduction 23
calculable and the predictable. The interest then and now in generating
‘evidence-based’ programmes of action is equally striking. Clearly the
stake in measurement was not only ‘information’ but the search for
more accurate and auditable bases for calculating costs and assessing the
financial demands that various social programmes entailed; it was also
centrally about issues of security.
From the point of view of genealogy, such developments draw
attention to the close relation between the techniques, the strategies, the
interventions and the thinking that were emerging from the early 19th
century and the problems that needed practical solutions in the wake of
the concretisation of political economy as the framework for social and
environmental policy, namely those relating to education and training,
the control of crime and delinquency, the improvement in health and
hygiene, the management of poverty, and the development of infrastruc-
ture, that is, an ‘environmental politics’.
Reform and the political economy of exclusion
The questions which the focus on biopolitical governmentality and

political economy has brought to the fore are those of the new knowl-
edges and techniques and the principles that should govern the state in
place of the older ‘art of government’. It must be remembered that the
context for the changes occurring from around the mid-18th century in
the ‘art of government’ included addressing the effects of industrialisa-
tion, urbanisation, the consolidation of free market or liberal capital-
ism, that all required data and knowledge about social and biological
processes adequate for interventions in the domains of population,
health, crime, longevity, deviancy, poverty, training and so on. This
relates directly to the conviction that the wealth of a nation, as Adam
Smith had argued, depended on the quality and productivity of labour,
that is, its ‘skill, dexterity and judgement’ (Smith, 1812: 2), and the
ratio of useful workers to the unproductive sector of the population;
it thus depended on improvements in these factors and ratios. As we
have noted, many of the major thinkers shaping these developments
were also prominent political economists and promoters of statistics
and social science as the fields for establishing the new knowledge and
techniques of government. As we also highlighted above, religion and
philanthropy played a key part too.
One organisation, the Social Science Association (National Association
for the Promotion of Social Science, 1857–1886), became the princi-
pal hub for all the debates about what was to be done, and acted as
intermediary in generating and disseminating the new reliable knowl-

edge that would inform the setting up of the new apparatuses of govern-
ment. Its work divided into five ‘departments’: penal policy, education,
public health, legal reform and ‘social economy’ (which focussed on
industrial, commercial and welfare problems). Its importance cannot be
overestimated, for it operated as an ‘open forum for the discussion of
all aspects of social policy’ (Goldman, 2002: 1), and was thought of as
an ‘unofficial parliament’ or ‘supplementary parliament’ (ibid.), a pub-
lic space where the goals of the state and ‘influence from below’ could
be mediated (op. cit: 9). Its conferences were held in all major cities of
Britain, attended by thousands, including prime ministers, politicians,
campaigners for popular education, penal reform and the extension of
suffrage. The reformer and politician Edwin Chadwick stressed its role
in providing expert knowledge for the emergent professionals such
as ‘sanitarians, educationists, law reformers and political economists’
(Edwin Chadwick, 1866, in Goldman, op.cit: 2). John Stuart Mill wrote
in 1864 that the Association ‘brings together persons of all opinions
consistent with the profession of a desire for social improvement’ (in
Goldman, op.cit: 1). The press reported verbatim the proceedings of
the Association’s congresses and lectures, further amplifying its impact
through print culture. The list of early participants such as Chadwick,
Mary Carpenter, James Kay-Shuttleworth, J. S. Mill, John Ruskin and
Charles Kingsley confirms both the commitment to reform as goal
and the prominence of the figures involved. An idea of its importance
in the reformulation of policy can be gauged from its role in promoting
the Taunton Commission of 1865–1868, which led to the establishment
of the Endowed Schools Act in 1869, and the fact that its research and
campaigns led to the Public Health Act of 1875, the Married Women’s
Property Act of 1870, the Habitual Criminals Act of 1869, Prevention
of Crimes Act of 1871 and the legal recognition of trade unions in the
1860s (details in Goldman, 2002).
In advocating and developing a ‘scientific’ approach to social issues,
it encouraged professionalisation and the formulation of policy based
on expertise (Goldman, op. cit: 3 ff). We agree with Goldman when he
argues that its abiding place relates to the ‘interplay of legislation, expert
intervention, and public opinion’ (Goldman, op.cit: 6) that changed
the landscape for practices in education, crime, public health, political
representation and so on between 1850 and 1870, a period of optimism
and economic stability in contrast to the class conflicts throughout
Europe in the 1830s and 1840s and the period of global economic crisis,
or Long Depression, from the 1873, linked to debt crisis and banking
Introduction 25
crises, and structural transformations, including the second industrial

revolution. Additionally, by reference to the conditions which con-
cretised governmentality as a form of state power, we argue that the
emergence of a public sphere (Habermas, 1964) and a print culture in
the Victorian period played a central part in the deliberations which led
to new approaches to schooling, hygiene, punishment, the reform of
criminals, the extension of suffrage and so on, institutionalised in the
new apparatuses of state. An important background in understanding
the nature of the reforms is the fact that in Britain at the time partici-
pation in deciding on public issues was confined to a tiny minority, as
most people were excluded until the enlargement of suffrage and the
slow inclusion of women within the public sphere (Fraser, 2013).
The case studies we present admirably illustrate the points we are
making. As part of our archival work, we have explored parliamentary
papers, commission proceedings, correspondences, key official docu-
ments, biographies, press accounts, law courts proceedings and so on
in order to reconstruct the activities of the figures we have picked as
exemplary in showing the formation and circulation of expert opinion,
the formulation of policy and the initiatives resulting in new practices,
particularly with regard to our focus on schooling and delinquency.
We have found several striking features of these developments that we
signal here before elaborating them in the different chapters. First is the
existence of powerful or influential networks of researchers, activists and
policy-makers, engaged in the activities we are describing, who travelled
widely in Britain as well as in Europe and the USA, exchanged views fre-
quently, contributed to the Associations we have highlighted, appeared
as expert witnesses at Select Committee, lobbied Parliament and wrote
detailed accounts of their activities; they function as our witnesses sup-
porting our analysis.
Thus, in Chapter 6, we discuss the work of Mary Carpenter, 1807–
1877, who tirelessly campaigned for the reform of education for poor
children and, putting theory into practice, had set up alternative schools
(ragged schools and reformatories) to rescue destitute and excluded chil-
dren. She frequently contributed papers to the Social Science Association
and was the first woman to present a paper for the Statistical Society. She
belonged to the same circle as other reformers and dissenters, particularly
Unitarians such as Harriet Martineau (translator of A. Comte), J. S. Mill,
C. Darwin, the Wedgwoods, Florence Nightingale, Harriet Taylor (Mill’s
wife) and thus to the intellectual elite that formed a small-world net-
work, that is, a network with a high degree of connectivity amongst
the hubs (Coghlan and Mackenzie, 2011). Her Unitarian commitment,
emphasising the equality and intrinsic worth of all God’s creatures, a

view shared with many other reformers at the time, was a driving force
giving direction and ethical foundation to the commitment for radical
change towards a more equitable society.
A contrasting figure whose activities we interrogate in Chapter 4 is
that of William Augustus Miles, a student of Malthus at Haileybury (East
India College), a lesser known figure than Carpenter and from a differ-
ent social background. His research generated statistics and unique eth-
nographic data that he presented to Select Committees, when acting as
expert witness, and disseminated in his pamphlets and correspondence
with those in power that aimed to influence the direction of reform. He
too operated through a network of public figures, supported particularly
by Edwin Chadwick who made use of his evidence in shaping social
policy and who appointed him as assistant commissioner for the Royal
Commission enquiring into rural policing in England. His largely self-
appointed role as ‘moral entrepreneur’ seemed driven by his Malthusian
and pessimistic view of human beings and society and his own morbid
interest in the criminal underworld of the time, an interest that moti-
vated him to undertake some of the earliest ethnographic work amongst
street children and delinquents. His views, and the policies he advo-
cated, are more in accord with neoliberal approaches to the poor today,
blaming their plight on idleness and a predisposition to crime and so
stressing harsh punishment, strict discipline and a work ethic as the
only way to salvation; some of his views, about the Irish for example,
fall within what Foucault has described as ‘the discourse of race war’,
establishing an ‘us and them’ divide between the winners and the losers
in the zero-sum economic game (Foucault, 2003). Present-day neocon-
servatives will recognise themselves in these two-century old creeds.
Carpenter and Miles are clearly at the opposite poles of two conflict-
ing sets of values and idea of the good society that have been fought
over from at least the period of the Enlightenment. As we noted above,
on the one hand, one finds those of business and the market, translated
into the priority accorded to the economy and labour, though in the
discourse of political economists such as A Smith and J. S. Mill,this has
often been on grounds of the conviction that this strategy ultimately
contributed to a moral order. On the other hand, often informed by
socialist ideals or by the universalist teachings of the Christian church,
particularly amongst Unitarians and Quakers (who were precisely those
activists detested by Edmund Burke, that great defender of conserva-
tive values), one finds those values consistent with the understanding
that the ultimate objective of good government must be ‘the common
Introduction 27
welfare and salvation of all’ (Foucault, 1979: 12), grounded in ‘a good

ethico-political end’ (Lyotard, 1984: xxiv). This is an objective that,
crucially for politics, provides the basis of consent to the authority
of the state and cashes out the true meaning of democracy. However,
these two tendencies have often co-existed in tension, as in J. S. Mill’s
attempt to reconcile the impersonal and harsh calculations of the mar-
ket with the commitment to an equitable allocation of opportunities
and life chances enshrined in the idea of a common good. These ten-
sions appear in the stories we tell about the interconnections of poverty,
inequality, schooling and crime, running from the reforms of the 1830s
to the setting up of the Welfare State and its demise today. In particular,
their effects on the new regimes and institutions put in place to deal
with delinquent children and their education and training are retraced
in Chapters 7, 8 and 9, where we highlight the features which have
survived and conditioned current practices and attitudes.
To conclude and update our analytical framework, we argue that
neoliberalism has resolved the tensions by making the state serve the
ends of the market and identifying the ‘common welfare of all’ with
the welfare, interests and values of capitalism. Foucault summarises the
reversal of the relationship of economy and society thus: ‘There will
not be the market game, which must be left free, and then the domain
in which the state begins to intervene, since the market, or rather pure
competition, which is the essence of the market, can only appear if it
is produced by an active governmentality. There will thus be a sort of
complete superimposition of market mechanisms, indexed to compe-
tition, and governmental policy … One must govern for the market,
rather than because of the market’ (Foucault, 2008: 121, and discussion
pp. 122–125; see also Venn, 2009). The surrender of state institutions,
services and objectives to the demands of corporate capital has wide
implications for education as a whole. The fact that the crises which we
are currently experiencing have brought to the fore the same options
and the same political and ethical stakes which we have detected in
our genealogy of exclusion adds to the relevance of our approach for
rethinking the relationship between inequality, poverty, forms of exclu-
sion and the economic system. The long struggle about the possibility
of progressive improvement in society has now taken the form of varie-
ties of neoliberalism (and fundamentalisms) against all those who sense
that the triumph of (feral) capitalism brings to crisis the fundamental
principles of equity and liberty that had guided democratic institu-
tions for some time. Stiglitz (2013) notably cites movements such as
Occupy and Los Indignados, which reject current austerity policies and
the domination of the economy by financial capitalism, as evidence of

moral outrage at the fact that the economic system now conforms to
his slogan ‘Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%’. Along with critiques from
radical economists and analysts, he presents this iniquitous situation
as an apt summary of his verdict on the current failures of the market
and establishment politics, failures that he argues threaten both further
increases in inequality and the basis of democracy. Our argument is
that finding adequate solutions to the problem of exclusion is part and
parcel of finding solutions to the wider problems we’ve indicated.
2
Pauperism, Delinquency and
Learning to Labour
In Covent Garden Market there is a party of between thirty

and forty boys, who sleep every night under the sheds and
baskets. These pitiable objects, when they arise in the morn-
ing, have no other means of procuring subsistence, but by
the commission of crime. (1816 Report of the Committee
for investigating the causes of the alarming increase of
Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis)
Poor Law officers paid manufacturers about £5 a head for

each child taken off their hands, and as soon as they were
carted off by their masters it was nobody’s concern what
became of them. They were often ill-treated, and their
position was to all intents and purposes that of slavery
(Dunlop, 1911: 258)
Threats and victims
The early part of the 19th century in England is a period when a num-
ber of concerns begin to coalesce around poverty and education. These
concerns, according to Jones and Williamson (1979), can be grouped in
terms of the state of the poor, the state of public morals and increases
in crime, particularly juvenile crime (Jones and Williamson, 1979:
63). In the discourse of ‘social economy’ in France they were seen as
a problem of wealth regulation, whilst in England, Political economy
placed more emphasis on population; Malthus’ work is pre-eminent
here. The social and political sides of the problems associated with
poverty gradually found common ground in education since ‘popular
29
30 Inequality, Poverty, Education
instruction was seen as a mode of improving that moral state of the

population and of the poor in particular, through forming “their minds
at an early period, to strict and principled habits of integrity and pru-
dence”’ (Jones & Williamson, 1979: 69, citing Bernard, 1809).
Such habits, or rather the lack of them, were those which Adam Smith
and Thomas Malthus had highlighted in their explanation of the causes
of destitution requiring poor relief. Their overriding concern, and those
of political economists at the time, was to ensure that ‘able-bodied’ poor
could be set to work and so increase the wealth of the nation instead of
being an expense. Jones and Williamson cite Eden 1797 who wrote ‘in
rescuing the infant poor from beggary and want, the sources of useful
population are augmented … in a ready case and cure of the sick poor …
the productive capital of the Nation is increased’ ( Jones and Williamson,
1979: 64).
Education came to be seen as a way of correcting the ‘bad habits’
and ‘vices’ that were the sources of corruption ( Jones and Williamson,
1979: 67). From the point of view of a genealogy of school exclusion,
it is the linking of poverty with danger and insecurity which points
to how subsequently juvenile delinquency becomes a focus instead of
education, especially with the rise in an idle population in big urban
areas and the increase in destitution. Government inquiries, educa-
tional schemes and discussions of prison reform target this young
population.
Yet another theme underlies the policies and discourses, relating to the
causes attributed to poverty and inequality. Classical political economy
regards inequality as natural and inevitable whilst many Enlightenment
thinkers like Rousseau and many radical reformers in the 19th century
consider poverty and inequality to be the product of particular forms of
society and economy. The implication that poverty and inequality are
the result of contingent regimes of power and wealth is that the poor are
victims, and a more equitable society would require political and social
interventions. These tensions in the two narratives are evidenced in the
accounts we present shortly, drawn from Select Committee proceedings
and other administrative bodies whose archives we have trawled in sup-
port of our narrative.
What interests us in the early discourses linking poverty, crime and
morality is not only its reappearance 200 years later, in today’s govern-
ment of social insecurity, but also the connection between the economy
and a politics of poverty. The parallels with schemes like Workfare are
instructive, as well as elements of policy today that add punishment
and correction, or ‘nudge’ to the mix.
Pauperism, Delinquency and Learning to Labour 31
Early in the 19th century two distinct discourses started to emerge

which would have profound effects on the lives of poor children. The first
concerned the early identification of increased crime with children and
juveniles. The second was the beginning of concern expressed regarding
the effects of child labour. Underlying and uniting these two strands
was the threat posed for the future by the increased numbers of children
and young people orphaned, abandoned or cast out by ‘feckless’ parents
to fend for themselves. Those who preferred the street to the workhouse
posed the greatest threat and were increasingly criminalised; those in
the workhouse represented an economic burden to parishes, particu-
larly in the Metropolis; one solution was to dispose of the children to
the emerging industrialists. Whilst children of the poor had always
worked, there was a transformation in terms of where they laboured
and what was required of them. John Farey, in a report to the Board of
Agriculture, reported that:
in most newly-erected cotton spinning mills the demand for children’s

labour exceeds even the inordinately excited increase of population in
the place, and children are not only sought for through adjoining dis-
tricts, but in many instances have been imported by scores at a time
from London, Bristol and other greats towns. (Farey, 1817: 501)
The shocking abuse of those who were sent from the workhouse to
become the cheap ‘apprenticed’ labour of developing industry was
largely ignored. Although there were commissions, inquiries and
attempts to introduce legislation, the protectionists argued successfully
that ‘it was cruel to prevent or restrict children’s labour because they
must starve without it’; furthermore, it was argued that the proposed
legislation would ‘injure trade, and drive it out of the country, eventually
reducing not only the capitalists, but also the workers to beggary’ (cited
in Dunlop, 2011: 285), familiar arguments today. Meanwhile, the chil-
dren of the streets presented a more visible threat and were increasingly
held responsible for what was described as an alarming increase in crime
and it is this discourse which would become dominant.
Education is mentioned frequently throughout the numerous reports
and inquiries. There were ‘national’ schools but access to these was
considered potentially dangerous, as it was thought education would
encourage pauper apprentices to want more and ‘criminal’ children to
congregate to plan crime. When Samuel Whitbread proposed, in 1807,
that each child should have two years of education between the ages of
7 and 14, arguing that such a move would reduce crime and pauperism,
his bill failed. The Tory MP Davies Giddy who represented Bodmin in
Cornwall opposed the bill, saying:
however specious in theory the project might be of giving education

to the labouring classes of the poor, it would, in effect, be found to
be prejudicial to their morals and happiness. It would teach them
to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in
agriculture and other laborious employments to which their rank
in society had destined them; instead of teaching them the virtue
of subordination, it would render them factious and refractory, as
is evident in the manufacturing counties; it would enable them to
read seditious pamphlets, vicious books and publications against
Christianity; … Besides, if this Bill were to pass into law, it would
go to burthen the country with a most enormous and incalcula-
ble expense, and to load the industrious orders with still heavier
imposts. (Hansard, House of Commons, Volume 9, 1807)
Giddy articulated many of the concerns associated with the working

classes at that time. On the one hand there was a paternalism and
concern to preserve their ‘morals and happiness’, whilst on the other
there was the desire to keep them as ‘good servants’ who remain within
their ascribed station in life, contented and deferential. The underlying
threat of ‘sedition’ or uprising, in the wake of the French and American
revolutions, reveals the fears of those in power regarding an educated
working class. The failure of the 1807 bill is the first of many through-
out much of the 19th century. At the same time there was growing
concern about the collapse of agriculture and the move to the city from
the country. This demographic shift, amplified by migration mainly
from Ireland, inaugurates a distinction between the urban and the rural
that has a chequered history. Migration from the rural to the urban and
increasing urbanisation during the period of industrialisation exacer-
bated many problems: housing, hygiene, crime, whilst creating new
economic problems for the management of the poor at the parish level.
Threats
Intervention into the working lives of children was still some way
off, and the main preoccupation with working class poor and pauper
children was in how to curtail what was seen as their increased threat
as juvenile delinquents or ‘street arabs’. Indeed, there were numerous
Select Committees established in the early decades of the century to
investigate various areas of concern from education to crime and to

the state of the police in the metropolis. What these Select Committee
Reports do reveal is a fascination with the lives of children and young
people who were perceived as posing a threat to the established social
order. Here are the robbers, pickpockets, prostitutes, gang members and
out-of-control youth who started drinking early and had total disregard
for the morals of the day. Significantly they are characterised through
the lens of the middle class explorers and experts whose testimonies
were presented to the committees and reveal much about the prevailing
attitudes of the time towards what Mary Carpenter would come to iden-
tify as the ‘perishing and dangerous classes’ (see Chapter 6). Thus in the
1816 Report from the Select Committee on the Education of the Lower
Orders of the Metropolis, Mr. F.A. Earle, Vestry Clerk of the Parish of
St. Giles, responds to a question about the moral and educational state of
children in St. Giles by saying that they were in a ‘dreadful state’, reveal-
ing that many of the boys were thieves and the girls had become pros-
titutes, often at a very early age (HCPP: Select Committee: 1816a: 10).
Significantly, what is absent from the questioning is any attempt to
address the environment of St. Giles which was then the poorest and
most deprived area of the metropolis and which attracted a large popu-
lation of those displaced from the countryside and from Ireland due to
ongoing agricultural depression. Another witness, Mr. T.A. Finnegan,
Master of St. Giles’ Irish Free School in George St., adds a different
dimension to the profile of the area and its inhabitants when he says:
six thousand poor Irish, exclusive of children; and they have all a
general disposition to have their children educated and not only
send them but many of the parents who could not read or write
themselves attend to be taught; about 100 of them attend four nights
a week. (HCPP: Select Committee, 1816a: 3)
However the focus was immediately shifted from the modest ambitions
of these parents for education for their children and themselves, to the
state of the inhabitants, particularly what was described by witnesses as
their ‘depraved’ morals, their exposure to vice and their belonging to
gangs of pick-pockets. Their parents did not escape, being described as
very ‘dissolute and violent’ (HCPP: Select Committee, 1816a: 3), charac-
teristics attributed today to ‘chavs’ ( Jones, 2011).
What can be identified here is a tendency, common to all of the
reports, to demonise those who were living in the most impoverished and
desolate conditions. Whereas on the one hand it is possible to glimpse
individuals who are struggling to achieve access to basic education and

who are able to welcome strangers, on the other hand, it is clear that the
preferred representation of feckless and immoral parents will prevail. In
addition, should these parents find themselves in need of support from
the parish, they risked losing their children, as the parishes used to take
the children away to be apprenticed, as documented in the 1816 Select
Committee on the State of the Children Employed in the Manufactories
in the UK. The factory owner Robert Owen, an enlightened employer,
appeared as a witness to argue for an increase in the age children were
employed to over 10 years and for them to be educated meanwhile. The
Committee though worried that the children would acquire ‘vicious hab-
its’ if not in occupation (HCPP: Select Committee, 1816b: 23).
In the same year, 1816, a report was published by the Committee for
Investigating the Causes for the Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delin-
quency in the Metropolis which had been established with the aim of
investigating juvenile delinquency and proposing ‘remedies’. Secretary
to the committee was William Crawford who became one of the first
Inspectors of Prisons and whose influence we examine later. The report
identified the main causes for the rise in juvenile crime as ‘the improper
conduct of parents; the want of education; the want of suitable employ-
ment; the violation of the Sabbath; the habits of gambling in public
streets; the severity of the criminal code; the defective state of the police;
the existing system of prison discipline’ (1816c: 10–11).
This readiness to place responsibility for unacceptable behaviour with
the parents, a common view today often expressed by government
ministers and in the press generally, together with the reluctance to
intervene in what were considered ‘private’ matters, meant no recom-
mendations regarding how to manage this were suggested. And whilst
the severity of the criminal code, the defective state of the police and
the existing system of prison discipline would all form the basis for
further select committees, these remained the primary means through
which juvenile delinquents would be controlled. In the report of the
1828 Select Committee on the Police of the Metropolis, the majority
of witnesses identified juvenile delinquency as the main cause for the
increase of crime. Suggested remedies were discussed and included rec-
ommendations such as ‘whipping boys under 12 years, generally about
35 lashes’; in addition, an early link was made between behaviour and
the use of alcohol, its consumption starting ‘at ten or twelve years of
age’ (HCPP: Select Committee, 1828: 45). Once again, incompetent,
neglectful and drunk parents were blamed for producing degenerate
youth (HCPP: Select Committee, 1828: 145).
The problem of prison discipline was increasingly addressed as the

decades unfolded; new regimes were instituted which included solitary
confinement, the ‘silent’ system and use of mechanisms such as the
treadmill. These measures were all implemented in moves to increase
the severity of imprisonment and thus reverse the tide of juvenile crime.
Whilst extending education was once more considered, it was rejected
on the grounds that rather than being of benefit it actually worked to
increase delinquent tendencies.
Meanwhile, a number of charitable organisations were attempt-
ing to reclaim and reform offenders. For example, Mr. James Ross,
Superintendent of The Refuge for the Destitute, described its aim as the
rehabilitation of offenders above 12 years through hard labour followed
by being taught a trade such as shoemaker, talisers and hemp-dresser,
as well as basic reading, writing and arithmetic. He admitted that the
difficulty was in finding good employers (HCPP: Select Committee,
1828: 182).
However, penalties were severe for those who left the Refuge and
offended. At the Old Bailey on 10th April 1828, 16-year-old Jonas
Lawday was sentenced to 14 years of transportation after being found
guilty of stealing eight brushes from his master, John Warner, who had
‘taken him from the Refuge for the Destitute’. Lawday is also seen to be
a source of contaminating another youth, 14-year-old Thomas Wilson,
who was indicted for stealing three brushes from Warner.
In contrast to the sentence received by Lawday, Thomas Wilson is
‘recommended to mercy by the Prosecutor. Confined Six Months’.
Whilst both punishments may be considered severe given the nature
of the offence, they were not unusual for the period and reveal much
about the nature of the crimes that were being committed by juveniles.
The main recommendation made by the committee was for the estab-
lishment of a separate prison facility for juveniles, and any possibility
of extending education was though ‘deserving of consideration’ neatly
sidestepped (HCPP: Select Committee, 1828: 8).
Therefore, whilst fear of crime dominated as it would until the latter
half of the 19th century, responses were driven by the need to pun-
ish and exclude. Hence punishment, including transportation, was
the preferred solution until the refusal by Australia to continue to be
a dumping ground, around the 1850s. In addition, debates around
education continued to argue that extending education to the ‘lower
classes’ actually contributed to criminality and alongside the divisions
regarding religion worked to prevent expansion of mass schooling
until the 1870s.
Victims
The parish apprentices, meanwhile, received little attention or protec-

tion; they remained at the mercy of the parish and the forces of change.
The historian Olive Dunlop argued that:
it was just at this time that the belief in laissez faire was at its height,
and the freest reign was given to the employer to use labour as
he chose. The child, as the employee least able to protect himself,
suffered the most from the absence of any industrial regulation.
(Dunlop, 1911: 262)
In what follows, we tell the story of victims using as much as possi-

ble testimony from affected children. The children whose stories are
outlined in this section are precisely those who, because of their state
of destitution, were already the excluded from whatever educational
opportunities and chances to escape poverty were available. So, whilst
elements of the case may appear exceptional, in the course of its unfold-
ing, one learns about several things: the gruesome conditions under
which destitute children laboured and lived, or died, the practices in
place that linked the workhouse to indentured labour, to early and
often corrupt inspection practices, and to the crushing weight of the
apparatuses in place that made redress and change difficult. Engels’
(1892 [1845]) study of the conditions of the working class had pointed
out that:
even children from the workhouses were employed in multitudes,

being rented out for a number of years to the manufacturers as appren-
tices. They were lodged, fed and clothed in common, and were, of
course, completely the slaves of their masters, by whom they were
treated with the utmost recklessness and barbarity. (Engels, 1892: 177)
One also learns about conditions which those in power and the better-
off members of society took for granted, including assumptions about
the proper station of the rich and the poor, that most thought natural
and inevitable. At its heart is the widespread view that inequality was
a fact of life, something which, as we noted at the start, neoliberal
theory now legitimises as a necessary regulating mechanism for an
economy geared to competition. In order to challenge the dominant
view which bound poverty to criminality and immorality, we present a
case retrieved from archives which is exceptional in being one of very
few testimonies from the side of poor children themselves. We have pre-
served the details to retain the voice of the children and to give an his-
torical sense of how the various mechanisms in place actually worked.
The case thus attempts to locate exclusion within the wider historical
and economic context, and functions as a way of setting the scene for
the reforms, policies and state-wide mechanisms gradually introduced
as part of governmentality.
The case of Frances Colpit: 1819–1829
Frances Colpit had been in the care of the parish from the age of two
years and nine months, having been admitted in September 1821 with
her brother who was nine (St. Martin’s Annual Register of Parish Poor
Children, Westminster Archives, F4308). It is worth noting that work-
house records were primarily concerned with collecting information
which was of use to the institution, and information was recorded
which would assist with the completion of annual returns and for finan-
cial auditing purposes. The particular circumstances which led to admit-
tance to the workhouse held no interest beyond establishing whether an
individual had settlement and was entitled to parish support.
As an infant, Frances was sent to the infant poor house, Highwood
Hills, on the 22 October 1821 (Hanway’s Act of 1767 required that
all pauper children under six in Metropolitan areas be sent out to the
countryside) as a response to high infant mortality rates amongst pau-
per children cared for in workhouses. Her brother was soon apprenticed
to a shoemaker in Clerkenwell although he is later recorded as ‘gone
can’t find where’. Frances returned to St. Martin’s when she was almost
ten years old and within four months of her return was indentured to
Esther Hibner as an apprentice tambour worker. Tambour work was
embroidery on Brussels or Nottingham net with a tambour needle.
Pinchbeck described it as:
this, an older domestic industry than lace running, was not practiced
so much in the north midlands as in London and other parts of the
country. From its introduction in the 18th c it was carried on largely
by small masters and mistresses employing apprentice labour in
domestic workshops. Generally bound by the parish for a long period
of years, tambour workers frequently worked under incredibly bad
conditions. Not only did unprincipled masters and mistresses compel
them to work almost without interruption, but they were often half
starved and miserably clothed and housed. (Pinchbeck, 1930: 214)
Indeed, the First Report into the Employment of Children in Factories

in 1833 stated that:
it appears in evidence, that of all employments to which children

are subjected, those carried on in factories are amongst the least
laborious, and of all departments of in-door labour, amongst the least
unwholesome. Hand loom weavers, frame work knitters, lace runners
and workpeople engaged in other kinds of domestic manufacture,
are in most cases worked at earlier ages, for longer hours and for less
wages, than the body of children employed in factories. (HCPP: First
Report, 1833: 51)
The St. Martin’s workhouse reports on apprentices reveal a wide

range of employers; children were sent to shoemakers, bookbinders,
lint makers, silk weavers, strawbonnet makers, chimney sweepers,
confectioners, cooks as well as to the mills and manufactories of the
North (St. Martin’s Reports on Apprentices, Westminster Archives,
F6061). Hibner was a recent addition to the list of employers and
would seem to have operated a modest establishment compared with
other, larger, tambour employers. The indenture records of the time
identify Frances Colpit as ‘a poor child belonging to the said Parish of
St. Martin’s in the Field’, and sign away the child to the employer ‘to
dwell and serve until the said apprentice shall accomplish the full age
of 21’. Whilst on one level ‘belonging’ could be interpreted as simply
being a member of the parish, it is possible to understand the term to
imply ownership, especially in the light of the financial and contrac-
tual arrangements underpinning the practice. Once a child entered
the workhouse the parent had no right to participate in any decisions
that might be made regarding the employment or education of their
offspring. The workhouse register for admittance asks: ‘What work
children past six years are employed in?’ which reveals an expectation
that the children of paupers would be engaged in working rather than
education. Indeed many of the arguments against extending education
to the children of the poor as well as to restricting children’s working
hours pointed to the hardship that would be caused if children were
removed from employment. The practice of apprenticing children from
the workhouse provided solutions for both the workhouse and the
employer insofar as the former had prudently discharged their respon-
sibility and the latter gained a worker who required little beyond basic
board and lodgings. The practice illustrates one pillar of the political
economy of poverty.
Thus, Frances was engaged to ‘learn the business of a tambour-worker’

and in return was to be provided with ‘board, lodging and all other neces-
saries’. Frances lived there with seven other young girls who had also been
apprenticed from St. Martin’s and other London workhouses. Most of the
girls had arrived early in 1828 and Mr. John Blackman, one of the overseers
of St. Martin’s parish, stated that he had checked conditions a month after
the first four girls had been apprenticed, and ‘it was ascertained that the
children had been well used, and that no cause of complaint had arisen’
(Bow Street Magistrates Court, 17th February 1829). Parish accounts
reveal that a substantial amount was spent on expenses by agents such
as Blackman, for instance £21.2s.6d claimed by him in November 1828
for ‘visiting insane and refractory poor, and children at tambour-workers’.
When Frances went to the Hibners at No. 13 Pratt Terrace in
St. Pancras on 7th April 1828 she was described by the master of
St. Martin’s workhouse, Jeremiah Smith, as being ‘in perfect health’
after ‘she had been under the care of the parish five or six years and was
always in perfect health’ (Old Bailey transcripts, t18280409–41, 9th April
1829). What is worth noting here is the vagueness of his evidence – it
would not have been difficult to give a precise account particularly given
the circumstances, and it throws some doubt on the second part of his
statement regarding her health. However, it is clear that the question of
how healthy Frances was when she arrived at the Hibner’s was of some
importance. Mary Ann Harford, another young apprentice, stated that
she remembered when Frances had arrived:
she was in very good health when she first came; she afterwards
became sick and ill – that was about five weeks after she first came;
she complained of a pain in her side, and sometimes of the head-ache;
Mrs. Hibner used to say, ‘Never mind, you must do your work’ – she
did not wear stockings; I knew of her feet being bad, and I told
mistress of it – they were bad a good while before I told mistress of it.
(Old Bailey transcripts, 9th April 1829)
Another child, Eliza Norman, who was 11 years old and had been with
the Hibners for ‘about a twelve month’, remembered Frances as being
in good health when she first arrived and this was confirmed by Susan
Whitby, another apprentice who stated that:
she was in good health when she came to live with us, and contin-
ued so till the food was changed, and then she got ill. (Old Bailey
transcripts, 9th April 1829)
The girls’ diet was very poor, consisting mainly of dry bread and
watered milk for breakfast which was often the only meal of the day.
Lunch consisted of potatoes – nine pounds being shared between the
apprentices and the adults. Eliza Norman describes the food:
we used to have half a slice of dry bread, and sometimes we used to

have milk and water, and sometimes none; when we had breakfast we
did not have dinner on the same day; when we had dinner we some-
times used to have potatoes. (Old Bailey Transcripts, 9th April 1829)
The general standard and availability of food had deteriorated within

weeks of the girls’ arrival. Mary Ann Harford reported that ‘we some-
times had meat once a fortnight; this short food began about three
weeks after we were bound; we had been on liking first, and were fed
very well then’ (Old Bailey Transcripts, 9th April 1829).
It would appear that conditions deteriorated following the visit that
had been made by the parish overseer who had been satisfied that
the girls were being well looked after. However, the food needed to be
‘earned’ and Frances would be denied food if it was decided that her
work was not up to standard; Susan Whitby said that ‘she used to cry,
and ask mistress for food, but she did not get it; the mistress used to say
it was no use for her to cry, for the more she cried the longer she should
do without it’ (Old Bailey Transcripts, 9th April 1829).
Hibner kept a dog and fed it with scraps brought from her brother’s
pig farm. Mary Ann Harford described how she would fetch:
the victuals for the dog from where Hibner’s brother kept pigs, in
Gray’s Inn-Lane; I used to bring it in a little wooden sieve – it was
hog-wash, and came out of the tub the hogs feed in; at times there
were little bits of fish and bones in it – I used at times to eat it myself
and so did Colpit – we all used to eat it, because we were so hungry.
(Old Bailey Transcripts, 9th April 1829)
Working practices at the Hibner’s were brutal, although certainly not

unusual as there are numerous accounts of long hours, ill treatment
and lack of food.
The young apprentices were expected to work from the early hours
of the morning, often being woken up at 2 a.m. and not finishing until
11 p.m. Frances seemed to have difficulty with the work particularly
after she became ill. Susan Whitby noted that Frances was ‘found fault
with’ for not doing her work properly. Mary Ann Harford, who sat near
Frances at the frame, said that ‘she could not do her work, she was too
ill’; she told of how ‘if we had not done our work mistress used to keep
us without victuals, and she used to give us a good flogging before we
went to bed’. When asked whether they were allowed to go to bed after
being flogged she replied ‘sometimes she let us go to bed, and some-
times she kept us up all night – she did so for two nights running’ (Old
Bailey Transcripts, 9th April 1829).
Eliza Norman said that when Frances did not do her work ‘she was
beat’. Indeed all the apprentices had been beaten when their work was
not good enough; again this was not uncommon for the time. However,
Frances seemed to be subject to punishments more frequently. Susan
Whitby stated that Frances was beaten with:
a rod, a cane, or a slipper – the daughter has taken her out of the
frame and knocked her on the floor, taken her up and knocked her
down again. I never saw her punish her in any other way. (Old Bailey
Transcripts, 9th April 1829)
In addition it was stated that ‘they beat her sometimes at night, and
sometimes in the middle of the day: she was working all day’ (Old Bailey
Transcripts, 9th April 1829).
Frances’ health deteriorated and her punishments became more severe.
Mary Ann Harford recalled a time when Frances was very ill and had ‘done
her tambour work wrong’. She was told to take a bucket of water and clean
the stairs. Frances was so weak that she could not finish them, indeed:
she fell down on the stairs and said she felt so weak she could not do
them. She was taken up the stairs, flogged well, and sent down again
to do them; the daughter took her up stairs – I went up stairs, for I had
to fetch her up; I saw the daughter flog her with a cane and a rod;
she beat her a good bit – she took her clothes up to beat her: she sent
her down to finish the stairs, and she made water on the stairs; she
had her nose rubbed in it – the daughter did it: I have seen her taken
by her clothes and dipped into a pail of water, a good many times.
The young apprentices worked six days a week, and on Sundays when
it was expected by the parish that they would attend church, they were
locked in the house. John Blackman, the parish overseer, admitted
not seeing them on Sundays in the workhouse ‘I never saw them on
Sundays at the workhouse’ (Old Bailey Transcripts, 9th April 1829).
Susan Whitby described how:
on some Sundays we were down stairs in the kitchen locked in; on other
Sundays, when we had meat, we were up stairs in the work-room –
our mistress was at home during those Sundays; the shutters to the
kitchen window were shut on the Sundays when we were down there,
and the door locked. (Old Bailey Transcripts, 9th April 1829)
The young apprentices lived an isolated life. With the exception of the
man who brought the milk, there were few visitors. Most of the girls
didn’t have relatives and those who did, like Frances, were prevented
from seeing them. Frances was fortunate in having a grandmother who
had provided her with some clothing; she had a frock and a petticoat
but no stockings. Frances Gibbs told how when she tried to visit her
granddaughter she would be told that it wasn’t convenient or that
because Frances’ work was not good enough she was being punished.
It had been reported in The Times newspaper that:
the grandmother of the little girl who was obliged to be left at

St. Pancras workhouse came forward in great distress of mind, and
said she had often called at the prisoner’s house to see her grand-
child and was quite pleased at hearing she was going on so well. She
had often wished to see her, but was told whenever she expressed a
wish to that effect, that the girl had committed some slight offence,
and by way of punishment she would not be suffered to see her
grandmother. Last Thursday she called at the house, and was told
that the child had gone to the Strand to see her brother. Suspecting
from these frequent excuses that something was wrong, witness
hinted her suspicions to Mr. Blackman, the overseer, who immedi-
ately took such steps as led to the discovery of the children’s situa-
tion. (The Times, 18th February 1829)
Unknown to the grandmother, she had visited during a particularly

inconvenient time, as events would show.
Mrs. Hibner and her daughter were charged at Bow Street Magistrates
court on 16th February 1829 with:
having starved and otherwise cruelly used, six female children,

placed as apprentices. Four of the unfortunate children were brought
to the office, and their appearance indicated the horrible usage
they had met with. One of them in particular was wasted to a mere
skeleton and appeared as if she were in the last stage of a consump-

tion, owing to the want of pure air and proper nourishment. Another
of the children lies in St. Pancras workhouse so weak that she is
unable to be removed and the sixth in the Infirmary of St. Martin’s
workhouse without the slightest hopes of her recovery, a mortifica-
tion having already commenced in her feet owing to neglect and
infamous treatment. The case was brought at the instance of the
officers of St. Martin’s parish (The Times, 17th February 1829); the
child in St. Martin’s was Frances Colpit.
Mr. Gosner, the surgeon of St. Martin’s parish reported that:
bad food, or an insufficiency of good food, the want of air and exer-
cise, sleeping without beds, want of proper change of clothing, and
the filth and diet to which they have been accustomed, have all
combined to produce the effect which you see. I understand that the
poor children have been accustomed to lie in a most wretched way;
and from all appearance, I should think that the linen, etc. in which
they were clad had not been washed for several months. (Old Bailey
Transcript, 9th April 1829)
However, it was the evidence from an officer of the Cripplegate parish

which revealed the extent of the neglect. He stated that:
a little girl who had been apprenticed by the Parish of Cripplegate

had died last Saturday week, and had been buried on Friday last.
From the secrecy which had been observed with respect to the
illness and subsequent death of this poor child, considerable suspi-
cion existed that her death had been hastened by bad treatment. It
was certainly very singular that no doctor had been called in, and
that the searchers had never been sent for to examine the body’.
The Magistrate, Sir. R. Birnie, observed that the fact of the searchers not
having been sent for led to the belief that the child had been unfairly
dealt with. Searchers were required by the parish to visit and note
the cause of death and their findings contributed to the collection of
statistics which would be published by the parish regarding mortality
rates. He advised the gentleman who appeared on behalf of the parish
of Cripplegate to ‘have the body of the child disinterred, and to hold a
coroner’s inquest immediately upon it’.
On 21st February 1829 The Times reported on the inquest which was
held into the circumstances attending the death of Margaret Howse,
aged 13 years. The report described how ‘the body was literally a mere
skeleton’.
A young witness, Susan Whitby, who was 12 years old and whose
appearance was described by The Times as ‘extremely emaciated’ pro-
vided a detailed account of the background to Margaret Howse’ death:
In November 1827 I was apprenticed to Mrs. Hibner by the overseers

of Cripplegate. My mistress is a tambour-worker, and resides at Platt
House, Somers-town. Her daughter, who is a woman grown, and
has a child, lives with her and assists in the business. The deceased,
Margaret Howse, came as apprentice to Mrs. Hibner, from the same
parish, a few days after me. For the last two months, she (deceased)
had been very ill. I and the other apprentices, of whom there were
eight in all, told our mistress that she complained of head-ache, in
the hope that she would give her a little tea, but our mistress gave
her none. On the night of Friday se’nnight [sic] all the apprentices
went to rest about 11 o’clock; at this time Margaret Howse was very
ill. Between 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning we were all desired to
get up to go to our looms in the work room; the deceased was unable
to move, and Ann Robinson, our mistress’s forewoman, dragged her
up stairs, without being dressed, to the work room, and made her
stand at her loom. At daylight we were all sent down in the kitchen
to breakfast; the deceased was pushed along by Mrs. Hibner; I helped
her down to the kitchen, and she went to bed. She could not eat her
breakfast, and soon after became speechless, in which state she con-
tinued till her death, which took place about 7 o’clock on Saturday
evening. The apprentices never went to bed before 11 o’clock at
night, and generally got up about 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, but
never later than 4 o’clock … The whole of the apprentices slept on
the floor with their clothes on, with two blankets over them; we had
no additional bed clothing during the late cold weather; our milk
and water consisted of half a pint of milk to two quarts of water,
which was never warmed; not a day passed but I and the whole of the
apprentices were severely beat by our mistress’s daughter and fore-
woman; the deceased was beat on the morning of the day she died;
none of us were ever allowed to go out of the house. No doctor came
to see the deceased whilst she was ill; Mrs. Hibner, her daughter, and
the forewoman, always had meat and pudding for dinner; they all
drank gin at times; on the night of the deceased’s death they had a
pint of gin, for the purpose of rejoicing, as they expressed it; we were
always hungry towards night, and myself, the deceased, and others,
often ate the meat out of the wash-tub which was bought for the dog.
(The Times, 21st February 1829)
Susan Whitby’s testimony described a regime which, whilst brutal,

reflected practices which were common. The young apprentices, sent out
by the workhouses, were simply a means to an end for the workshops,
mills and factories which flourished during that period. The Times report
of the trial continued by describing how:
several of the unfortunate children were next examined and gave

corroborating evidence. One of them stated, that on the Saturday
morning, when the deceased was knocked down stairs by one of the
unnatural women, she became senseless; that she (witness) assisted
her into the kitchen, where she lay down; soon afterwards she became
speechless, and died with a portion of her half slice of bread in her
mouth; on her telling Mrs. Hibner that the deceased could not speak,
her reply was – ‘Oh, let her lie and die; it will be a good riddance’.
When she died in the evening, she went to her mistress and daughter,
who appeared glad at the intelligence, and desired her to wash the
body and lay her out, which she did, assisted by another little girl.
Mr. Berlin, a surgeon, of Brewer-street, proved that the actual cause
of the child’s death was want of food.
Mr. Hamp, an undertaker, said he was employed by Mrs. Hibner to
bury the child, and having seen many who had died of consumption
much reduced, he did not suspect any unfair conduct on the part of
his employer. The searchers called to examine it some days before the
funeral; but as the coffin was in some degree fastened down, they did
not inspect it.
This being the whole of the evidence, the Coroner summed up the
case, and the Jury returned the following verdict: ‘Esther Hibner, sen;
guilty of the wilful murder of Margaret Howse; and Esther Hibner,
the daughter, accessory’. (The Times, 21st February 1829)
Meanwhile, Frances Colpit was gravely ill in the workhouse infirmary.

The surgeon Charles Wright after arranging for her to be removed to the
Infirmary examined her and found:
the body extremely attenuated, with a slight cough, the toes morti-
fied, some of them about separating at the time; all the toes on the
left foot, except one, partook of mortification, and the right foot was
in the same state, but was the worst. I attended her till Sunday, the
15th March, when she died, in St. Pancras infirmary: after her death
I examined her body, with two other medical gentlemen; there were
abscesses on the lungs, with tubercles covering the lungs, a slight
inflammation of some of the abdominal viscera and stone in the
left kidney: her death arose from abscess on the lungs – that was the
approximate cause, in conjunction with the mortification of the toes
I have no doubt these tubercles might be produced by the treatment
described, and want of food. I attribute the mortification of the feet
to the want of food and necessary exercise – cold and wet would be
an exciting cause – the disease might have been in the lungs a long
time; the tubercles had been going on a long time I have no doubt;
she had a bruise on the right eye, and some bruises on the right
arm particularly – I should not think them produced by very violent
blows. (Old Bailey Transcript, 9th April 1829)
Thomas Gosling, another surgeon who gave evidence, when asked if ‘it
happened that persons in the lowest condition of life, who have been
all their lives in workhouses, have been much under your care?’ replied:
very much; they are very often the children of diseased and weak
parents, and more liable to consumption than any other complaint –
commencing at times in early life, but generally at an advanced
period; everything which occurs to them has doubtless a tendency to
increase these symptoms. I think dipping her head two or three times
into a pail of water very likely to bring the tubercles into action, and
form abscesses. (Old Bailey Transcript, 9th April 1829)
From the evidence given it would seem that Frances’ health deteriorated
within a short time of her arrival at the Hibners and the descriptions
suggest that she may have already been suffering from tuberculosis.
On 13th April 1829 Esther Hibner senior was found guilty of the mur-
der of Frances Colpit and was hanged three days later. Press coverage of
the hanging recorded large numbers of spectators:
We do not remember to have seen such a concourse of people col-

lected to witness an execution since that of Fauntleroy. The whole
space from the scaffold down to the bottom of the Old Bailey was
one dense mass of spectators … On her arrival at the scaffold, she was
assailed with a loud volley of yells from the people, particularly from
the females, of which the crowd was in a great measure composed.

(The Times, 14th April 1829)
Much was made of the Hibner’s refusal to ‘receive any spiritual consola-
tion, and no clergyman attended her on the scaffold’.
On 13th April 1829 her daughter Esther Hibner junior and her fore-
woman Ann Robinson were tried and found guilty for ‘a gross and most
outrageous assault on Elizabeth Lawman, Ann Proctor and others of the
unfortunate parish apprentices committed to their charge, on the 1st
October 1828’. Hibner was sentenced by the court to 12 months and
Ann Robinson to four months imprisonment and hard labour in the
House of Correction.
The sentences seem somewhat lenient when compared with the fol-
lowing cases which were all dealt with on the same day:
Lydia Gubert, aged 15, stealing 1 shawl: transported for seven years
Elizabeth Spice, aged 16, stealing lace and ribbon: transported for seven
years
Henry Brady, aged 16, stealing 3 loaves of bread: transported for seven
years
John Owen, aged 11, stealing 5 pounds of mutton: whipped and
discharged
William Hornet, aged 12, and John Heron, aged 17, pickpocketing one
handkerchief: transported for life
Robert Nixon, aged 19, stealing two coats and one hat: sentenced to
death (Old Bailey transcripts for proceedings of 13th April 1829)
What links all of these cases is the youth of the perpetrators and the
severity of the punishments that were being handed out to juveniles
particularly if the crime involved theft. Sentences for those in their
thirties and older tended to be more lenient even when the crime was
similar. Concern was sometimes expressed, focussed on ‘abuse’ and on
caution when parish officers selected employers for apprentices rather
than the practices themselves and the underlying assumptions and val-
ues regarding the poor and their children.
Conclusion
The case of Frances Colpit starkly reveals the prevailing conceptualisa-

tion of childhood and the central importance of class and poverty in
the practices that operated to take charge of children’s lives and regulate
their conduct. Already nearly two centuries ago, the inter-relationships

of labour practices, judicial practices, administrative arrangements and
expert opinion with state and local authority institutions’ procedures
and responsibilities were becoming structurally organised. The evi-
dences in the case reveal a situation in which policy, principles and
practices were in a state of flux, awaiting formulation. Relevant mecha-
nisms and new institutions appropriate to the new conditions and
requirements of the economy were in their formative state and had yet
to become established as part of biopolitical governmentality. The Poor
Law Act of 1834 based on the political economy of Malthus, Ricardo
and Bentham was a major step in that process. As education gradually
emerged as one of the key institutions for constituting ‘normalised’ sub-
jects and populations with the level of skills and capacities suitable for
an industrial society, forms of exclusion also became institutionalised,
affecting the ‘lower-orders’. It is clear that economic interests prevailed
in determining policy; we find echoes in the audit culture framing
policy today. Whilst the evidences from transcripts and public records
indicate a variety of understandings, at times confused or in opposition,
it also becomes apparent that some values have a dominant or hegem-
onic purchase on practices and policy, for example, regarding the inter-
est of capital and those that have subsequently come under the slogan
of ‘law and order’ or ‘value for money’. The first thing to note is the
appalling disregard for the lives and welfare of poor children whether
they are viewed as criminals or as cheap labour. This attitude is reflected
in the treatment of the poor generally, both in everyday practices such
as the apprenticeship of children or in the kinds of physical torment to
which child workers and prisoners were subjected.
An important element of the changes gradually taking place was the
beginnings of the adoption of national solutions to ‘local’ issues, as
can be identified in the plethora of reports which took the ‘metropolis’
as the template for much of the policy which eventually emerges. The
framing of the New Poor Law Amendment act of 1834 was an attempt
to reformulate the framework for state action at the national and local
levels guided by political economy; the shifts were very much part of
the governmentalisation of the state in terms of new apparatuses and
practices gradually shaped by the new sciences of the social.
3
Labour, Poverty and the Export
of Destitute Children As ‘Waste’
As for the destitute youth whose offences are less glaring, he

should be subjected to compulsory emigration W.A. Miles.
(1835a: Select Committee on goals: 400)
We have been arguing that a close connection began to be established

between early forms of exclusion and the interests of capital. The con-
text is the rise to predominance of the ideas of classical liberal political
economy in Britain, particularly those of Smith, Bentham and Malthus,
ideas which increasingly shaped policy and opinion. Central to these
changes were the relocation and reconceptualisation of the poor, and
the working class generally, by reference to the ‘wealth of the nation’
and to State regulation and management of targeted populations.
Thus, political economy became authoritative in the debates leading
up to the changes to the Poor Law Acts (1834), with direct consequences
for the population of children we are considering. This chapter uncovers
the importance of colonial economy in determining national strategies
and policies regarding the treatment of the poor and those who fell foul
of the law because of poverty. Immigration, notably from Ireland to
England, and migration, forced or otherwise, settler colonies of Australia,
Canada and South Africa, were central to these strategies. There is thus a
global and imperial scope to the problem of exclusion which tends to be
neglected, in this case the exportation to the colonies of troublesome and
troubled children. This element of the genealogy has implications for a
fuller account of biopolitics which will be noted at the end of the chapter.
In what follows, we focus on this imperial scope to reveal aspects of
the interconnections between the emerging biopolitics and a political
economy shaped by liberalism. Our genealogy of exclusion will estab-
lish how emerging discourses and practices re-categorise the children
49
so that they become manageable within the existing social framework

and are even made to yield a profit for social entrepreneurs. Beginning
with the emergence of developments which were designed to manage
the increasing numbers of destitute children, particularly the children
who lived on the streets and who were considered to be always at
risk of being recruited into criminal activity, new measures began to
emerge within a discourse which dehumanised the poor, making it pos-
sible to commodify thousands of children and young people. The case
study presented here illustrates how a ‘solution’ to a particular crisis
became the foundation for a practice which endured until the mid-20th
century. Eekelaar (1994: 490) has estimated that the numbers of chil-
dren exported from the UK must be in excess of 100,000. The majority
were exported by philanthropic, voluntary agencies whose mission was
to ‘rescue’ children both from the streets and from their ‘feckless’ and
‘irresponsible’ parents.
Concerns focussed on the growing number of the destitute and dis-
affected children of the slums and of the streets producing a category
of youth who were seen as criminals who had not yet been caught.
The signifier of their ‘crime’ was their visibility on the streets of the
metropolis, a reminder of the potential threat to the established order
that they were seen to represent, expressed in the invention of the term
‘street Arabs’ to describe them:
The term ‘street arab’ implied that poor children were nomadic,
alone in the world without homes or families … unlike respectable
English Citizens who increasingly valued stable domesticity, ‘street
arabs’ rejected the middle-class vision of the home and, along with
it, the values of English society. (Murdoch, 2006: 25)
Although it has to be pointed out that it was not so much that they
‘rejected’ society in the way that Murdoch describes, but rather that
the ‘street arabs’ were casualties of the after-effects of (Napoleonic) war,
disease, migration and the collapse of the labour market, and as such
often found themselves orphaned or abandoned and with little choice
in terms of basic survival. Various estimates at the time suggested that
upwards of 15,000 orphaned or abandoned children made their homes
on the streets of London alone, surviving on their wits and their ability
to find fair means or foul of surviving in the margins.
Destitute children feature in a wide range of parliamentary debates
ranging from population, poverty, labour, emigration, emancipation of
slaves, transportation, prisons, and so on. The space that they inhabit
Labour, Poverty and the Export 51
throughout thousands of pages of evidence from ‘experts’ is one which

combines horror, dread and fascination and in which they are con-
structed as on a par with industrial waste as Hadley has pointed out:
because the street children inhabited an industrial ‘social body’ and

seemed to lack a productive role within its mechanism, they were
seen to be instead the unavoidable by-products of the modern tech-
nological structure – industrial waste. Consequently, the children
were defined as ‘gutter children’, ‘pollution’, ‘filth’, ‘refuse’, and the
‘drainage of our jails’, and, reformers suggested, they should be man-
aged accordingly. (Hadley, 1990: 432)
These definitions worked to eliminate any sense of humanity or con-

cern and implied they would be swept up and thrown away. However,
waste could also be transformed into something potentially useful and
money-making. The existence of the colonies and the wider interest of
the British Empire provided a ready option that served both domestic
concern about the security of property and the labour needs of settler
colonies, serving the interests of both domestic and colonial economies.
What follows will be an account of how these destitute children were
recruited into the service of colonial capitalism at a time when the abo-
lition of slavery impacted upon the availability of cheap and docile or
malleable labour for colonial economies.
The traffic in children

In 1826 a Parliamentary Committee on Emigration had been convened
to explore the possibility of using emigration to the colonies as a solu-
tion to the twin problems of surplus population and unemployment.
Both were seen to have strained the resources of parishes, particularly in
metropolitan areas with London being the most severely affected. The
Committee thought it was:
justified in recommending the subject of Emigration to the most

serious and deliberate consideration of the House as one obvious and
immediate measure for correcting in some degree this redundancy of
population and for mitigating the numerous evils which appear to
result from its existence. (HCPP: Select Committee, 1826: 4)
One of the ‘numerous evils’ referred to had been identified as the increas-
ing numbers of young people adrift in London. The Committee noted that
they had received an application to give evidence from Mr. Chambers, a

Police Magistrate who ‘requested to be examined’:
upon the subject of that numerous class of persons in the Metropolis,

chiefly under age, who, being thrown upon the streets in perfect
destitution, soon resort to crimes for their support. A class so numer-
ous, and whose case is so lamentable, deserves the attention of
Parliament as one of those special cases which must be either left
to the benevolence of charitable institutions, or of Parliament, to
supply those funds for the first period of emigration. (HCPP: Select
Committee, 1826: 84)
Mr. Chambers had specific proposals to make based on his survey of the
largest parishes in London and supportive responses he had received.
He argued that:
if there was an emigration from this country the children might

be apprenticed for five or seven years to persons in Canada, who
would be glad to receive them. It would be a material relief to
this country and in time pay itself admirably … (HCPP: Select
Committee, 1826: 86). The Directors and Guardians of the Poor (of
Mary-le-bone) highly approve of the plan of sending children to
Canada. There are now in the workhouse 56 boys and 25 girls from
the age of 12 to 20, and a great number under that age, whom they
will be just as much at a loss to provide for as they are for the others.
(HCPP: Select Committee, 1826: 86)
Chambers added that the parish of St. Giles had 50 boys and 27 girls,
and Saint Luke’s had 26 boys and 20 girls between the same ages.
The enthusiasm of the parish guardians for the scheme proposed by
Chambers lay in the effect of a recently implemented Apprentice Act
which prevented them from sending children more than 40 miles out
of London, making it difficult for them to find enough apprenticeships
for the children.
The financial benefits of disposing of children to the colonies made
the scheme very attractive indeed. Whilst it was still possible to find
apprenticeships for children within the Metropolis, these were fre-
quently problematic, resulting in complaints from masters that the
children were unsuitable, were running away and living on the streets
or returning to the workhouse. Another witness, W.H. Bodkin, Secretary
of the Mendicity Society, also spoke in support of the idea of emigra-

tion, saying:
there is a very large number of boys in the metropolis, leading an

idle desultory life, many of them orphans or deserted, or children of
Irish parents, who have no claim upon parishes. Many of these boys
have no guardians or protectors of any kind and it is from them that
the gangs of pickpockets, and those persons who commit offences,
are, I think, to a great extent supplied. A great number sleep in the
market-places and situations of that kind in London; and I have
observed that even though there were receptacles open for the recep-
tion of the houseless, many of those boys preferred herding together
in the way I have described. I think if any judicious scheme could
be devised for sending away those boys, it would be a great public
benefit; and I have several times suggested it to persons of influence.
We cite the evidence from Chambers and Bodkin at some length because
they encapsulated views towards pauper children which were endemic
at that time, belonging to the Malthusian-informed Utilitarian ideology
which, at its worst, represented the poor as parasites who needed to be
eliminated for the good of society.
As a ‘solution’ the notion of emigrating children, in effect perma-
nently excluding them, emerged at just the right time: Canada, Australia
and South Africa were desperately short of both labour and population.
Possible tensions in forced migration were soothed by ‘an imperial ide-
ology which saw these young white Britons as new stock for the colonial
lands’ (Shore, 2000). As one commentator remarked at the time:
the services of an English boy, though ill-educated and rude, were of

some value to colonists, who were dependent on the half reclaimed
savages of the country; and the mere recollection [sic] of what these
boys had known of the usages of civilized life, enabled them to
imitate what their masters had never seen. The demand accordingly
increased. (Brenton, J, 1846: 625)
Whilst government agreed in principle to the idea of emigration for

destitute children, it was left to philanthropic entrepreneurs to initiate
schemes which would rescue and train the children for their new life.
Although the early years of child migration were troubled and beset by
scandals, it was a solution which would resurface at moments of crisis
throughout the century, eventually achieving a degree of respectability

and only concluding in the 1960s.
The Children’s Friend Society 1830–1840: from charity

to trade
The first organisation to emerge was the ‘The Society for the Suppression
of Juvenile Vagrancy’ which was established in 1830 by Captain
E.P. Brenton and subsequently rebranded ‘The Children’s Friend
Society’ in 1834. Neff (2007: 235) points out that the name change was
in response to reluctance on behalf of Canadian operators to accept
children identified as ‘vagrants’ and cites examples from newspapers
which referred to ‘London’s surplus stock of vagabonds’. The Children’s
Friend Society provides a compelling case study for it allows us to access
the experiences of children themselves, and their families, of the
first experiment in reclaiming and emigrating vagrant and destitute
children.
In his memoir The Bible and the Spade (1837) Captain Brenton recounts
how he was moved to rescue children following the account that he read
of the Hibner case:
These unhappy children were poor orphan parish girls of St. Pancras …
and the testimony of the survivors corroborated by indisputable evi-
dence, exposed to the public a scene of tyranny and cruelty, which
I will venture to say, was never exceeded in the worst of our slave
colonies. I was particularly struck with this fresh instance of barbar-
ity, and I immediately made myself acquainted with the process of
binding parish apprentices, the motives of the guardians of the poor
in getting rid of them, as well as those of the generality of tradesmen
who apply for them. (Brenton, 1837: 15)
Brenton’s account is interesting and revealing in the way that he juxta-

poses the horrors of the slave colonies with the experience of parish
apprentices and the calculations of the parish guardians, three strands
that would eventually be woven together in a series of scandals which
would lead to the disintegration of the Children’s Friend Society.
There were innovatory elements to Brenton’s scheme such as the
experimental agricultural establishment for boys at Hackney-wick
which introduced an approach founded in tolerance and which, it was
claimed, avoided the harsh discipline associated with many other insti-
tutions. Brenton described how:
it is nothing when compared to the moral effect produced on the

minds and habits of the children, who coming as it were, wild from
the hot beds of vice and lawless indulgence, are rapidly brought into
the habits of order, regularity and obedience, and this without the
agency of any other means than kindness and firmness. We have no
whips or rods, although we have had many very unruly spirits to deal
with. Each boy freely gives his own personal labour and individual
exertion to the well-being of the general hive. (Brenton, 1837: 33)
Brenton clearly knew how to appeal to the widely held beliefs of his
intended audience of potential and actual subscribers.
At its inception, the Children’s Friend Society proposed that it would
rescue vagrant children from the streets, provide them with training
and some basic education based on ‘The Bible and the Spade’ for the
boys and ‘The Bible and the Broom’ for the girls and send them out to a
more successful life in the colonies. Bradlow pointed out that:
its object was to train both poor and vagrant children to ‘useful
habits’ through a combination of labour and a humble religious and
secular education. The need to assist the parishes in disposing of
unwanted inmates, with the accompanying reduction in the poor
rates, was therefore the essence of the scheme. (Bradlow, 1984: 156)
Thus the society emerged in response to both the crisis on the streets
and the crisis being experienced by parish workhouses at a critical period
around the introduction of the New Poor Law Act (1834). Brenton
seemed motivated from a sense of Christian duty, yet there was a sig-
nificant entrepreneurial element too which, as Bradlow suggests, was
a common feature of such endeavours. ‘In the first place it recognised
that the rich were morally obliged to improve the quality of life of the
very poor. At the same time – because the philanthropist also wore the
entrepreneur’s hat – the expectation of profit accruing as a result of such
charity was regarded not only as right and natural, but as desirable’
(Bradlow, 1984: 155).
Whilst Canada had initially been the intended destination for the
children, it soon became clear that the Cape of Good Hope would
provide a much higher return on the ‘investment’. Neff (2007: 244)
has suggested that whilst the Children’s Friend Society started sending
children to Canada in the 1830s, by 1837 the preferred destination was
the Cape of Good Hope where subscribers had contributed 2153 pounds
and ten shillings compared to the 17 pounds and 17 shillings from
Canada and 132 pounds from Swan River in Australia.
The reality was that the young people, trained in basic agricultural and
domestic skills, would become a valuable resource, especially in South
Africa which was on the verge of losing its own supply of unwaged slave
labour with the implementation of the Emancipation Act (1834). Bradlow
points out that ‘the outlay on the premiums for seven apprentices was
£105 compared with £525, the cost of seven slaves’ (Bradlow, 1984: 159).
Although committees had been established in the Cape to oversee the
welfare of the migrated children, very little was offered in terms of care
and protection. Indeed, any disputes brought to the authorities were
settled in favour of the employer. Bradlow has argued that ‘far from the
scheme’s sole object being to “improve the condition of the children”,
it is quite apparent that it was intended primarily to rid England of
unwanted population while simultaneously providing Cape employers
with a satisfactory substitute for the servile, unskilled labour supply
which they were shortly to lose as the four years of slave apprenticeship
drew to a close’ (Bradlow, 1984: 165).
Brenton’s scheme was both successful and financially sophisticated –
by the late 1830s there were dozens of wealthy subscribers supporting
the Society; arrangements with several London parishes brought in a
fee of £15 per child to cover the cost of travel, clothing and housing as
well as the ‘fee’ from the employer in the Cape which was estimated at
around 10 guineas per head. By the late 1830s several hundred children
had been sent to the Cape and arrangements whereby overburdened
Parish workhouses were able to offload their ‘surplus’ (and costly) chil-
dren to the Children’s Friend Society seemed to be working well.
However by 1838 dissatisfaction with the attitudes of the Whig gov-
ernment towards the poor was growing, particularly among the London
parishes which had strongly resisted the New Poor Law Act and which
had opted to retain local control under Hobhouses’ Vestries Act of
1831. There was powerful and vocal dissent towards any arrangement
which appeared to be operating according to Whig principles regard-
ing paupers. Thus, when a resolution had been passed by the Vestry of
St. Pancras in September 1837 to send pauper children to the Cape
under the auspices of the Children’s Friend Society, it set in motion a
train of events which would result in a Parliamentary Commission, the
death of Captain Brenton and the end of the Children’s Friend Society.
The Hackney kidnappers: parish, parents and children
1838 had been a year of much significance in the development of radi-

calism throughout much of the country. It is perhaps useful to view the
strength of feeling against the Children’s Friend Society which devel-
oped towards the end of 1838 with this in mind.
There is a way in which the events which unfold can be seen to operate
on a number of different levels: as a forum to express anti-government
and anti-poor law feelings; as a way of asserting local authority control,
for the powerful Parishes of the Metropolis operated in such a way. In
addition, the press used the events as a way of illustrating class and
political differences which operated within the different districts of the
Metropolis. The parish of St. James was described in one contemporary
account (The Champion and Weekly Herald, 16th December 1838) as ‘rich,
highminded, refined and genteel – the focus of fashion and elegance
and the metropolitan seat of royalty’, whilst, in contrast, the parish of
St. Pancras is a ‘parish of merchants, lawyers, traders, idlers, a parish of
property’. It is worth noting that St. James had already discharged 300
children into the care of the Children’s Friend Society who had sent
them to the Cape of Good Hope. Although the unfolding ‘scandal’ was
represented as ‘concern for poor children’, evidence would suggest that
the concern only went as far as asserting ownership of the decision-
making process within the parish; therefore, interventions to protect the
children resided primarily in a rejection of the Children’s Friend Society
scheme rather than in any real attempt to either challenge or change
their conditions as paupers in the parish workhouse.
On 4th December 1838 a meeting of ratepayers and parishioners
of St. Pancras had been called to discuss a resolution passed on 18th
September by the Board of Directors of the poor where it had been
agreed ‘to place the pauper children in the workhouse at the disposal
of the Children’s Friend Society so that they might be conveyed to the
British Colonies’ (The Times, 5th December 1838). Such a move was in
keeping with other parishes in London, but it was clear that once the
decision became common knowledge throughout the parish, it gener-
ated considerable concern and anger. The object of the meeting was
to propose a resolution challenging the Director’s decision which one
speaker suggested would give the Children’s Friend Society ‘the power
of sending out these children, whose only crime is poverty, to the Cape
of Good Hope’ (The Times, 5th December 1838). In other words, this
would be transportation in all but name. The Times report recorded
the meeting in full detail and noted the strength of feeling which was
displayed by numerous speakers who all considered that the Board of

Directors had failed in their duty to act as ‘guardians of the poor’.
Mr. Vince, one of the rate payers proposed:
that it was the opinion of the meeting that the sending out of poor
children of the parish workhouse as emigrants to the British colonies
was nothing better than transportation; that such children would
be deprived of that protection which was now awarded them by the
directors of the poor; and that in sending them to so great a distance
from their mother country they might be subject to the greatest
hardships, privation, and even cruelty, without having any one to
afford them protection or redress; that this meeting would cheerfully
contribute towards their support in the workhouse until opportuni-
ties presented themselves here to place them out in such occupations
as would enable them to obtain their own support and make them
useful members of society (The Times, 5th December 1838)
The resolution is extraordinary in that it identifies a number of key issues

including concerns about the treatment that the children might encoun-
ter, the lack of protection available and a desire to take responsibility for
their welfare within the parish. At the time that the residents and rate
payers of St. Pancras met to discuss their concerns, there had been no
criticism of the scheme undertaken by the Children’s Friend Society, no
negative publicity, and many of the other London parishes had taken
advantage of the opportunity to discharge their responsibility for the
pauper children in their workhouses. However, the report of the meeting
does suggest a high level of political awareness and a rejection of what
were seen as ‘Whig values’, for example, in seconding the resolution,
Mr. Hopkins commented that the Board of Directors had ‘acted upon
the principles of the political economists, and thought that emigration
was the best relief for a surplus population’ (The Times, 5th December
1838). Hopkins’ reference to ‘political economists’ and ‘surplus popula-
tion’ reflect the extent to which the views of those such as Malthus were
familiar to those wielding power in the emergent public sphere.
It was left to Mr. Farrer, a rate payer, to respond to the Board of Directors
by pointing out that they had been guilty of gross neglect. ‘There is
unanimous feeling throughout the parish against the resolution –
the plan proceeded on the principles of the Whig Government, who
when they wished to get rid of the people, first began by getting them
into poverty, then starved them, and put a climax to their work by
transporting them for life’ (The Times, 7th December 1838).
Mr. Farrer then stated that he wished to move an amendment to the

effect that:
the board could not lend its co-operation, or give its sanction, to a
measure which had for its object the sending into the colonies por-
tions of the workhouse children, as such a measure was cruel, unjust,
arbitrary and illegal. (The Times, 7th December 1838)
The resolution and its amendment were carried by a majority of one.

The next day The Times published a letter from Brenton who defended
the Children’s Friend Society pointing out that nearly 2000 children
had been rescued and sent to a better life in the colonies, children who
‘would in all human probability, have been transported as felons, at ten
times the expense’ (The Times, 8th December 1838).
But, whilst the Children’s Friend Society claimed to rescue orphans,
abandoned and vagrant children with the assumption being that such
children did not have any parent, the reality was somewhat different.
Hadley (1990: 424) has commented that ‘these children were often
labelled as orphans even when their parents remained alive’ and it was
this seemingly casual disregard for the truth that would contribute to
revelations which would destroy the Children’s Friend Society.
Brenton’s comments regarding the greater expense of alternatives to
his sham reveals the priority granted to calculations of costs evidenced
in a statement by Mr. Gregg, overseer of the poor at St. Luke’s, and
a known supporter of the New Poor Law, who attempted to justify
his proposal to discharge the female children of the parish to the
Children’s Friend Society on the grounds that ‘the female children
of the parish cost them £2000 a year; at an expense of £10 each they
could make comfortable provision for these unhappy and unprovided
orphans’ (The Times, 11th December 1838).
Besides, Gregg loads the financial dice by labelling the female chil-
dren of the workhouse as likely to become prostitutes who would
return time and again to the workhouse requiring additional care and
becoming financial burdens. Such views were not uncommon amongst
supporters of the New Poor Law Act who generally expressed scant con-
cern regarding how conditions for the poor could be improved, or how
pauper children in the care of Parishes could be protected.
However, the refusal of both parishes to get involved in the Children’s
Friend Society scheme exposed the potentially illegal practices of work-
houses which had been disposing of their ‘surplus’ children in agreeing
to ‘sell’ them to the society. One of the effects of the New Poor Law
Act was for pauper parents who, whilst not eligible themselves for par-
ish relief, placed their children in the workhouse when they could no
longer afford to support them. The widespread publicity had generated
concern from parents and resulted in approaches to magistrates for help
in discovering what had happened to their ‘lost’ sons and daughters.
On 20th January 1839 a report headlined ‘Kidnapping Society’ pro-
vided an account of a widowed mother, Mary Croker, who appealed to
magistrates at Bow Street for help with finding her 12-year-old daughter
Louisa who had been placed in the St Martin’s in the Field workhouse
when she was no longer able to support her. She said that she had
become concerned after reading that pauper children were being sent to
the Cape of Good Hope and she had gone to visit her child to discover
that the girl had recently been sent to the Cape of Good Hope under the
auspices of the Children’s Friend Society. However, Mary Croker stated
that no effort had been made to get her consent and that the child had
been sent illegally; furthermore she would never consent to her only
child being sent away. She had approached the Society for help but
‘they made a jeer of it and laughed at me’ (The Champion and Weekly
Herald, 27th January 1839). As the case unfolded it resulted in the
Children’s Friend Society being renamed, in the press, ‘The Kidnapping
Society’ and its activities opened up to public scrutiny. It was one thing
to scoop up children from the streets and ‘reclaim’ them which had
been seen as performing a valuable service. However, the practice of
receiving children from the workhouse was considered reprehensible
given the strength of feeling which had developed regarding the effects
of the New Poor Law.
The following week an inquiry was instituted by Bow Street magis-
trates who asked both the Parish and the Children’s Friend Society to
give an account of why Louisa Croker had been sent to the Cape with-
out legal consent. The Parish attempted to defend the actions that had
been taken by claiming that Mary Croker was an unfit mother on the
basis that she had worked in a brothel, albeit as a servant. Interestingly,
Mr. Minshull one of the magistrates who had become involved in the
case reprimanded the Parish, arguing that ‘suppose it was a brothel that
has nothing to do with the question. The poor woman has evidently
been struggling to maintain herself, and her necessities might have
driven her to accept the first place that offered’ (The Operative, 27th
January 1839). The case, he said, was to discover whether ‘diligent and
proper means had been used to obtain the consent of the mother to
the removal of her daughter to the Cape of Good Hope’ (The Operative,
27th January 1839).
Neither the Parish nor the Society was able to provide satisfactory
responses, though Mr. Le Breton, representing the Parish, attempted
to defend the actions on the basis that ‘the woman herself had been
seven times in the workhouse, and her daughter’s maintenance had
cost the parish no less a sum than £50. Was it to be endured that the
rate payers were continually to be burdened with her?’ (The Operative,
27th January 1839).
However, whilst the magistrates sympathised with the mother, they
were unable to force the society to return the child and when Mr. Sparke
offered Mary Croker the chance to go to the Cape to join her daughter
there, she refused, ‘No, sir, I will not go from this country, where I was
bred and born. I want my child back again, and I don’t want to be trans-
ported’ (The Operative, 27th January 1839). The magistrates concluded
by stating that they were at a loss to know how to proceed other than
encouraging the mother to appeal to the Secretary of State. Louisa
Croker was finally returned by St. Martin’s on 27th December 1839
(The Era, 29th December 1839).
The case had attracted a lot of attention; a report in the radical press
made plain the opposition to Malthusian social policy:
This new species of merchandise which our ‘free trade’ and ‘Malthusian
philosophers’ no doubt have concocted in their great wisdom, as an
ingenious contrivance for getting rid of what they term ‘the surplus
populations’, as they find that all their efforts to check its production
have proved to be miserable failures (The London Dispatch and People’s
Political and Social Reformer, 3rd February, 1839)
The evidence of oppositional voices from radical movements is impor-

tant for the case we are making about the heterogeneity of forces at
work in the emergence of systematic governmental policy, including
the existence of discourses critical of liberal political economy.
At this stage however, criticisms were directed at the parishes which
had become involved in this new form of trade and the Children’s
Friend Society were deemed to have been innocent victims:
Nothing, in our opinion, could be more praiseworthy than the princi-

ple upon which the Children’s Friend Society, as directed by Captain
Brenton, began its labours. It commenced by taking the utterly desti-
tute children out of the streets, maintaining and clothing them for a
time, and finally sending them to the Cape of Good Hope (chiefly),
to be placed in various useful occupations amongst the settlers.
It has been discovered, however, that certain parishes, we suppose

it would not be incorrect to say ‘poor law’ authorities, have taken
upon them to drive an export trade in this branch of industry: but
not at all conducted upon the same benevolent principles as the
Children’s Friend Society. (The London Dispatch and People’s Political
and Social Reformer, 3rd February 1839)
This report, along with many others in a similar vein, reinforced the
view that the Children’s Friend Society was a model organisation so
long as it confined its activities to the children of the streets, that is,
those constructed as threats to society. Clearly, criticisms of Malthusian
philosophies did not extend to questioning how so many children had
become destitute and in need of charitable intervention. However, by
becoming party to those workhouses who saw the scheme as a sound
economic transaction, the Society became tainted. Thus, the children
of the workhouse were constructed as innocent victims caught up in a
scheme designed to exclude those represented as threats.
The children speak
On 2nd April 1839 a 12-year-old boy, Edward Trubshaw, appeared

before Marylebone magistrates charged with stealing a purse. The con-
stable who had apprehended him was asked whether he knew anything
about the boy and replied that he only knew he had recently returned
from abroad. Asked by the magistrate if that was so, the boy replied, ‘It
is, Sir; I have been to the Cape of Good Hope’ (The Champion and Weekly
Herald, 7th April 1839).
During the course of questioning Edward Trubshaw revealed that he
had escaped from the Cape and worked his way back to England. He left
because ‘I was half starved, and knocked about shameful. But they served
me worse than that: they sold me and a good many more’ (The Champion
and Weekly Herald, 7th April 1839).
The Magistrate, shocked by this statement, suggested that surely he
meant that he had been apprenticed. The boy replied:
No, Sir; not apprenticed: they sold me. To a Dutchman, who came
and looked at a lot of us; he bought me for 10 guineas. (The Champion
and Weekly Herald, 7th April 1839)
The magistrate, Mr. Rawlinson, was sufficiently shocked by the boy’s

account of his experiences at the Cape that he sent for Captain Brenton.
He also requested ‘to take the depositions of any person who could give
him information concerning the offence that the boy charged upon
“The Society of Friends of Children”. Here was a new slave trade com-
ing before his eyes!’ (The Champion and Weekly Herald, 7th April 1839).
Meanwhile, the Children’s Friend Society responded to the claims
made by Trubshaw by attempting to discredit his account. Mr. Sparke
the secretary in a letter to The Times stated ‘that the boy may have
been chastised by his master is highly probable, as it has since been
ascertained that he was a troublesome and unmanageable lad’ (The Times,
5th April 1839).
It seems extraordinary that the Society had been able to establish
these details within two or three days of Trubshaw’s statement. Captain
Brenton had also written a letter to The Times which appeared on the
same day where he claimed that ‘he had seen Trubshaw’s mother and
that she assured him that her son was a very wicked boy and would
certainly be transported’ (The Times, 5th April 1839).
However, when Trubshaw and his mother appeared before the
Magistrate, Mr. Rawlinson, on 5th April she claimed that she had not
seen Captain Brenton. Rawlinson then asked her ‘now what’s your own
opinion respecting this extraordinary affair. Do you think there is any
truth in what the boy has stated? … The boy was brought here for thiev-
ing, you know, and those who will do such things will perhaps also tell
lies’ to which she replied ‘I know that’s all very true, sir, but I’ve very
good reason for giving credit to him, for I know another boy who was
sent out to the Cape, and he was sold for ten guineas also’ (The Times,
8th April 1839).
Although there may have been some reluctance to take the word of a
thief, more evidence came out when Mrs. Bay, ‘a respectable laundress’
who appeared before Rawlinson on 8th April, asked for help in finding
her son who had been sent to the Cape. She claimed that he had been
‘very ill used’ and produced a letter that he had written to her in April
1838. The letter was read out in the court and printed in newspaper
accounts. It included a description of the conditions he was experiencing:
With the situation I have received I am not very well satisfied, as I am

learning no trade but am only as a servant; at which I was very much
disappointed, and have not the best of masters. I am neither found in
caps or shoes; from which I feel great inconvenience. And this is not
all I have to encounter; for on the other hand I am placed amongst
a parcel of slaves, and not thought much better of by the master and
by the slaves themselves, as there is no difference made between us. …
The slaves will be made free on the 1st December, when I don’t believe
it will be for the better. (The Chartist, 14th April 1839)
William Bay implored his mother not to disclose the contents of his
letter to anyone as he feared that this would only make his situation
worse. He revealed that he planned to try to escape and work his pas-
sage home. Nevertheless, Rawlinson asked whether she had shown the
letter to Captain Brenton. Mrs. Bay said that she had and that he had
‘treated them as absurdities’. Asked what crime her son had committed
to induce her to send him to the Cape, she replied, ‘None whatever. He
was a very good lad, and I was induced to part with him by being per-
suaded that it would be for his welfare’ (The Chartist, 14th April 1839).
Rawlinson then revealed that he had forwarded details of the Trubshaw
case to the Secretary of State and suggested that he would forward
details of Mrs. Bay’s son too.
Meanwhile Captain Brenton had died suddenly on 6th April at
home. An inquest recorded that he had died of natural causes with the
suggestion that stress from recent criticisms of the society had been a
contributory factor.
The following weeks saw more parents coming to seek assistance from
Mr. Rawlinson. Many brought letters from their children describing the
harsh conditions and brutal treatment that they had encountered in
the Cape. The Chartist, in an editorial, condemned what had happened:
Can such things exist in a country like England without calling down
the severest reprehension from the public, and consign punishment
upon the heartless concoctors of the iniquitous money making
scheme? These poor children are at this moment much worse off
than if they had been convicted felons. It is in the interest of their
masters to keep them in slavery and to work them as hard as possible,
so that they have no hope of any alleviation of their punishment,
or at least of any shortening of their time of bondage, whatever may
be their good conduct. The master has paid his money and must
have its worth out of them. It is the duty of the Secretary of State to
rip up this matter without delay and to cause every one of the kid-
napped children to be restored, if not to England, at least to liberty.
(The Chartist, 28th April 1839)
Although The Chartist and other radical newspapers condemned what

had happened, the Children’s Friend Society continued to operate and
send children to the Cape. Whilst parents continued to appear before
the magistrate appealing for help, the Children’s Friend Society refused
to acknowledge that the claims made had any substance. All the con-
temporary accounts suggest that the Society was driven by the belief
that the children were much better off in the Cape and that those who
complained were not representative. By the time the Society called a
public meeting to ‘hear the allegations’, one parent had committed sui-
cide, with the inquest recording that she had ‘been driven to despair’ by
the failure of the society to respond to enquiries she had made to them
regarding her son (The Times, 7th May 1839). Indeed it would seem that
the meeting was intended primarily to defend the society and call for
further subscriptions. The Times reported that ‘testimony to the cruelty
with which it is alleged the poor exiles are treated was put down with
hisses, and opprobrious language directed against those who offered it;
and the assembly broke up, just as it had assembled, with a vote of self-
confidence in itself and its officers, and a fresh call for subscriptions’
(The Times, 16th May 1839).
And whilst The Chartist may have urged the Secretary of State to inter-
vene and restore children to their parents, legally there was little that
could be done given that the children had been contractually bound to
their masters. Eventually, it was the commissioners in the Cape who,
whilst prepared to undertake an inquiry, nevertheless felt sufficiently
aggrieved by the unfolding scandal to inform the Children’s Friend
Society that no further children should be sent. The Society meanwhile
continued to claim that criticisms were nothing but ‘absurd exag-
gerations of prejudices individuals or the contemptible abuse of a party
press’ (Report from Governor of Cape of Good Hope, 1840: 35).
Legitimating the ‘traffic’ in children
The call for an inquiry into the treatment of children sent by the
Children’s Friend Society had provoked strong feelings in the Cape and
the Governor, Sir. G Napier, wrote to Lord John Russell that:
their proceedings, as well as those of some of the metropolitan mag-

istrates, relative to the children sent to this colony, have created the
strongest disinclination on the part of local commissioners to receive
and take charge of any more of the society’s children … (HCPP:
Report from Governor of Cape of Good Hope relative to Condition
and Treatment of Children sent out by Children’s Friend Society,
1840b: 34)
The Report which had been commissioned by the Secretary of State for
the Colonies was published in May 1840 shortly before the Children’s
Friend Society ceased operating. Although the Governor rejected the
allegations that the commission set out to investigate, it is clear from

the evidence gathered by the commissioners and from what the com-
missioners said in their summaries that all of the allegations were
substantiated. The children, some as young as nine years old, did expe-
rience isolation and hardship. Many were ill-treated by their masters
and by former slaves who remained in employment; they were denied
access to education, they were losing their native language, as most of
the masters were Dutch, and as most of the children were employed on
farms herding cattle, they were not receiving training in any kind of
useful skills. Significantly it was also clear that most of the children had
parents or other relatives living back in England. One young girl, Sarah
Ballot, described how she was in St. Martin’s workhouse and had been
‘sent out here without my sister’s knowledge or my own consent; I wish
to go back to my sister’ (Report, 1840: 14). Nevertheless, the evidence
was at all times undermined with reference to the perceived ‘criminal’
past of the children; discipline, however harsh, was seen as deserved
and necessary. Children were described as ‘looks stupid’, ‘very idle and
disobedient’, ‘tells lies’, ‘dirty’ and so on. One employer who had 13
of the children working on his farm described most of them as ‘very
obstinate and disobedient’ (Report, 1840: 15).
Yet, the overall tone throughout the Report was to assert that the chil-
dren sent out by the Children’s Friend Society had been of questionable
character and therefore any complaints that may have been made were
discredited. Indeed, the commissioners went out of their way to point
out the ways in which the children had been ‘reformed’ through their
employment and treatment in the Cape whilst minimising the effects
of any reported ill treatment.
The report is significant primarily because of the insight provided
into the lives of the children sent to the Cape for a ‘better future’. Four
commissioners had been despatched to interview the children and their
masters and all seemed to support the allegations that had been made in
London. It became clear that both the boys and the girls were employed
in tasks that were previously undertaken by slaves. Most of the farms
were in isolated locations which meant that the young people were cut
off from any form of basic education which was supposed to be avail-
able to them and were unable to attend church regularly; their living
arrangements were basic and discipline harsh. Furthermore, reading
the accounts given by the children, it is clear that the majority of them
were former workhouse children who had parents or relatives at home.
This contradicts Brenton’s original aim which was to rescue vagrant or
criminal children from the streets.
For a few months, the Children’s Friend Society ‘scandal’ had oper-
ated at the level of a ‘moral panic’. However, by the time the report
was published the ‘moral panic’ about the activities of the Children’s
Friend Society had evaporated. Concern about the welfare of the chil-
dren had been fleeting and no kind of concrete intervention had been
implemented. There were no efforts made to ‘rescue’ the children and
restore them to their families. Instead, once the fuss had died down,
they were left to serve out their terms, abandoned once again. In fact it
could be argued that the ‘crisis’ was less about the conditions and treat-
ment of children and rather more about the activities of the Children’s
Friend Society being used as a stick to beat an unpopular government.
As an example of the way that the Poor Law operated it had served
its purpose in drawing attention to what were seen as corrupt parish
officials prepared to do anything in order to balance the books and
protect ratepayers. Thus, once the crisis had subsided concern had
waned. This is illustrated by the general lack of interest shown when
Edward Trubshaw, the young boy who had first drawn attention to the
activities of the Children’s Friend Society, appeared at The Old Bailey on
20th June 1839. The only report appeared in The Charter:
On Thursday Edward Shaw, alias Trubshaw was arraigned for stealing a

basket containing some bread and cake, in the parish of Marylebone.
He pleaded guilty, and Mr. Serjeant Arabin sentenced him to 15 years
transportation. (It will be remembered that this is the boy that was
sent out by the Children’s Friend Society to the Cape of Good Hope
and who, since his return home, has given that society so bad a char-
acter, at the Marylebone Police Office, and elsewhere). Mr. Serjeant
Arabin remarked that this showed him to be a very wicked boy, as
did also the cunning way in which he had committed the robbery of
which he had been found guilty. (The Charter, 23rd June 1839)
Thus, the prediction that had been made by Brenton in his letter to
The Times on 5th April is fulfilled. Trubshaw was represented as having
brought about the downfall of the Children’s Friend Society, and there
was no sign of the sympathy he had received just weeks earlier when
he had first appeared in front of the magistrate in Marylebone. Indeed,
Judge Arabin seemed to be imposing a particularly harsh sentence for a
relatively minor offence and it is difficult not to see this as retribution.
On the same day and before the same judge, other young boys who had
committed similar crimes for goods with a much higher value received
sentences of six months of imprisonment.
Conclusion: legalising exclusion and the

governmentalisation of pauperism
The case study of the Children’s Friend Society serves to highlight

how discursive ideas such as Malthusian theory linking population to
resources and poverty, and the discourse of liberal political economy
about the wealth of nations and its management and its location of the
poor within the scheme of things, become translated into practices of
disciplining and regulation. The analysis of the play of forces at work,
which were governmental, radical, reformist, philanthropic in the
period we are looking at, shows too the process whereby the apparatuses
designed to achieve the objectives of biopolitics are subject to constant
adjustments to address failures or inadequacies, and also resistance.
In the Children’s Friend Society case the most significant mistake that
was made and the one which ultimately brought about the downfall
of the society was in failing to ensure that the transactions for sending
children to the Cape of Good Hope were legal; it was not any moral or
ethical concern for the welfare of the children and young people. Louisa
Croker, the only child who was returned from the Cape, was brought
home because her mother had instituted a challenge based on whether
there had been legal consent to her daughter’s removal to the Cape.
The legal anomalies were eventually addressed through an amendment
to the Poor Law in 1850 when it was established that the child needed
to give consent to justices of the peace, and the Poor Law Board was
required to approve the application in respect of each child to be emi-
grated. The introduction of a clear legal framework enabled workhouses
to emigrate children to the colonies. Thus, the emigration of pauper
children became normalised through a legal framework and agreement
that emigration to the colonies was for the benefit of children rather
than a means of discharging financial responsibility. Indeed, when Lord
Shaftesbury presented a bill in the House of Lords in 1852, ‘The Pauper
Children Emigration Bill’, he stated that the purpose was to ‘enable
parishes and boards of guardians to raise funds … for the purpose of
juvenile emigration’. Shaftesbury claimed that there were 52,000 chil-
dren in the union houses of England and Wales and in support of the
bill he presented testimony from a churchwarden where it was claimed
that ‘the cost of maintaining and educating such children is at the rate
of three shillings and sixpence a week each. We cannot put them out
to service till they are 14. They are soon returned upon our hands; the
girls, in many cases, pregnant. They often marry at an early age, and
beget a race of paupers’ (Hansard, 26th June 1852).
All the familiar themes are reiterated in this statement, the financial
burden, the fecklessness, particularly of the girls and the belief in inher-
ited characteristics that led to pauperism. Hadley (1990: 435) has drawn
attention to the contradictions inherent in Shaftesbury, supporting the
emigration of pauper children whilst at the same time ‘campaigning to
shorten the working day and improve the physical conditions of labour-
ing children in English factories’. However, we would suggest that the
contradiction could be managed in terms of the different positioning
of those children who could be recruited as useful cheap labour against
those who were perceived to be potentially criminal. The result, as we’ve
shown, was that emigration became embedded as a way of excluding
pauper children from their country, their families and their future.
The 1830s–1840s was a period in which poverty became transformed
through the application of new measures of social control. Children and
young people became the target for interventions aimed at eradicating
the visible presence of pauperism by removing them from the street, the
workhouse and the nation. Other options, such as widening access to
education, had been repeatedly rejected because the explanation in terms
of inheritance dominated: if these children were destined from birth to
become criminal, then education, as many claimed, would make the situ-
ation worse rather than better. The idea that the ‘problem’ was within the
individual child, and his or her family, rather than a product of external
factors has remained very powerful and continues to shape both policy
and provision, especially with the turn to the neoliberal worldview.
Such a view was perfectly consistent with classical political economy,
since it absolved the State of responsibility, except in establishing
mechanisms for constituting populations of those who could be ‘saved’
for useful labour and those who could not. Means for dealing with the
latter had to be found. Both aims involved gaining better knowledge
of such children so that appropriate institutions and disciplinary
mechanisms could be set up. This phase in the genealogy of exclu-
sion saw the emergence of a key role for ‘experts’ in the middle of the
19th century and an increasing emphasis on ‘ethnographic’ and other
reliable evidence. This period also saw the emergence and consolida-
tion of the social sciences as the reliable discourses to inform policy,
as we explained in the Introduction. Thus, power/knowledge basis for
normalisation and disciplining begins to be more clearly in evidence
in authorising new systems of classification of the population and new
mechanisms and institutions for their regulation and administration.
4
Security, Population and the
New Management of the Poor
Beggars live well; have hot beefsteaks and beer for breakfast,
fare well at night and are never poor. (Miles, 1839: 103)
The 1830s–1850s saw intense scrutiny into the lives of poor children
through a plethora of commissions and committees which were estab-
lished to investigate working practices and criminal activity. The impor-
tance of these commissions, as well as the role of expert witnesses in
influencing public opinion and in shaping social policy, and the key
role of commissioners and inspectors in ensuring the implementation
of these policies cannot be emphasised enough. These developments
are tied to the broader genealogy of the emergence of a governmental-
ity as part of the modern nation-state and the disciplinary apparatuses
that were gradually put into place as mechanisms of normalisation
(Foucault, 1979b, 2007). This was a period in which the construction of
poor children as ‘other’ becomes firmly embedded within an emerging
discourse which identified these children as in need of control, con-
tainment or protection. The rapid growth of cities during this period of
industrialisation produced enormous problems related to poverty. The
influx of large numbers of dispossessed people, both young and old,
arriving in search of employment and housing and in need of support
from the parishes contributed to a huge strain on resources. It is against
this background that a shift emerges which finds expression through
the reframing of the Poor Laws (1834) and the implementation of much
harsher punishment regimes. It is important to note, again as part of
the context, the fact that the debates leading up to the enactment of
these laws drew on the writings of Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith and
Jeremy Bentham, so that the concerns of political economy and utili-
tarianism were central in underpinning the beliefs and values which
70
Security, Population and the New Management 71
informed policy. Venn (2006) has pointed out in relation to the new
poor law that:
the discussion leading up to it was influenced directly by the dis-

courses of Adam Smith, which stressed individual responsibility,
Jeremy Bentham, regarding technologies of discipline and surveillance
and Malthus regarding the relation of population size and poverty; all
three were of course founders of modern political economy and were
concerned with a world economy and with generalising their theories
at the level of universal principles. (Venn, 2006: 7)
The emerging correlation of the discourse of political economy with

biopolitics, as indicated in the Introduction, contributed to a preoccu-
pation with statistics (Foucault, 2007; Hacking, 1981) and the constitu-
tion of populations as part of the calculation of cost-effective means
for managing the poor. It is easy to see how measures were adopted
which aimed to punish poverty rather than recognise and eradicate it,
given the widespread acceptance of Anglican religious beliefs such as
predestination and original sin (rejected by Unitarians) and the sway
that economic interests had over policy. It was against this background
that children and young people come to be seen as largely responsible
for increased crime. In the wake of this development, a new discourse
begins to emerge which becomes so strongly embedded that it can
be seen to underlie attitudes and beliefs which still inform modern
discourse around children and young people (see, for example, Shore,
1999: 148); at its core is the conviction that there existed a population
of poor young people who were, for whatever reason, seen as ‘other’:
criminal, maladjusted, sub-normal, destined to be a burden. The com-
mon element is that they were all subject to forms of exclusion.
Blaming the poor
The 1832 Royal Commission on the Poor Law and subsequent policy
such as the 1834 Poor Law Act were one strand of a complex reworking
of the place of the poor in the newly emerging industrialised nation.
A new poverty discourse was emerging which placed responsibility for
their plight with the poor themselves, displacing the idea of collective
moral responsibility for the poor. Up until this point responsibility for
managing the poor was located within local communities; however,
with increased industrialisation, urbanisation, migration from rural
areas and Ireland, and a rapidly growing population, a debate had
begun towards the end of the 18th century which posed new ques-
tions regarding the efficacy of the existing poor laws. Whilst it had
been possible to tolerate the demands of the poor at a local level in an
agriculturally based nation, the transformations in the economy and
the profile of the population drove a need to devise new strategies and
new state-wide mechanisms to fit the rapidly changing circumstances
which saw the landscape both literally and metaphorically change. As
Malthus argued, ‘the poor laws of England were undoubtedly instituted
for the most benevolent purpose, but it is evident that they have failed
in attaining it’ (An Essay on the Principle of Population. Sixth edition:
1826, III.VI: 10).
What is important is the way that all areas of life inhabited by the
poor were opened up to intense scrutiny, so that new measures could
be put in place to discourage what were seen to be the wanton habits of
the poor in terms of breeding, drinking and financial recklessness and
criminality, the combined effects of which were seen to pose threats to
the long-term stability of the nation. The new provisions were directed
at instilling new habits such as thrift and family stability. The condition
of poverty begins to be seen and understood in a much more pragmatic
way. What starts to appear is a sense that poverty is the effect of choices
made by the individual within the context of existing poor laws. In
examining the effects of poverty divorced from the economic and struc-
tural conditions, the discourse becomes anchored to a set of views which
sees punitive responses as capable of enforcing change. Malthus is quite
specific about this:
The labouring poor, to use a vulgar expression, seem always to live

from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole atten-
tion; and they seldom think of the future. Even when they have an
opportunity of saving, they seldom exercise it; but all that they earn
beyond their present necessities goes, generally speaking, to the ale-
house. The poor laws may therefore be said to diminish both the
power and the will to save, among the common people; and thus to
weaken one of the strongest incentives to sobriety and industry, and
consequently to happiness. (Malthus, 1826, III.VI: 10)
Malthus’ judgement about the conduct of the poor, the irresponsible

choices they make coupled to their dependency on state support is
interesting both for shifting attitudes towards a punishment and deter-
rent regime, and for the eye-opening similarity with today’s discourse
of the Right about poverty and the welfare state.
This shift is key in understanding how the new strategies for catego-
rising and managing the poor were constructed, bearing in mind too
that it is located within a period when anxieties regarding the poor
were particularly acute, not only for economic reasons in the context
of economic crisis in the 1820s but for political reasons too, given the
rise of syndicalism and the labouring classes’ demands for social justice.
These anxieties were translated into the discourse of security which was
a central element of classical political economy and biopolitical govern-
mentality as Foucault (2007) has demonstrated.
In terms of those identified earlier as ‘victims’ or ‘threats’, it must be
pointed out that although the approaches may have been different, that
is, on the one hand, an apparent protectionism for child workers and,
on the other hand, increased punishment for child offenders, ultimately
the effects were very similar since both groups were effectively excluded.
This is because of the extent to which children of the most impover-
ished, those who were seen to be in a state of dependent poverty, were
viewed as burdens, and disposable, for as Malthus had observed, ‘the
infant is, comparatively speaking, of little value to society, as others will
immediately supply its place’ (Malthus, 1826, IV.VIII: 9).
For Malthus, such children should never have been conceived, given
that their parents were frequently unmarried, driven by ‘animal pas-
sion’ and no sense of responsibility towards their offspring. His argu-
ments have an uncanny familiar ring:
Obligation on every man to support his children, whether legitimate

or illegitimate, is so clear and strong, that it would be just to arm
society with any power to enforce it, which would be likely to answer
the purpose. But I am inclined to believe that no exercise of the civil
power, however rigorous, would be half so effectual as a knowledge
generally circulated, that children were in future to depend solely for
support upon their parents, and would be left only to casual charity
if they were deserted … In the moral government of the world, it
seems evidently necessary, that the sins of the fathers should be vis-
ited upon the children; and if in our overweening vanity we imagine,
that we can govern a private society better by endeavouring system-
atically to counteract this law, I am inclined to believe, that we shall
find ourselves very greatly mistaken. (Malthus, 1826, IV.VIII: 14–16)
It could be argued that the sins were indeed already being visited upon
their children even within the context of the existing poor laws, and,
as our genealogy aims to show, the exclusions they entailed then have
been repeated in other more contemporary forms of exclusion, includ-

ing in schools today. As we explained in our Introduction, in the con-
text of incipient new knowledge about the lives of the poor and social
process generally, the role of particular individuals operating within
the emerging public culture of the time was particularly determinant in
accounting for the invention of new institutional and legal mechanisms
for dealing with the diseases of poverty.
The aspects that we have highlighted as particularly relevant are those
of the gathering of new knowledge through ethnographic work, surveys
and enquiries, the functioning of networks in the policy-making pro-
cess, the working out of appropriate interventions guided by particular
ideologies, and the role of particular dedicated or driven individuals at
a time when spaces were emerging in public culture for individuals to
exert significant influence. We have chosen William Augustus Miles
(1796–1851) as one of these agents of change because he appears to
have been an exemplary Malthusian advocate.
Malthusian realism, Miles and moral entrepreneurship
The 1830s was a period in which a range of employment possibilities

were opening up for the growing middle classes, newly enfranchised
by the 1832 Reform Act (Wakefield, 1834). Whilst the professions were
increasingly overcrowded, new opportunities were emerging at the level
of government as it entered a period of increased intervention into a
wide range of areas. Indeed, this particular period sees a marked expan-
sion of Government enquiry into social problems which is reflected in
the proliferation of commissions set up to examine a range of issues
from sanitation to education. Philips (2000) has pointed out that:
many of these people eagerly took up the new opportunities opened

up in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s by new forms of government
employment, as Poor Law Assistant Commissioners; inspectors
of factories, prisons, schools and mines; administrators of police,
prisons, education and public health. A number of them developed
distinct careers for themselves as ‘moral entrepreneurs’ – people who
make a career out of rousing public alarm on some particular issues,
advocating certain necessary reforms and measures to deal with the
problem, and then putting themselves forward as the appropriate
people to carry out these reforms and measures. (Philips, 2000: 64)
It is in this context that W.A. Miles, a minor but significant figure,

emerges. He was driven by personal ambition and supported the widely
held Malthusian Utilitarian view that the poor were to be blamed and
held to account for the wretchedness of their existence. His research
into crime and his particular focus on the problems related to juvenile
delinquency were driven largely by his ambition to achieve regular,
salaried government employment. However, unlike many of his con-
temporaries Miles had no professional qualifications or training. He
relied instead on exploiting his claim to be of royal birth and used this
as a means to enlist favours from those in authority. We present some
details of his background and personal formation and history as they
provide grounds for arguing that they contributed to the formation of
many of the extreme attitudes which underpin his research.
Miles was born in 1796; the precise details of his parentage are some-
thing of a mystery although there were claims that he was the illegitimate
son of royalty and his birth wasn’t recorded until he went to live with
Miles Snr. in 1801. It is suggested that Miles Snr. may have taken him on as
a favour to the King following the death of William’s mother when he was
five (Philips, 2000: 6) Nevertheless he was brought up as the eldest son of
W.A. Miles Snr. who was a devoted father and appeared to idolise William.
His father used ‘connections’ to secure a place at Haileybury College for
William in 1813. Haileybury was an immensely important establishment
at the time, being the preparatory college of the East India Company,
whilst, significantly, Malthus was the Professor of Political Economy there.
The College was thus an important link connecting colonial adminis-
tration, political economy, and class formation at a time when govern-
mentality was emergent. Young men would spend three or four years at
Haileybury as preparation for being sent out to India as administrators;
securing a place at the college was of considerable importance as it assured
that graduates would be set up for life in terms of a profession, finan-
cial security and status. The college was the site of turbulence, partly
because it operated a collegiate system whereby the students had more
freedom than they were accustomed to at public school, a freedom that
many had difficulties adjusting to as evidenced by the numerous occa-
sions whereby discipline collapsed and students were either rusticated
or expelled. There was also ongoing pressure from shareholders who
criticised the structure, curriculum and the disciplinary process.
What is of interest here is that Miles, who was noted as being a poor
student, idle, prone to running up considerable debts and unpopular
with other students and with the staff, was expelled in 1815 when
he was 19. Philips (2000), who has made the only biographical study
of Miles, has been unable to uncover the precise details regarding the
expulsion although he is clear that Miles was not caught up in the riots
in the College in November of that year. However, he cites a letter from

Miles’ father to his son in which he noted William’s ‘perversity’ and
which went on to state ‘your repeated transgressions, so repeatedly and
affectionately forgiven you, mark a mind unfeeling and obdurate. Your
perseverance in Errors, more allied to crime than to folly, has almost
broken his heart …’ (Philips, 2000: 23).
Although Miles Snr. was clearly deeply angry with William, he did try
to have his son reinstated, without success. But, it was clear that what-
ever crime William had committed was so serious that it could neither
be overlooked nor spoken of directly.
Miles Snr. appealed to the East India Company, arguing that no
supportive evidence had been presented for punishing his son. When
this failed he shifted his attention to attempting to preserve William’s
reputation by requesting that the details be removed from the records
and attempting to blame the college. What is clear then is that William
was accused of serious offences which went beyond debt, drunkenness
or disruptive behaviour, and moreover the nature of the offences were
such that if guilty as charged he would be an outcast in society.
Nevertheless, by the end of the following year, the case was being
referred to in a meeting of the General Court of the East India Company
when Joseph Hume, a radical and influential M.P., delivered a stinging
attack on Haileybury College. Miles Snr. had clearly conveyed to Hume
that the responsibility for whatever had happened to William rested
with the College and not William. Yet, by the time that Hume made
this submission to the East India company, Miles Snr. had fled to France
with his wife and children:
The increasing [sic] delinquencies of William compel me to fly

from my native country to avoid hearing either of his disgrace or
imprisonment. His guilt has no bounds … William, wicked cruel
William – drives me from home and has assassinated my happiness
forever. (cited in Philips, 2000: 38)
This provides a dramatic contrast to his campaign to have William rein-

stated and would suggest that perhaps he received further evidence of
his son’s guilt for whatever crime was committed. Soon after he arrived
in France he made a new will which disinherited William and cut off
all further contact with him. Indeed, Miles Snr. was so affected by what
had happened with William that his health deteriorated and he died in
Paris on 25th April 1817. The family never forgave William and had no
further contact with him beyond a chance encounter in 1835.
A final twist to the tale can be found in Malthus’ intervention to

defend Haileybury, which he published as a pamphlet in 1817 where he
referred explicitly to the case by citing the intervention made by Hume:
let Mr. Hume candidly and manfully produce the name of the person
who is now become an outcast of society from the contagion of the
East India College. Let his previous character be traced: and let it
be seen by an appeal to facts whether he was not much more likely
to corrupt others than to be corrupted himself. His example indeed
could hardly have failed to produce a most pernicious effect, if the
good sense and moral feelings of the great majority of the students
had not induced them, from the very first term of his residence to
shun his society. (Malthus, 1817: Section VII: 85)
The Haileybury Incident is significant in that it provides a context

within which Miles’ subsequent attempts to establish himself as an
expert in juvenile crime can be located. Being cast out from the family,
shrouded in secrecy regarding the incident which led to his expulsion,
had a devastating and lasting effect. Miles spent a largely unfulfilled and
miserable life where he was constantly in debt, prone to drunkenness
and always begging favours from those in power on the basis of what he
considered to be his birthright. In this respect he can be seen to share
much with those whom he studied so closely as he attempted to estab-
lish himself as a ‘moral entrepreneur’.
The details of the case highlight another aspect that the genealogy
tries to bring to light, namely the difference between the treatment
and fate of the children of the poor who have broken the law in some
way, and those from the privileged classes. Equally, his experiences
seems to have prepared him to be an ideal intermediary between the
emerging apparatus of biopolitical governmentality and the ‘criminal
underground’ that he explored and reported upon, providing valuable
evidence that helped to flesh out what utilitarian discourse already
assumed about the innate criminality of the poor.
The ‘moral entrepreneur’ and the formation of policy
As previously pointed out, the 1820s–1830s was a critical period in the

establishment of a new form of governmentality which was under-
pinned by a commitment to utilitarian political economy, notably in
legislation such as the New Poor Law Act whose chief architect was the
staunch Utilitarian Chadwick who was instrumental in the employment
of Miles as an expert. It is clear that to succeed in Government service at

that point it was necessary to work within the new realist, instrumen-
tal, calculative, and disciplinarian framework which certainly posed no
problem for Miles who was actively seeking Government employment
from the 1820s. Having largely ‘disappeared’ following the Haileybury
incident Miles reappeared when he managed to secure his first official
position in 1829 when he was employed for eighteen months to index
the Privy Council Registers. He worked for Charles Greville who subse-
quently recorded that ‘I first employed a certain Wm. Augustus Miles,
who pretended to be a natural Son of one of the Royal Family (I forget
which) and who turned out to be a scamp and vagabond, and who
cheated me. This man got into prison, and I lost sight of him’ (Greville
Memoirs, 1843:Vol. V: 165 Cited in Philips, 2000: 50).
Nevertheless, whilst he seems to have had little in the way of regular
employment it is clear from his writings and his report to the Select
Committee on Gaols (1835) that he spent a lot of time exploring the
most notorious slums in London and elsewhere. Philips cites a letter
that Miles wrote to the Whig politician, Lord Brougham, in 1835 where
he was again soliciting for employment:
I have made it my duty to spend very many hours in the worst,

the very worst streets and courts in St. Giles’s, in order to render
myself thoroughly acquainted with the habits and manners of those
Inhabitants where Idleness and Vice are not even considered criminal
(I have visited) every low neighbourhood in London (for the same pur-
pose). I have passed much time in the Gaols of the Metropolis, in order
to examine youths who live by plunder. (cited in Philips, 2000: 72)
Miles’ use of language here is revealing; he cites ‘duty’ as his reason for
spending time in the ‘worst, the very worst streets’ and stresses the need
to become ‘thoroughly acquainted’ with the ‘habits and manners’ of the
inhabitants. Given that what he was undertaking was particularly unusual
for a gentleman at that time, it is clear that he felt the need to ensure that
his motives were seen to be those of someone undertaking public service
in order to provide new information for the benefit of those entrusted
with reform and with the establishment of new institutions and practices
to deal with the mounting problems. It is thus not surprising that Miles,
besides his own intense fascination with the lives of slum dwellers, spent
a lot of time in close observation of their daily lives producing accounts
which are ethnographic in scope in that he observes, documents, inter-
views and produces impressive reports which include statistical analyses
and recommendations for policy and practice. As such he was clearly a

pioneer in the development of the kind of knowledge which fed into the
‘sciences of the social’ (Foucault, 1981b, 1979a). It says much about Miles
that he could make recommendations which were often extreme in their
brutality, although he had observed at first hand the extreme poverty of
those who populated the slums at that time.
Miles’ two most significant contributions were made through his
evidence to the Select Committee on Gaols (1835) and his book Poverty,
Mendicity and Crime (1839). The book concludes with a dictionary in
which he provides a detailed description and translation of ‘flash or cant
language known to every thief and beggar’ (1839: 161). These two works
illustrate Miles’ belief that harsher punishments were the only way to
control the poor and thus resolve the problems associated with crimi-
nality. By concluding from his research that a ‘criminal class’ existed
that were responsible for the majority of criminal acts, he implies that
the poor were undeserving of philanthropy or charitable acts. His evi-
dence to the Select Committee on Gaols sets out this position:
There is a youthful population in the metropolis devoted to crime,

trained to it from infancy, adhering to it from Education and
Circumstances, whose Connexions prevent the possibility of refor-
mation and whom no punishment can deter: a Race ‘sui generis’
different from the rest of society, not only in thoughts, habits and
manners, but even in appearance; possessing, moreover, a language
exclusively their own. (HCPP: Select Committee, 1835a: 396)
What is of note in this extract is the profiling of a ‘race apart’, dis-

tinguishable by appearance, language, thoughts, habits and manners,
resistant to change, as it fits with the biopolitical discourse emerging
at the time which promoted harsher punishment and opposed reform
through education and social change. Miles pressed the point in the
following passage:
And my conclusions are, first, that the source of crime is early con-
tamination and vicious education from parents; secondly, that labour
and safe custody will not deter or reform offenders; thirdly, that the
discipline should be rendered so irksome that the self-convenience
and interest of an idle man or thief would make him prefer a work-
house to a goal; to effect which I should suggest that no prison
dietery should exceed those of workhouses; that the periods of sleep
should not exceed four hours; and as mental ideleness is greater
punishment than physical labour, I should recommend that prison-

ers should be placed in forms, and inspected daily by policemen.
(Miles, 1835: 394)
The timing of his interventions was critical because the post 1834 Poor
Law Amendment Act period was one in which the poor were particu-
larly denigrated, especially at the level of policy, and viewed as parasites
feeding off the nation and therefore undeserving of consideration, sym-
pathy or support. Miles, in a letter to Chadwick in October 1836, talks
about ‘the twaddling voice of a pseudo-philanthropy’ as he presents a
case for controlling beggars and trampers and suggests that:
I should seriously recommend a trial in one of the prisons, which

I am persuaded would check tramping, namely, commit every
tramper, let the time be short and severe, but before he is dismissed
shave one side of his head, and if he is again caught before it has
grown, then shave the other: it would also be desirable to put them
in stocks when taken; not that it can degrade the tramper, but it will
render his face familiar, and he will not infest the neighbourhood
again. (Miles, 1839: 53)
The views that Miles expresses in his writings and witness evidence were
consistent with prevailing attitudes to the poor and to crime that basi-
cally attributed crime to poor parenting and bad influences; reform and
a ‘softly, softly’ approach does not work; and deterrence is the effective
approach. These views continue to find support amongst a substantial
section of policy-makers, the right-wing media and politicians up to the
present. The same attitudes underlie policy regarding persistent disrup-
tive behaviour in schools today.
His suggestions or recommendations were certainly taken seriously
enough for some of his recommendations to be embedded in reforms.
Indeed, it is clear that he was building on Chadwick’s idea of ‘less eli-
gibility’ by proposing a system so harsh that potential criminals would
prefer to seek out the workhouse rather than commit crime. From the
1830s a massive prison-building scheme was underway, and some of his
proposals were incorporated, for instance, separate cells for prisoners to
stop free association as well as providing a means to enforce the ‘silent
system’. Although not all of his recommendations were implemented, it
is clear that he had some impact on the development of harsher punish-
ment regimes as well as making a significant contribution to the ongo-
ing debate about juvenile crime. As such he can be seen to have laid
the foundations (along with others) for the shift in attitudes, in which
juvenile crime becomes linked to the idea of a criminal ‘type’.
Miles had undertaken a lot of research in his endeavour to secure a gov-
ernment position; as well as the research that he did in the Metropolis,
he conducted hundreds of interviews with boys awaiting transportation
on the hulk Euryalis; he visited gaols, bridewells and prisons collecting
statistical information as well as documenting the views of prisoners
and warders. He travelled extensively throughout England and provided
accounts of vagrancy, wrecking, poaching, gambling and the effective-
ness of the police, as well as developing his own theories regarding the
causes of juvenile crime. However, some of his recommendations were
considered too extreme. Lord Russell, the Home Secretary, remarked that
‘his remedies are absurd’ and declined to appoint Miles to one of the
new posts as Prison Inspector. Chadwick however requested that Miles
be appointed as one of the commissioners on his Constabulary Force
Commission in 1836, which looked into the viability of establishing a
national police force. Chadwick had recognised in Miles a kindred spirit
and was keen to be able to use his research to support his own views of
the poor. In his request to Russell he remarked that Miles had ‘displayed
much tact in the examination of vagrants and culprits and the investiga-
tion of the penetralia of crime. His continued researches I think would
be extremely useful’ (cited in Philips, 2000: 80). Indeed, Chadwick used
Miles’ research to inform a number of significant reports.
However, Miles’ book Poverty, Mendicity and Crime did not receive
critical acclaim when it was published in 1839. A review in The Times in
July 1840 which considered Miles’ book alongside four others, including
the Constabulary Force Report of 1839 and the 1840 Report of the Poor
Law Commissioners on the Continuance of the Poor Law Commission,
severely criticised the view of the poor which was constructed through
these accounts. In particular there was concern that these works were
designed to deter acts of philanthropy and charity which were seen as in
decline as the country moved to what was described as an anti-Christian
position:
The libellous and abusive descriptions of the lower orders of society

which characterize modern publications respecting them, and the
great popularity which these obtain, is one of the most alarming
symptoms of the decline of the national character. It is more than
alarming – it is awful and appalling in the highest degree; and exhibits
a feeling and tone of character so wholly anti-christian as must draw
down the heaviest judgments upon the nation … Scarcely a voice has
been raised in favour of the character of the lower orders of late years,
or even of free and liberal almsgiving. (The Times, 9th July 1840)
Miles’ book was singled out as ‘… exceed(ing) the two former in the
strength and virulence of its charges and it exceeds them in the unfaith-
fulness of the picture which it presents’ (The Times, 9th July 1840).
Nevertheless, The Times review indirectly admits that the views,
attitudes and values displayed by Miles appear to be consistent with
prevailing and widespread public opinion. It is such views that are
reflected in legislation and policy about prison and education. These
constitute a population of the poor in terms that legitimated a regime
of punishment and discipline which pathologised their conduct and
ensured their exclusion.
It is also clear from the arguments in The Times review that other less-
punishing and exclusionary views, and less determined by Utilitarian
thinking, were present and affected both discourse and policy. Whilst
not establishing a counter-discourse, this evidence of challenges to
the ‘common sense’ of the time opens the way for a more systematic
account of an alternative approach to the question of poverty and the
education of poor children, as we examine in chapter six.
Miles’ intervention illustrates the extent to which his own life experi-
ences and disposition enabled him to occupy a key role in amplifying
the existing discourse linking the poor to criminality and in providing
the evidence to translate attitudes into mechanisms for punishing and
bending delinquents to the prison regimes being considered at the time.
Biography here feeds into genealogy because English society in a period
of transition and turbulence allowed spaces for public figures such as
Miles to have a degree of agency they would not otherwise have had.
Nevertheless, the net result has been to throw light on the conditions
which shaped the exclusion of pauper or street children as an integral
aspect of liberal governmentality.
As a coda, one could note that Miles ended up as Police Commissioner
in Sydney, Australia, a post to which Russell appointed him in 1841. He
was dismissed in July 1848 following allegations of fraud and drunken-
ness. Although the charges were unsubstantiated his unpopularity and
lack of support led to his dismissal. In 1848 he took up a position as a
Police Magistrate. He died on 24th April 1851 and Philips (2000: 182)
notes that his gravestone bore this ironic inscription: William Augustus
Miles – Police Magistrate and late Commissioner of Police whose
parentage was derived from Royalty. Died 24th April 1858 Aged 53 years –
Neglected and in Poverty.
5
Disciplining and Punishment:
The New Exclusionary Regime
Emerges
In some goals you see (and who can see it without pain?)
boys of twelve or fourteen eagerly listening to the stories told
by practices and experienced criminals, of their adventures,
successes, strategies and escapes. (Howard, 1777: 15)
In this chapter we examine the beginning of reforms that whilst tak-

ing place at around the same time as the elaboration of biopolitics in
Miles and Chadwick’s approach to poverty and juvenile delinquency
departs from the focus on harsh punishment by introducing elements
of self-discipline and reform. Our account will show that nevertheless
these apparently more humane approaches end up multiplying the
techniques for bending destitute and disaffected children to norms of
a normalising power that basically desired to eliminate their threat to
the security of property and their costs to society. What happened was
the incorporation of techniques like the silent system, introduced by
those motivated by a desire to rescue the fallen, into a regime of punish-
ment now standardised across England and Wales. The new system thus
targets both body and mind, thereby deploying elements of normalisa-
tion, as Foucault (1979a) has pointed out regarding the penitentiary. So,
alongside the kind of institutions proposed by the Malthusians, there
emerged a more effective biopolitics, still utilitarian in outlook, that is
driven by an instrumental political economy concerned with minimis-
ing costs and maximising the security of the population as a whole, yet
more sophisticated. Our interest in these developments is the continu-
ing effects of these techniques into contemporary practices of dealing
with disruptive and delinquent children.
Alongside the panic about the increase in juvenile crime in the early
19th century, there emerged a concern about the state of prisons which
83
had first been documented by John Howard in the late 18th century.
A plethora of reports from both the State and charitable bodies began
to identify a significant relationship between the two issues which
became an ‘explanation’ for youth recidivism, particularly the lack of
any separation between adults and juveniles held in prison, especially
in the critical period before sentencing. Thus, juveniles were seen to be
at risk of becoming hardened criminals if this practice wasn’t curtailed.
One solution which started to be explored was that of building a prison
specifically for boys. At the same time, there was increased preoccupa-
tion about the need to rehabilitate prisoners, to lead them into repent-
ance and a better life.
Numerous commissions were established to explore such diverse
concerns as the conditions in goals, the effectiveness of punishments,
transportation and the workings of the metropolitan police. For exam-
ple, as early as 1816, a report from the Committee on the State of the
Police in the Metropolis questioned all the witnesses about the ‘alarm-
ing’ increase in crime committed by juveniles.
The evidence from the magistrates highlights factors picked out in
other enquiries, as noted in Chapters 2 and 3, namely, children who
have been orphaned or abandoned by parents who cannot care for them
because they are too poor, or drunkards, or criminals. Other witness
statements confirmed the view that the increase in crimes committed
by juveniles was due to a combination of destitute or incapable parents
abandoning their children, the lack of means other than begging and
theft to support a livelihood and a precarious existence on the streets of
London and other cities. Yet, the report exposed an acceptance of the
conditions which produced criminality, whilst the preoccupation was
on how to provide effective punishment.
In contrast, and at the same time, charitable, philanthropic organisa-
tions had emerged with the aim of trying to explain the underlying
reasons for the increase in crime and ‘mendicity’. The Committee
for Investigating the Causes for the Alarming Increase in Juvenile
Delinquency in the Metropolis is interesting in that it was set up to iden-
tify causes and propose solutions for the increase. It was established in
1815 by a group of eminent Quakers and Philanthropists, including fig-
ures such as David Ricardo, whilst joint Secretary was William Crawford
who would go on to have a very successful career in government as an
expert in ‘crime’, becoming one of the first Inspectors of Prisons in 1835.
An army of volunteer investigators were sent out to visit gaols to
interview and gather ‘evidence’ from the young inmates, the aim being
that ‘the youths in confinement be separately examined and privately
Disciplining and Punishment 85
admonished, the evil consequences of their conduct represented to

them, and every persuasive used for their recovery which kindness
could suggest’ (Report (of the Committee for Investigating the Causes
for the Alarming Increase in Juvenile Delinquency), 1816: 6).
However, if we examine some of the brief case studies which were
published as an appendix in the report, it becomes clear that poverty
and exclusion were the common factors associated with youth crime:
C.D. aged 10 years: He was committed to prison in the month of April,

1815, having been sentenced to seven years imprisonment for picking
pockets. His mother only is living, but he does not know where she
resides. He has a very good capacity, but cannot read (Report, 1816: 30).
A.B. aged 13 years: His parents are living. He was but for a short
time at school. His father was frequently intoxicated; and, on these
occasions, the son generally left home, and associated with bad
characters, who introduced him to houses of ill fame, where they
gambled until they had spent or lost all their money. This boy has
been five years in the commission of crime, and been imprisoned for
three separate offences. Sentence of death has twice been passed on
him (Report, 1816: 30).
I.F. aged 12 years: Can neither read nor write. His father is a sol-
dier, and his mother is deceased. This lad, with a younger brother,
was sent to a workhouse, where it appears that he experienced harsh
treatment, which induced him to effect his escape. When at liberty,
he engaged himself to a chimney-sweeper, with whom he remained
about a week. During this period, he states, that he suffered much
from hunger and oppression. Early one morning he decamped with
his master’s watch; he was, however, soon apprehended and commit-
ted to prison. (Report, 1816: 31)
In addition to the circumstances identified by Magistrates in the 1816

Report, the Investigating Committee reported the difficulties involved
in this endeavour, as the children and young people frequently refused
to co-operate, and investigators found conditions in the gaols daunting
and were particularly concerned about the lack of separation between
adult and child prisoners:
the Committee frequently had no suitable opportunity of examining

or admonishing the offending youths; and if at any time favour-
able impressions were excited on their minds, the visitors had the
mortification to reflect, that such feelings could be but transitory, as
the boys were doomed to mix with characters the most atrocious; in
a society, where the first risings of penitence would be repelled by
mockery, and the name of religion treated as a jest. (Report, 1816: 9)
Yet, whilst the Committee had considered that a separate prison should
be built for juvenile offenders, it would be some 20 years or so before
the recommendation would be acted upon. What was becoming clear,
however, through the gathering of evidence for the numerous com-
missions, was that imprisonment and other forms of punishment
such as transportation and flogging did not appear to result in change
or deter juvenile delinquents. For example, transportation of young
offenders between the ages of seven and fourteen increased threefold
during the years 1816–1820. Whilst the offences were relatively trivial,
stealing of coats, handkerchiefs and so on, the sentence would usually
be seven years of transportation. Indeed there was growing belief that
young criminals found prison and the threat of transportation to be an
attractive alternative to the daily struggle for survival on the streets. In
1831 the Governor of the Coldbath Fields house of correction informed
the Select Committee on Secondary Punishments that ‘the punishment
of prison is no punishment to them; I do not mean that they would not
rather be out of the prison than in it, but they are so well able to bear
the punishment, and the prison allowance of food is so good, and their
spirits so buoyant, that the consequences are most deplorable’ (HCPP:
Select Committee, 1831: 3).
This comment was representative of views which called for much
stricter regimes to be developed and implemented so that prison would
become a more effective deterrent. What was absent from all the
debates was any attempt to address the underlying causes. Instead, what
emerged from the intense scrutiny of juvenile crime was a reconceptu-
alisation of the character of the offender that in effect naturalised crime.
As Shore has pointed out:
previously there had been at least some acceptance of the pressure

of external factors, such as poverty and unemployment. Increasingly
though, crime was seen as something inherent; during the 1820s and
1830s juvenile crime was linked to a much narrower explanation,
which was characterised by reference to criminal subcultures and the
existence of a criminal class. (Shore, 1999: 19)
However, Shore does not explain why this great shift should have occurred
at that particular moment, though the acute economic problems of the
1820s could be a factor in directing the focus on punishment rather

than cure. The important reflection is that this shift illustrates the way
that responsibility for ‘criminal’ behaviour was increasingly becoming
transformed in official discourse from being seen as the result of ‘paren-
tal neglect’ or ‘want of education’ or destitution into something located
within the individual. The work of people like Chadwick and Miles as
we saw added the veneer of authority to this view. Once this explana-
tion becomes accepted and established, then it is the individual subject
who becomes the target for intervention.
The new prisons: Parkhurst, The Penitentiary Model

and a clash of values
The early 19th century was a period when there was intense interest
in England in providing new and better facilities in which to house
prisoners. This was largely informed by the appalling conditions which
prevailed in prisons at that time and which had been described by John
Howard in his 1777 report The State of Prisons.
It is a shocking thing to destroy in prison the morals, the health,

and (as is often done) the lives of those whom the law consigns to
hard labour and correction. One is charged with bastardy; another is
abusive in a drunken quarrel; a young creature, who perhaps was
never taught a moral lesson is guilty of some petty theft: send them
to Bridewell for a year, or two, which they must consume in idleness,
hunger, dirt, with companions much improved by such education –
if that prison be not secure, send them into still worse company, that
of abandoned felons in the County Gaol – what is this but devolving
them to destitution? (Howard, 1777: 69)
The situation described by Howard played a major part in sugges-

tions that a separate prison for boys should be built; eventually, a Bill
for Establishing Prison for Young Offenders was passed on 3rd May
1838 and Parkhurst Prison for Boys opened on 26th December 1838.
Interestingly, the reform movement was split into two tendencies; on
the one hand there were those, such as Elizabeth Fry, Sir Samuel Romilly
and Thomas Fowell Buxton, who were appalled by the conditions in
prisons and who wished for reform on humanitarian grounds, whilst
on the other hand were the influential voices from the establishment
such as William Crawford, Joshua Jebb and Whitworth Russell who
wanted a more ‘efficient’ system. The reality was that the disorganised,
disease-ridden and frequently ad hoc system of prisons which had been

documented by Howard could no longer meet the demands of increased
crime. However, the rise needs to be viewed within the context of new
laws such as the Malicious Trespass Act (1827) and the Vagrancy Act
(1824) which criminalised a range of behaviours and thus drew more
people, particularly juveniles, into the criminal justice system.
At the same time there was an interesting point of convergence
between the reformers and the state in terms of how best to design and
run the proposed new institutions. Both groups were seeking a solution
which would provide facilities for reclaiming ‘depredators’ and looked
to the new models which had emerged in the USA founded within
Quaker beliefs. At the heart of the new system, most fully realised in the
Eastern State Penitentiary which opened in Philadelphia in 1829, was
the belief that prisoners were capable of being reformed:
The criminal justice reform principles advocated by Beccaria, Bentham

and Howard and based on the social contract philosophy of the
Enlightenment found ready acceptance among the Quakers and other
members of the Philadelphia elite around the time of the American
Revolution. The belief in the perfectability of human nature and the
faith in social progress based on reason were incompatible with the
colonial emphasis on retribution and stressed instead the reformation
of the criminal as the sole objective of punishment. (Philadelphia
Historical Commission: Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Structures
Report, 1994: 33)
The new penitentiary was the perfect expression of these beliefs and its
radical design by the English architect John Haviland ensured that pris-
oners, housed in single cells and subjected to the silent system, would
have ample time to reflect and repent and thus emerge as reformed
individuals. The word ‘penitentiary’ originates from the Pennsylvania
Quakers and their belief in penitence and self-examination as a means to
salvation. It is worth noting that Haviland’s design for the Eastern State
Penitentiary was incredibly influential: in the century following its con-
struction more than 300 prisons worldwide were built based on his plan.
In his comments on the penitential system, Foucault has argued that:
in absolute isolation – as at Philadelphia – the rehabilitation of the

criminal is expected not of the application of a common law, but
of the relation of the individual to his own conscience and to what
may enlighten him from within … It is not, therefore, an external
respect for the law or fear of punishment alone that will act upon the
convict but the workings of the conscience itself. A profound submis-
sion, rather than a superficial training; a change of ‘morality’, rather
than of attitude. In the Pennsylvanian prison, the only operations
of correction were the conscience and the silent architecture that
confronted it. (Foucault, 1979a: 238–239)
This sense that the individual, left in silent contemplation, would be

able to achieve some sort of reconciliation which would aid their reha-
bilitation clearly had much in common with the Quaker ethos of the
‘inner light’ believed to provide ‘inward transformation’.
Foucault’s reflections on the silent system echo those made by Alexis
de Tocqueville who along with Gustave de Beaumont visited the Eastern
State Penitentiary in 1831 and reported that:
thrown into solitude … the prisoner reflects. Placed alone, in view

of his crime, he learns to hate it; and if his soul be not yet surfeited
with crime, and thus have lost all taste for anything better, it is in
solitude, where remorse will come to assail him … Can there be a
combination more powerful for reformation than that of a prison
which hands over the prisoner to all the trials of solitude, leads him
through reflection to remorse, through religion to hope. (Beaumont
and Tocqueville, 1833: 22)
Nevertheless, Tocqueville and Beaumont were impressed with condi-

tions, and observed:
all prisoners, whom we have seen in the penitentiaries of the United

States, had the appearance of strength and health; and if we compare
the number of those who die there with the mortality in the old pris-
ons, we shall see that the new penitentiaries, in spite of their severe
regulations and barbarous discipline, are much more favourable to
the life of the imprisoned. (Beaumont and Tocqueville, 1833: 45–46)
Thus, whilst recognising the limitations in the new establishments in

terms of the severity of the disciplinary regime it was clear that there
were benefits related to the overall health of the prisoners. In this
respect it is clear that some of the issues which Howard had highlighted
in his work had been addressed within a framework which set out to
improve the welfare of the prisoners whilst at the same time endeav-
ouring to achieve some form of rehabilitation and thereby reduce both
crime and recidivism.
What is of interest here is the extent to which these new institutions,

established in the USA, exerted a powerful influence throughout Europe.
There was a constant stream of visitors, which included Demetz and
Blouet, founder and architect of the children’s colony at Mettray (see
Chapter 7), respectively, who made a detailed and comprehensive study
of the Eastern State Penitentiary on behalf of the French Government in
1834. All were eager to learn about the radical measures which appeared
to provide efficient and effective methods for dealing with offenders.
The only dissenting voice was that of the author Charles Dickens who
visited in 1842 and was deeply critical of what he saw. He noted that
‘in the outskirts stands a great prison, called the Eastern Penitentiary,
conducted on a plan peculiar to the State of Pennsylvania. The system
here is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in
its effects, to be cruel and wrong … I hold this slow and daily tamper-
ing with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any
torture of the body’ (Dickens, 1842: 238).
Dickens’ comments seem remarkably perceptive given the way that
the techniques developed at the Eastern State had generated such
excitement amongst the majority of those who visited. For example,
and in contrast to Dickens’ reservations, it is worth noting that Demetz
and Blouet produced what was described at the time as ‘a monumental
statistical and architectural report’, which was seen to ‘reaffirm the
preferences of other Europeans with the Pennsylvania plan’ (History
of Eastern State Penitentiary, 1994: 65). Of particular significance for
England were the visits made by William Crawford who was a founder
member and secretary of the London Society for Improvement of
Prison Discipline in 1816. Ignatieff (1978) describes how the Society
had ‘led the campaign for a new jails act, setting out standards for the
treatment of prisoners and establishing uniform criteria for discipline.
In their reports, they pointed out that the decentralization and local-
ism of English administration had allowed an unjust and unequal
variation in the rigors of discipline to emerge in institutions across
the country … Such anomalies could only be corrected, they argued,
by national legislation enforced by a salaried inspectorate’ (Ignatieff,
1978: 68). It can be seen from this that the drive for improving prison
conditions can also be understood within the framework of political
economy and biopolitical governmentality at that time which was con-
cerned with increased efficiency, value for money and centralisation of
institutional management.
Crawford visited the Pennsylvania prison in 1833 and, in his report
presented to the House of Commons in August 1834, he commended
the silent system. His report and the subsequent evidence he gave to
the 1835 Select Committee of the House of Lords on Gaols and Houses
of Correction in England and Wales, when he stated that ‘there is noth-
ing so terrible and so effectual in the tendency to deter as solitude’
(1835: 10) were influential in the adoption of the techniques associated
with the Eastern State Penitentiary; these were most fully realised in
Pentonville Prison which was opened in 1842. However there was a
degree of selection at play in terms of how far to replicate the American
system; for instance, Crawford was sceptical of some elements such as
the more generous diets provided and the lack of emphasis on religious
‘training’; he was also very critical of the lack of resident chaplains in
the penitentiaries that he visited.
In 1835, the First Report of the Select Committee (of the House of
Lords on Gaols and Houses of Correction in England and Wales) pro-
posed the adoption of the techniques associated with the American
system, particularly the establishment of one uniform system of disci-
pline across every goal in England and Wales, the method of complete
separation of prisoners to prevent ‘contamination’, and the enforce-
ment of the silent system (HCPP: Select Committee, 1835a: iv). But
what was lacking was any understanding of the underlying ethos which
had informed the techniques. The whole point of the new methods for
the Quakers was to lead offenders into a new and better life and to offer
prisoners the possibility of redemption which was absent in the old
system based on brutal and humiliating punishments. However the new
techniques were implemented in England in addition to the existing
punishment regimes. Thus the new regime combined disciplining and
punishment to the new process of normalisation. The governmentalisa-
tion of poverty and security and the production of useful labour thereby
acquired the basic techniques which have continued to be deployed
into the present, if in more subtle and sophisticated way. The first insti-
tution which applied the new principles was Parkhurst Prison for boys
which opened in 1838.
Parkhurst: the reality of the new regime
Parkhurst Prison for boys opened on 26th December 1838. Located on

the Isle of Wight it had been adapted from a former military hospital.
The location was deemed highly suitable as it offered easy access for the
ships which would eventually transport the young offenders to serve out
their time in Australia. Selection for Parkhurst required that the prisoner
was sentenced to be transported and was considered a suitable candidate
for the Parkhurst regime. In addition escape from the prison was both
difficult and dangerous, whilst there were frequent attempts made to
escape none were successful. There were 49 boys admitted when the
prison opened under the management of the first governor, Robert
Woollcombe. A total of 157 were admitted during the first year, the
majority from backgrounds which were described as ‘destitute’ and
where they had been neglected. Indeed, looking at the descriptions of
the backgrounds is heartbreaking and suggests that these young people
were struggling to survive: for example, prisoner no. 79 is described
as being 13 years old and was convicted of receiving stolen goods.
Sentenced to seven years he is described as ‘a poor destitute boy from
Newcastle, turned out by his parents to obtain a living by begging or
stealing’; or prisoner no 67 who at eight years old was convicted of lar-
ceny and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment, described as having
been in custody four times before and ‘utterly neglected’ (HCPP: Reports
relating to Parkhurst Prison, 1839a: 30).
The first report made by the Inspectors of Prisons – which included
William Crawford – appeared in July 1839. The Inspectors set out their
views on the ethos of the prison:
The objects sought to be attained at the Parkhurst Prison are two

fold viz – the penal correction of the boy with a view to deter, not
himself only, but juvenile offenders generally from the commission
of crime, and the moral reformation of the culprit. In the general
treatment of the boys, every comfort and indulgence not necessary to
preserve the health of the mind and body of the offender, should be
excluded. There should be nothing throughout the arrangements at
Parkhurst, of a tendency to weaken the terrors of the law, or to lessen
in the minds of the juvenile population at large (or of their parents)
the dread of being committed to a prison. (Commission on State
and Management of Parkhurst Prison First Report from Inspectors of
Prisons: 1839a: 1)
The techniques of silence and solitude were applied to each new prisoner
and operated alongside corporal punishment such as whipping. Thus
from the beginning Parkhurst adopted a brutal regime, aimed at both
punishing the offenders and supposedly acting as a deterrent. However,
and bearing in mind the earlier descriptions of the backgrounds of the
offenders, the numbers sent to Parkhurst increased year on year. More
than 4000 boys passed through Parkhurst during the 26 years that it
operated. Almost 1500 were transported between 1842 and 1852.
In the first annual report of the prison submitted in 1840 Woollcombe

described the ‘treatment and condition’ of the prisoners as follows:
The penal discipline of Parkhurst Prison consists of deprivation of

liberty, wearing an iron on the leg, a strongly marked prison dress,
a diet reduced to its minimum with regard to the mental and bodily
demands made on the prisoners, the enforcement of silence on all
occasions of instruction and duty, an uninterrupted surveillance by
officers. (HCPP: Reports Relating to Parkhurst Prison. First Annual
Report: 1840a: 4)
Thus, the young offender was represented as needing severe restraint in

order that he may be both deterred from committing further criminal
acts and reformed through the Parkhurst regime which included lock-
ing up each new inmate in a solitary cell for the first four months of his
captivity and a strict enforcement of the rule of silence.
Whilst some adjustments were made to this regime when Woollcombe
was replaced as governor by George Hall in 1844, the use of leg irons
was abandoned and the diet was adjusted as it was not considered suffi-
ciently nourishing; however, the use of separation, silence and solitude
was retained. In 1847, Serjeant Adams, Assistant Judge of the Middlesex
Sessions, in evidence to the Select Committee of the House of Lords on
the Execution of Criminal Law (Juvenile Offenders and Transportation)
reported on a visit that he had made to Parkhurst Prison:
they have 40 solitary cells and every child who is sent to Parkhurst
is locked up in one of those cells for four months – there for the
whole twenty four hours with the exception of when he is at chapel
and two hours when he is at school where he is in such a pen that
he can see nobody but the minister. His sole employment is knitting
and reading good books. No good conduct can make him there less
than four months and if his conduct is not good he is there until his
conduct is good. At this time there are several boys who have been
in these cells from six to twelve months. It seems to me it can only
make them sullen. (HCPP: Select Committee 1847b: 15)
At the same time it should be remembered that the young criminals

who entered Parkhurst were on the first stage of a journey which
would eventually take them to Western Australia, Van Dieman’s Land
(Tasmania) and New Zealand.
We need to recall that the reality of juvenile delinquency for which
these young offenders had increasingly being criminalised was the
introduction and implementation of Acts that had been introduced

in previous years and which were designed to ‘clean the streets’ of the
metropolis. This was recognised in evidence given to the 1836 Report of
the Inspectors of Prisons of Great Britain Home District by the governor
of Newgate Gaol where the point was made that:
many offences for which a lad is now sent to gaol were formerly
disregarded, or not considered of so serious a character as to demand
imprisonment. By the Vagrant Act alone, hundreds who were for-
merly permitted to remain at large, are committed not for the com-
mission of a specific offence, but as ‘idle and disorderly’, or ‘reputed
thieves’. The Malicious Trespass Act and other laws particularly
applying to the offences of youth, have also materially contributed
to the increase of juvenile prisoners. (HCPP: Report, 1836: 81)
Thus on the one hand there was what amounted to a ‘moral panic’
regarding juvenile crime, whilst on the other it was clear from the
Report that children and young people were being brought into the
justice system on the most spurious of charges:
Delinquencies of the most trifling description, committed by mere

children, and formerly thought very lightly of, are now treated as
grave offences. A boy has been committed to Cold Bath Fields House
of Correction for stealing an orange, several have been confined
in the Westminster Bridewell for taking a few apples, one boy has
been committed to Clerkenwell prison for stealing two buns. (HCPP:
Report, 1836: 81)
However, such dissent did not sit comfortably in a period where ‘experts’
such as Miles, with his notion of ‘sui generis’, were constructing a debate
in which crime was believed to be the result of choice rather than cir-
cumstance. In the 1839 Royal Commission on establishing Efficient
Constabulary Force in the Counties of England and Wales (chaired by
Edwin Chadwick), it was stated firmly that ‘the notion that any consid-
erable proportion of the crimes against property are caused by blameless
poverty or destitution we find disproved at every step’ (HCPP: Royal
Commission, 1839b: 67).
What chance then for explanations which had related the increase in
juvenile crime to lack of education or parental neglect? By the time that
Parkhurst was established, the consensus was that juvenile criminals
needed to be confined, constrained, severely punished and eventually
excluded by way of transportation, to the other side of the world. And

whilst young offenders had previously been transported soon after
being found guilty of an offence, what was new with regard to Parkhurst
was the imposition of a regime of disciplinary rehabilitation before they
began to complete their sentence of transportation.
In the following decades George Hall, Governor of Parkhurst Prison,
made additional changes to reflect shifting attitudes, particularly from
the early 1850s and in response to differing and conflicting demands.
On the domestic front there was increased campaigning for Juvenile
Reformatories with an emphasis on education rather than punishment,
and in terms of ensuring that the young transportees were suitable for
employment in the colonies, there was pressure to reduce education
and increase the learning of suitable trades and skills. In addition, it was
becoming clear that the Parkhurst Boys were not welcomed in many
of the areas that were due to receive them. New Zealand received two
shipments of boys in 1842 and 1843 which sparked outrage given that
the Colony had been established with an agreement that it would not
become a penal colony. The fact that the boys were considered to have
served out a prison sentence and were being transported to become
‘apprentices’ did little to appease feelings:
The transportation of Parkhurst apprentices to this Colony appears

by late accounts from England to be regarded by the friends of
New Zealand as an evil, and an act of injustice which should not be
tolerated. We have spoken strongly against the importation of these
boys, because we believe the Home Government is acting unjustly
both by themselves and by this Colony in sending them to this
place, but while we are opposed to the Policy of sending them to this
Country, we must say that we are still more opposed to any thing like
an improper treatment of them … We were very sorry to hear the
other day that several of them were employed on the roads without
shoes and stockings. This is not by any means proper. If the govern-
ment work them, they ought to keep them in food and clothing.
(Daily Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 42, 3rd February 1844)
Southern Australia, in particular, which long resisted becoming a penal

colony, waged a newspaper campaign which was particularly vindictive,
using New Zealand as evidence for what could happen:
The Parkhurst boys are almost exclusively thieves nurtured in vice,

and repeatedly convicted … After the arrival of the boys by the
St. George, the number of robberies at Auckland was quadrupled, and

the press of that settlement was loud in its outcry against a recep-
tion of the experiment by the Home Government. (South Australian
Register, 13th January 1844)
This prompted Parkhurst Governor George Hall to write to the Governor

expressing his concern, ‘In New Zealand the Parkhurst Boys have been
treated in a very unjust and unfeeling manner, by parties who, fearing
lest the immigration of these boys should give something of a penal
character to the colony, endeavoured to excite prejudice against them,
through the columns of colonial newspapers before the boys landed’
(South Australian, 10th January 1845).
Meanwhile, Western Australia which had been similarly reluctant to
accept the Parkhurst Boys soon discovered the benefits of low cost or
free labour. A sheep farmer wrote to defend and support the practice of
receiving Parkhurst boys:
Letter: Sir, what would have become of us, long ere this, if these
lads had not been sent out here? Why every sheep farmer in the
colony would have been ruined … It is very well for persons living
in towns, who have never experienced the difficulty of procuring a
shepherd at even extravagant wages, and the still greater difficulty
of making something from their flocks to pay those wages, to rail
at these lads and call them a nuisance and a pest; but if they had
once experienced the real nuisances I have just mentioned, they
would be very glad to take any Parkhurst lad they could get. We,
as individuals, do not hesitate to admit that we have derived very
great benefit indeed from the employment of Parkhurst lads, and
therefore is it not a natural inference to draw that others have
been equally benefitted? At present we have two of them, both out
of their apprenticeship, living with us as shepherds; one of them
had served his time to us, and now received £20 a year and board;
the other gets £24; and they are as good shepherds, and give us as
much satisfaction, as men we had paid £40 a year to. You advanced
an opinion that these lads, in consequence of their early bad hab-
its, can never become steady assistants to the colonists. If you had
made any inquiries in the sheep districts, you would have seen
the injustice of this opinion, as all the flocks in this part of the
district, with the exception of one, are in the charge of young men
(now free) who had been sent out here from Parkhurst, and their
employers speak very highly of them. William Burges, July 13th

1849. (Inquirer Perth 8 august 1849)
In the ten years between 1842 and 1852 just under 1499 boys aged from
12 to 18 were transported to Western Australia and New Zealand from
Parkhurst Prison. Parkhurst Prison closed in 1864 with the few remain-
ing boys being sent to Dartmoor Prison to serve out their sentences:
The boys hitherto sent to Parkhurst are to be for the future kept
at Dartmoor, where the isolation of the locality and the severity
of the climate and work will, under the control of the Governor
Mr. Moorish, whose management of this isolated prison meets
our approbation, we hope be beneficial to them. Parkhurst will be
retained for the present as a female prison only. (HCPP: 1864: 11)
Parkhurst Prison for boys may have closed and children are no longer
sent to serve out their sentences in adult prisons; however, the ethos
which informed Parkhurst still underpins current attitudes and prac-
tices in relation to child and youth offending. Single separation is
still in use in institutions which house young offenders and a recent
report from the Inspectorate for Prisons noted that ‘at Feltham, young
people could spend as much as 22 hours a day locked up (of those on
the lowest level of rewards and sanctions)’ (H.M Prisons Annual Report
2011–2012: 76).
Furthermore, and echoing the extent to which children and young
people had been drawn into the criminal justice system in the 19th
century through the creation of new offences, the charity ‘Action for
Children’ recently pointed out how:
between May 1997 and May 2007, the Labour Government created
almost one new offence every day, and enacted legislation that drew
ever greater number of young people into the youth justice system.
Between 1992–2002 the number of under 15s held in custody
increased by 800%. This was despite overwhelming evidence that the
‘custody bonanza’ simply fast-tracked minor offenders into major
ones. (Action for Children, 2008: 8)
England and Wales now spend 11 times more on this kind of severe
exclusion than on preventing youth crime. It costs about £215,000 a
year to keep one child in one of the UK’s ten secure units.
The genealogy of exclusion has one foot in these developments and

the attitudes to poverty, delinquency, punishment, deterrence and edu-
cation that underlie them. Some things have not changed; the question
of the costs of existing practices, and of ‘value for money’, when set
against those of education and rescue, has gone beyond the bounds
of reason. Yet, alternatives had emerged in the 19th century; their
promises, and the reasons why they have not replaced solutions within
the scope of the disciplinary society and a narrow political economy
approach, are the issues we explore next.
6
Ragged Schools, Child-Centred
Education and the Struggle for
Egalitarian Politics
In many cases juvenile delinquency is a mere accident aris-

ing from particular circumstances. When these are altered
and the child is so placed that his nature can freely develop,
nothing is wanting but wholesome and natural restraint
and ordinary instruction. (Carpenter, J.E., 1879: 164)
In the previous chapters we have explored the changes taking place in

relation to the management of poverty and its ‘diseases’ as industrialisa-
tion and liberal capitalism were transforming the economic, social and
political landscape across Europe and North America. In England and
Wales in particular, the rapid pace of urbanisation, the consequent dis-
placement in population from rural areas to cities, the related increase in
slums, the changes in the labour force and the opportunities afforded by
the growth of colonial economies have together introduced disruptive
pressures that triggered the development of new forms of administra-
tion and regulation that, following Foucault, we have described in terms
of governmentality and biopolitics. Our genealogical approach has
revealed the key moments in the institution of practices framed by the
new technologies of power targeting juvenile destitution, and crime as
key problems requiring more effective state intervention. Our account
has highlighted the preference for punishment and the gross exploita-
tion of the young victims of poverty. Education, though suggested as
part of the solution by some reformers, had been greatly neglected in
practice. Yet, as pressure for a more skilled workforce mounted in the
course of the 19th century, education and schooling became more of a
focus for both reformers and governmental policy.
In this chapter we focus on the work of those who saw education for
poor children as not just a means to produce a more valuable labour
99
force but as the road that promised both economic and spiritual salva-
tion. The intention was to rescue the destitute and excluded children
for more fulfilling lives that involved principles of caring, social justice
and respect for the intrinsic worth of human life.
We have chosen to focus on the work of Mary Carpenter for many
reasons. Her experimental schools and approach introduced peda-
gogical methods that recognised child-centeredness and a focus on
the whole child as more appropriate when dealing with children trau-
matised by a whole range of deprivations due to poverty. Carpenter
besides was a key activist amongst the network of Dissenters, radical
reformers and early social scientists whose interventions and writings,
highlighted in our Introduction, established alternatives to Utilitarian
and Malthusian worldviews. Their work can be seen as evidence of
counter-discourse, even if their oppositional stance belonged to a
broad liberalism that was far from revolutionary. Nevertheless, their
activities opened up spaces for dissidence and encouraged movements
such as the demand for the extension of suffrage and greater equality
for women that fed into the growth of radicalism generally, challeng-
ing the privilege of political economy in the formulation of educa-
tional and social policy.
As in previous chapters, we provide sufficient biographical details in
order to give historical depth to the activities and events and to dem-
onstrate the centrality of particular networks and agents in the complex
process by which the institutions we are examining came into being.
It allows us also to present background evidence for disagreeing with
Foucault’s account of the school at Mettray and thus draw more positive
lessons for alternatives to the practices of exclusion.
Including the poor: Carpenter, Unitarianism and

alternative schools
Mary Carpenter was born in Exeter on 3rd April 1807, daughter of the
Unitarian minister and educator, Dr. Lant Carpenter. The eldest of six
children, Mary had a privileged upbringing within a family described
by her biographer as ‘belonging to the aristocracy of English Puritanism’
(Manton, 1976: 18). Her father was renowned as both a minister and
intellectual and was considered an effective educator and the most pro-
gressive of dissenting schoolmasters, running schools first in Exeter and
subsequently in Bristol where the family moved in 1817. The Bristol
school was seen to be an outstanding academy and, with fees at a
Ragged Schools 101
hundred guineas a year, it was among the most expensive schools in the
country. Manton describes how:
his school was a remarkable personal creation, at a time when English

public schools were a desert of barbarism. Christ’s Hospital still had
dungeons, ‘little square Bedlam cells, where a boy could just lie his
length upon straw’. ‘A public schoolboy, wrote Sidney Smith, is
alternately tyrant and slave’, while Southey described Charterhouse
(which Miles attended) as ‘a sort of hell on earth for younger boys’.
(Manton, 1976: 26)
For Lant Carpenter the purpose of education was ‘to lay the intellectual
foundations of Unitarian belief’ which he achieved through a curricu-
lum which included:
chemistry and physics, with simple laboratory apparatus for practi-

cal experiments and a course in physiology which he taught himself.
Mathematics included geometry, trigonometry and conic sections.
Latin and Greek were the staple subjects in all grammar schools,
but Dr. Carpenter also taught New Testament Greek, as an introduc-
tion to philosophy. There were unusual courses in modern history,
geography and modern languages. English literature, under the title
of Belles Lettres, was an important subject, virtually unknown in
the public schools. Dr. Carpenter’s pupils even read living poets,
Wordsworth and Coleridge. (Manton, 1976: 25)
In addition the Unitarian belief system, which held that ‘even the worst
character could be improved by the right conditions’, rested on the
belief that ‘one of the chief duties of a Christian, was ‘social justice, the
regulation of our conduct by a steady regard for the rights of others’
(Manton, 1976: 27).
Mary and her sister were both educated alongside the boys in the
school, receiving an excellent education at a time when it was unusual
for girls to benefit from such a rich curriculum. In addition, their father
ensured that the family were familiar with the public events of the time:
The whole household used to read the newspapers aloud, adults and
children together, sitting round the dining-room table, and discussing
each item in turn. This was Mary Carpenter’s earliest education for
public life. She had been born during the Napoleonic wars, and was
8 years old at the time of Waterloo and the passing of the Corn Laws.
She learnt, in these family readings, of the radical movement and
its repression, of the hunger and distress of the working classes, of
machine-breaking and rick-burning. She was 12 years old when her
father read aloud to school and family the account of Peterloo, ‘the
Manchester massacre, kindling his generous indignation as he drew
on constitutional history to defend the right of popular petition’.
(Manton, 1976: 27)
The encouragement of children to develop an awareness of issues and to

participate in discussions were both untypical for the time and demon-
strate much about Lant Carpenter’s beliefs as an educator and Unitarian.
It is clear that these early experiences had a powerful effect on Mary
Carpenter and provided the basis for her subsequent development as a
radical reformer and undoubtedly contributed to the emphasis which
she placed on the restorative powers of education.
Whilst her father was convinced that events such as the Reform Bill of
1832 and the 1833 Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Empire
Act signalled progress and the beginnings of a new era, Manton points
out that:
this high-minded, well-ordered belief in progress was breached in

1832 by two major social disasters, the Bristol riots and the cholera
epidemic. Both taught Mary Carpenter something she had never expe-
rienced at first hand, the reality of poverty, brutal, squalid and danger-
ous … whilst her first response to the riots was horror and fear. … her
father urged her to face the problems of human justice and ‘to ponder
the general causes of the outbreak’. Thus her full attention was turned,
for the first time, to the dark world of the very poor, and among them,
to the suffering and degradation of convicts. (Manton, 1976: 44)
These events and her father’s emphasis on both a practical and intel-
lectual response provided the underpinning for Mary Carpenter’s future
work. A particularly strong bond had been formed in infancy, between
Mary and her father who was writing a book on the principles of educa-
tion and used Mary as the testing ground for his theories; she was very
close to her father, assisting him with his work as she grew older and
shouldering responsibilities when he became increasingly ill and unable
to combine preaching and running the school. However, it was another
Unitarian minister who would introduce her to the possibilities of work-
ing for the poor.
Ragged Schools 103
Dr. Joseph Tuckerman, an American Unitarian minister, visited the

family in 1833, staying longer than planned because of ill-health. In
1826, Tuckerman had given up his parish in Chelsea, Massachusetts,
in order to move to Boston where he established what he described as
‘The Ministry at Large’, a city mission based on house-to-house visiting.
Wach (1993) describes how:
in his view, the urban migrant lost contact with the cohesive com-
munity characteristic of the rural environment. The vast, impersonal
city sharpened class divisions, worsened the experience of poverty,
and loosened communal checks on immoral behaviour. The positive
work of the ‘moral policeman’ was to restore social cohesion through
forming sympathetic human relationships with the downtrodden.
The task bore little connection to the abstracted and mechanical
analyses of politicians and political economists, whom he accused
of regarding the working classes as ‘machinery, in relation alone to
their productiveness of wealth’. Instead, his mission comprised ‘an
infinitely higher charity’ one which ‘has for its object the character,
the mind, the soul’. No mere alms-giver, the moral policeman had
the far weightier responsibility of reconnecting broken social bonds.
It took formidable resources, among them a rich intellectual inherit-
ance, to rehabilitate characters, minds, and souls. (Wach, 1993: 542)
The recognition of the centrality of the socio-cultural and natural envi-

ronment, and the adverse effects of urban environments for sociality,
would become a key feature in much of the work that reformers under-
took, with rural areas representing the ideal as locations for institutions
aiming to reform or reclaim those who had been brutalised by the city.
In addition there was the emphasis that Tuckerman placed on forming
relationships with the poor in order to effect rehabilitation. This marks
a shift from the usual philanthropic approach which administered to
the poor within a paternalistic framework and with the underlying
intention being as much to secure the philanthropist’s soul in heaven
as to rescue the poor. Tuckerman’s approach illustrated Unitarianism in
its most practical form with the belief that all are equal in the eyes of
God as the guiding force. Wach (1993) points out that such an ethics
required much more than Christian benevolence. It shaped an approach
to poverty far removed from the focus of political economy on produc-
tion and labour; the emphasis on ‘the character, the mind, the soul’
could be seen as more closely related to what Rose (1999a) has described
as a ‘government of the soul’, though this can import its own problems.
Tuckerman’s work in the city had exposed the problems of neglected,

vagrant and delinquent children and as Manton points out ‘he had
become convinced that the cost of educating them would be far less in
the long run than allowing them to drift into delinquency’ (Manton,
1976: 50). By the time he visited Bristol he had already established a
farm school on Thompson Island in Massachusetts Bay, a model which
shared the underlying ethos of Mettray which was established in France
in 1840. It is worth noting that Thompson Island is still in use today
as an Outward Bound establishment. In 1833 it was the first vocational
school in America and established the first school band in the country.
The aim was to reclaim and rehabilitate vulnerable children by remov-
ing them from the ‘city jungle’ and placing them in an environment
which would enable them to acquire skills and receive practical and
emotional support.
During his time with Mary Carpenter, Tuckerman spoke enthusiastically
about his new venture:
He described the farm for outdoor work in summer, and the work-
shops where during the long New England winter the boys could
learn a variety of crafts. He described the special help for slow or
backward children, and the sympathetic counselling for disturbed
boys. Above all, he dwelt on the philosophy of child reclamation.
‘The school presents no vindictive or reproachful aspects. It threat-
ens no humiliating recollections of the past. It holds no degrading
denunciations for the future. It is to be regarded, not as a prison but
as a school.’ (Carpenter, M, 1849: 81)
There is an enormous contrast here with the existing provision then

available in England which as we saw imprisoned, brutally punished or
transported similar young people. Rather than seeing such children as
born criminal, or part of a criminal class which required harsh measures
to control them, Tuckerman differentiated between children in terms
of intellectual or emotional ability and shaped provision to meet their
needs. As he later wrote to Mary Carpenter on 30th March 1835:
I would look on every human being, however encrusted with dirt

and covered with rags however degraded by ignorance and debased
by sin, as still retaining in his soul the strongly defined linea-
ments however marred they may be, of the image of Himself there
impressed by the great Creator. The poorest, lowest, meanest human
being is a child of God. (Carpenter, M, 1849: 91)
Ragged Schools 105
Thus, for Unitarians, poverty, degradation and inequality were the

result of man’s actions and could thus be alleviated by individual and
collective intervention.
However, the most significant incident which would shape Mary
Carpenter’s future occurred during Tuckerman’s convalescence when
he had asked her to show him the poorest areas of Bristol. At that time,
Lewin’s Mead was the most notorious slum area in the city and it was
whilst they were walking there that an incident occurred which Mary
Carpenter later described as ‘the turning point in my life’. ‘One day as
they passed along beneath the shadow of abodes of vice, a miserable
ragged boy darted out of a dark entry, and rushed wildly across their
path. “That child” remarked Dr. Tuckerman “should be followed to his
home and seen after”. His words sank into my mind with a painful feel-
ing that a duty was being neglected’. (Carpenter, J.E., 1881: 35)
Tuckerman paid the family a second visit in 1834 and Lant Carpenter
subsequently established a Working and Visiting Society in Bristol which
he modelled on Tuckerman’s Boston society. Mary Carpenter took on
the role of secretary, keeping case records, maintaining accounts and
writing reports. She combined these activities with her other duties
in her father’s school as well as reading the reports which Tuckerman
produced in which he recorded his work in Boston. Her father edited
and published a selection of these under the title ‘Christian Service to
the Poor in Cities’. Mary studied these avidly and declared that she
intended to ‘devote my life entirely to aiding the poor and destitute’
(Manton, 1976: 52).
Two devastating bereavements would prevent her from being able
to fulfil her ambitions until she was middle aged. In 1839 her father
suffered a catastrophic breakdown and a London specialist advised
that he should take a ‘tour of the continent’, one of the few remedies
then available to treat psychiatric distress. It was during this trip that
he disappeared from the ship that he was travelling on sometime dur-
ing the evening of 4th April 1840. It was never clear whether he was
washed overboard or had thrown himself into the sea. In the autumn
of the same year Tuckerman also died during a sea voyage which he
had undertaken for health reasons. Her devastation led to a depression
which lasted for more than two years. She channelled her grief by pro-
ducing her first of two books: Morning and Evening Meditations published
in 1845 and dedicated to her father’s memory. As well as selections of
prose writings it contained poetry written by Mary, which would lead
to a significant friendship with Lady Byron, widow of the poet Byron
and a well-known philanthropist and benefactor who had recently
moved to Bristol and had already established a school for vagrant boys
in Ealing Grove. She was to become instrumental in enabling Mary
Carpenter to establish Industrial and Reformatory Schools by provid-
ing financial support. ‘Meditations’ was very successful in Britain and
America and provided her with the confidence to complete a memoir
of Dr. Tuckerman which was published in 1848, again to great acclaim
in both Britain and America.
It is perhaps indicative of Mary Carpenter’s inner strength that she
was able to recover by continuing her work both in the school and
amongst the poor in Bristol. A Domestic Mission had been set up in the
early 1840s, based on the Tuckerman model, that she chose to locate in
the savage and desolate area stretching between Lewin’s Mead meeting
house and the docks.
Her biographer has noted how difficult it was for Mary Carpenter to
cope with the demands required to work in such a deprived area: ‘again
and again, she had to force herself to take the walk down the hill, which
led into another world’ (Manton, 1976: 73), but she was full of deter-
mination, believing that ‘we should suffer sympathetic pain to teach us
to make efforts for our fellow creatures’ (Manton, 1976: 73). Her reward
lay in the developing relationships that she was able to make with those
she visited and which increased her confidence. Lewin’s Mead was also
the site where she opened her first school, in August 1846, having been
influenced by the work of the Unitarian shoemaker John Pounds who
had established the first experiment in working with ‘wild boys and girls’
in Portsmouth that initiated the Ragged School movement. Manton has
noted that ‘the schools were located in barns, old warehouses, under
railway arches; the children were those too noisy, dirty and wild to be
acceptable in National or British Schools even in the unlikely event of
their parents being able to pay fees’ (Manton, 1976: 82).
This first school which eventually moved to St. James Beck was in
operation for more than 25 years. Her mother recorded, on its opening,
how it was ‘literally a Ragged School; none have shoes or stockings,
some have no shirt, and no home, sleeping in casks on the quay, or
on steps, and living, I suppose by petty depredations’ (Carpenter, J.E.,
1888: 82).
By 1848 more than 500 children had attended, daily attendance was
never less than one hundred and sixty. The school was inspected by
HMI Joseph Fletcher who declared that: ‘He did not know of any other
ragged school where there was so large an amount of intellect and well-
directed effort exerted to raise the school, to train up self-acting beings
(Carpenter, J.E., 1888: 88).
Ragged Schools 107
Whilst the Ragged School, with its impressive curriculum, was suc-
cessful in drawing in the children of the streets or of the ‘lowly’ poor,
Carpenter became increasingly aware that there were children who
required more specialist intervention. She recorded how:
of the very first scholars whom I remember in our school at its com-
mencement six years ago, almost all have been since in prison, one
has been transported; the instruction given to them during a few
hours in the day could not counteract the hourly influences to evil
under which they had been brought up. (Carpenter, 1853: 338)
This was the recognition that something more was needed, namely,
intervention at the level of society as a whole to tackle the causes of
poverty and delinquency. Her involvement with the work of the Social
Science Association is central here, for that work, as we explained in the
Introduction, had as objectives the better understanding of social pro-
cesses and the lives of the poor in order to develop positive programmes
and policies that would change conduct and lives by changing the
social, political and economic framework within which people acted.
The project of reform through education
The 1850s marked the beginning of a new phase in terms of the juvenile
delinquency discourse. The 1850s to 1870s was also a period of industrial
progress and relative optimism that favoured reform (Goldman, 2002).
Yet, fear regarding the continued threat posed by the poor remained in
the forefront of policy-making. This was exacerbated by the ending of
transportation which resulted in the need for increased domestic provi-
sion, particularly for juveniles and children, and stimulated an increased
focus on what type of provision would best contain these offenders.
A difficulty for radical reformers is that they had to struggle against the
prevailing opinion that required retribution before reformation, and that
sheltered behind the belief that social inequality was natural or even
the will of God. It was in this context that Mary Carpenter emerged as a
formidable campaigner who faced constant opposition and frustration.
Mary Carpenter’s career spanned almost three decades during which time
she wrote numerous books and pamphlets, presented evidence to Select
Committees, convened the first conference on Preventive and Reformatory
Schools in 1851 and presented papers to every annual conference of the
National Association for the Promotion of Social Science between 1857 and
1876. In addition to these activities she continued to run the St. James Back
ragged school as well as establishing two further schools, Kingswood and

Red Lodge in which she put into practice her educational theories.
Carpenter’s first book, Reformatory Schools for the Children of the
Perishing and Dangerous Classes and for Juvenile Offenders (1851) was her
response to the ‘1847 Select Committee of the House of Lords on the
execution of the Criminal Law with particular emphasis on Juvenile
Offenders and Transportation’. This report presented statistics which
revealed that large numbers of young people and children continued
to be sent to prison despite growing evidence that imprisonment did
nothing but harm. The report recommended that ‘reformatory asylums’
should be established with the emphasis on reformation rather than
punishment. However, as was often the case at that time, no action had
been taken to implement the recommendations.
Carpenter’s response was to write a book with the aim of presenting
the facts regarding the juvenile delinquency question and recommend-
ing reforms based on her own views. This was a huge undertaking at a
time when serious books on major issues were written by men, moreover
by men who were professionally qualified. Undeterred, she undertook
18 months of research, which included grappling with parliamentary
reports and amassing statistical data in order to challenge the Utilitarian
political economists on their own terms; she also visited prisons so that
she could learn of conditions at first hand. In addition, she examined
institutions which had been established as ‘farm colonies’ in the USA
and in Europe in order to illustrate the poverty of provision in England.
She began her account by acknowledging that ‘the enormity and
amount of juvenile depravity is a subject which now most painfully
engages the public mind’ and goes on to describe the remedies which
have been tried and which have proved ineffectual, concluding that
‘none can prove effectual without setting right the main-spring of life,
which can be done only by education’ (Carpenter, M, 1852: 2).
This was a radical departure from the accepted practice of punish-
ment, imprisonment and also from the new ‘reformatories’ which were
beginning to emerge but which did not prioritise education. Thus, from
the beginning of her account she proposed to put education at the cen-
tre, but tailored according to the different needs of children, depending
on the categories of ‘perishing’ and ‘dangerous’ that her research had
prompted her to construct. As she explains:
that part of the community which we are to consider, consists of

those who have not yet fallen into actual crime, but who are almost
certain from their ignorance, destitution, and the circumstances in
which they are growing up, to do so, if a helping hand be not extended
Ragged Schools 109
to raise them; – these form the perishing classes: – and of those who
have already received the prison brand, or, if the mark has not been
yet visibly set upon them, are notoriously living by plunder, – who
unblushingly acknowledge that they can gain more for the support
of themselves and their parents by stealing than by working, – whose
hand is against every man, for they know not that any man is their
brother; – these form the dangerous classes. (Carpenter, M, 1852: 2)
Whilst there had been awareness earlier in the century of the ways in
which external factors relating to the environment and family func-
tioned as crucial conditions, these had largely been ignored in recent
years. Increasingly, the views of those such as William Miles, who
had identified the existence of a refractory ‘criminal class’, had been
embraced and informed policy. Whilst her description of the ‘dangerous
classes’ accommodated the prevalent fear of crime, she also argued that
the approach based on punishment alone further alienated them from
society. Furthermore, she drew attention to the inequalities of a system
which dealt very differently with ‘crimes’ according to the status of the
offender rather than the nature of the offence when she pointed out
that justice was weighted against those of the lower classes:
Such severity does not, indeed, affect the children of the higher and
more favoured classes of the community. Robbing orchards or hen-
roosts is regarded only as a clever feat in the gentleman’s son at a
public school; and while the boy who steals lead from the top of a
house is threatened with transportation on the next conviction,
stealing knockers from the door by a young student is considered
a spirited feat, to be punished, if at all, only by a fine and a repri-
mand. (Carpenter, M, 1852: 289)
She would return to this theme in her 1853 book Juvenile Delinquents,
Their Condition and Treatment, where she provided a more detailed
account of how such differences worked both in terms of justice and
provision and, importantly, public opinion which she saw as always
weighted against those whom she sought to represent.
In the Introduction to Juvenile Delinquents she provided an eloquent
account of the ways in which laws and justice were weighted against
those of the lower classes:
When do we hear of a child being brought to trial for his offences from
the higher classes of society? When do we see the children of parents
of respectable character appear before the magistrates? When do we
find fathers who live honestly bringing their sons up for punishment
for thefts committed on themselves? Yet every magistrate exercising his

duties in a large town, can testify how often such cases appear before
him from among the pariah class … – in the ‘perishing and dangerous
classes’, the child is, almost from infancy, exposed in his immature,
inexperienced, and untaught condition to face the dangers and share
the treatment of a man! In the more favoured portion of society, paren-
tal love shelters like a guardian angel tender childhood, defending it
from physical want, from spiritual danger. (Carpenter, M, 1853: 5)
The solution to such inequalities as she described here needed to be

addressed, she argued, through increased awareness, specific and tar-
geted provision to meet the educational and spiritual needs of the chil-
dren at risk and for the state to take on the protective and nurturing role
of the parents. These were revolutionary proposals at a time when the
New Poor Law principle of lower eligibility applying to the ‘undeserv-
ing poor’ dictated the level of assistance to the poor and their children.
In Reformatory Schools Carpenter sets out her arguments with refer-
ence to all the evidence that she had gathered in order to demonstrate
how her proposals for a targeted form of education was the solution for
a system that did not exclude children in trouble by banishing them to
prisons or to the colonies. Drawing from the principles that informed
her practice at her St James Beck School, she writes:
Behold them when the hand of wisdom and of love has shown them
a better way, and purified and softened their outward demeanour
and their inner spirit, in Schools well adapted to themselves, and
you hardly believe them to be separated by any distinct boundary
from the children who frequent the National and British Schools. Yet
there is, and will long be, a very strongly defined line of separation
between them, which must and ought to separate them, and which
requires perfectly distinct machinery and modes of operation in deal-
ing with them. (Carpenter, M, 1851: 3)
It is worth pointing out that her methods worked; Manton (1976: 94)
describes how Joseph Fletcher, an experienced HMI and Editor of The
Statistical Journal who had inspected the school in 1849, was ‘bowled
over’ by Carpenter’s achievements. He considered she had made ‘out of
the dregs of a large city a school as good as any paying day school’.
He singled out the ‘trained teachers, the good order, pleasing manners
and gentle tone of the school and the trusting friendliness of the children
which only wise and good treatment created’ (cited in Manton, 1976: 94).
Ragged Schools 111
At the same time, and perhaps surprisingly, she was careful to retain the
distinction between the types of children she has described and the chil-
dren of the ‘respectable’ working class, those who were fortunate enough
to be able to attend the schools then available which required financial
contributions from their parents. The ‘street arabs’ might benefit from
education, but it needed to be separate, differently organised and with
the boundaries between classes maintained. The three types of education
that she proposed were designed to cater for the specific needs of each
‘class’ of child that she had identified. There would be free day schools
for those children ‘as cannot attend other schools, from the poverty of
their parents, or from their own want of character or necessary clothing’
(Carpenter, M, 1851: 38). Industrial schools, with food given were for
‘those children, who, through extreme poverty or vice, subject themselves
to the interference of the police, for their vagrant and pilfering habits;
the attendance at these should be compulsory on all who will not attend
the Free School. These, as they are to deliver the public from a serious
nuisance, should be supported by a municipal or parochial rate’ (Carpenter,
M, 1851: 38); and finally, for those children who have already committed
crimes and been confined to prison, Reformatory Schools.
In arguing the case for the latter, she was careful in addressing the
economic arguments that would be brought to bear against her propos-
als and she sets out an impressive cost/benefit analysis to demonstrate
that her recommendations would ultimately result in savings, both in
the short term and in the longer term, and benefit society by producing
useful citizens. As she explains:
consider the prison system in reference to juvenile offenders, and

prove its usefulness, as well as costliness, from the testimonies of per-
sons eminently qualified to form a correct judgement on the subject.
Having shown the inefficiency and injurious tendency of the prison
system for juvenile offenders, various Reformatory Schools will be care-
fully examined, both as to their principles and their details; and their
applicability as substitutes for prisons, under suitable restrictions,
will be shown. (Carpenter, M, 1851: 39)
Reformatory Schools was an instant success, and was widely reviewed in

all the major publications of the time:
The Edinburgh Review called it the first book to treat the sub-
ject adequately. The Athenaeum said, ‘In seven brief but terrible
chapters she discusses some of the darkest problems that perplex
jurists and statesmen of our day’. Probably most influential with

the general public was a notice, under the title ‘Lambs to be Fed’,
in Dickens’s popular middle-class journal Household Words for
30th August 1851. This described the work of ‘an earnest, grave,
Christian lady, Miss Mary Carpenter’ as ‘not only of national, but
one would think of personal interest to every thoughtful citizen’.
(Manton, 1976: 103)
Buoyed by the success of the book, Carpenter embarked on an extraor-

dinary mission to gain support by convening and organising a public
conference on juvenile delinquency which she organised to take place
in Birmingham on 10th December 1851. The object of the conference
was set out to be:
a consideration of the Condition of the Treatment of the ‘Perishing

and Dangerous Classes’ of Children and Juvenile Offenders with
a view of procuring such Legislative Enactments as may produce
a beneficial change in their Actual Condition and their Prospects…
In this statement of the object of the Conference it is assumed that
society has a right to protect itself from the injury and loss which
it at present suffers from this class of children; - that the existing
system does not so deter or reform as to protect society, and that
Education, including both instruction and training, is the only
means of effecting any material diminution of juvenile crime.
(Carpenter, M, 1853: 331)
Carpenter’s central and innovative objective was to protect children

from the destructive influences inherent in a society with such deep
social divisions as existed at that time, which meant that it was impor-
tant to turn attention to the conditions which she argued produced
juvenile delinquency.
Taking the model of the three types of schools that she had set out in
Reformatory Schools, the conference passed resolutions for their adoption
and recommended that a committee be established ‘to adopt such meas-
ures as they may think desirable in order to obtain the requisite parlia-
mentary enactments, as well as to prepare a memorial to the Committee
of Privy Council, and for the attainment of the specific objects laid
down in the foregoing resolutions’ (Carpenter, M, 1853: 333).
However, whilst the conference was successful in terms of a broad
agreement that legislation was needed to address the issues it also
Ragged Schools 113
revealed a huge gulf between what Carpenter envisaged and what the
majority of participants believed was required:
Mary Carpenter became aware of divergences of view which seemed

to her to imperil her most cherished objects. These differences
appeared to her to result from opposing conceptions of the sig-
nificance and purposes of punishment. She desired to lay the whole
stress on reformation; others recognised a further element of retribu-
tion. The two ideas naturally led to different modes of treatment: the
one applied severity of discipline, the other relied on the power of
just but gentle influence. (Carpenter, J, 1881: 129)
And of course the problem was that the gulf represented the huge differ-
ence that existed between Unitarians such as Carpenter and Anglicans
such as Sydney Turner who was the Chaplain at the Philanthropic Societies
reformatory, Redhill, and who would become the first Government
Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial Schools in 1857. Turner proposed:
exposure to weather and cold … diet studiously plain … no hot slops,

cocoa, soup or gruel … no attractive dress, but plain rough clothing.
Let there be no high education but only plain, useful instruction.
(cited in Manton, 1976, 106)
And the Rev. John Clay, a Prison Chaplain who was widely acknowl-
edged as an authority on crime and punishment, believed that:
fourteen days preliminary imprisonment far too short a term. He was a

strong believer in the ‘softening effect of solitary confinement and
suggested that three months discipline in a separate cell would make a
lad attach a proper value to the more active life and advantages of a
school. He also thought the expense of school-training could only be
justified where three or four ordinary prison-sentences had failed.
(cited in Manton, 1976, 106)
Indeed, Carpenter had written to Clay arguing that ‘crime is a moral

disease. The young criminals placed in the school must be treated as
moral patients, for whom cure we should, as Christians, apply the best
remedies in the widest way’ (Carpenter, J.E., 1881: 129).
In essence, whilst Turner, Clay and others were convinced that placing
juveniles in adult prisons was an abhorrent practice in need of reform,
they still believed firmly that punishment should remain central to any
new provision. Thus whilst there was agreement that prison was not a
suitable environment for young offenders, it was clear that the reforma-
tory model that the majority of participants at the conference had in
mind was more akin to Parkhurst (a place that Carpenter detested) than
to Mettray which more enlightened campaigners wished to adopt. She
had written to Mr. Thomson of Banchory making the point that if the
committee were to succeed then it would lead to ‘a multiplication of
Parkhursts, instead of Mettrais and Red Hills’ (cited in Manton, 1976:
106). It is important to underline that the divisions amongst reformers
reflect another crucial split we discussed in our Introduction, namely,
that between the ‘radical liberals’ and socialists who prioritised ethical
principles, and more classical liberals who prioritised the free market
and the law when deciding on which programmes to support; this split
has lasted into present times.
However, Carpenter was undeterred by the divisions and when she
was summoned to give evidence to the Select Committee on Criminal
and Destitute Children in 1852 and asked how a school should treat
children convicted of serious offences, she replied:
I would enlist the will of the child in the work, and without this
I do not think that any true reformation can be effected. I would
next consider the nature of the child, as a child. I think that there
should be a degree of confidence shown to the children, which will
make them feel that they are workers together with their teachers.
(HCPP: Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Children,
1852: VII 1ff: 515)
In response to an objection from one of the Commissioners that this

was hardly punishment for juvenile crime, Carpenter replied:
but we ought in the first place to consider the position of these chil-
dren in regard to society. I consider society owes retribution to them,
just as much as they owe it to society or in fact more. If society leaves
them knowingly in the state of utter degradation in which they
are, I think it absolutely owes them reparation, far more than they
can be said to owe reparation to it. (HCPP: Select Committee, 1852:
VII 1ff: 516)
These statements illustrate the extent to which her views were revo-
lutionary at a time when the children she was representing were
Ragged Schools 115
considered little more than vermin; indeed she would point out in
Juvenile Delinquents (1853) that:
the mass of society are better acquainted with the actual condition
of remote savage nations, than with the real life and the springs of
action of these children, whose true nature is less visible to the public
eye when collected in a Ragged School, or swarming in by-streets,
than is the state of little heathen children as exhibited in the Reports
of Missionaries. (Carpenter, M, 1853: xxxix)
Her evidence to the committee was consistent with her strong beliefs
and demonstrate the extent to which she always considered a child,
especially a ‘criminal’ child, as being in need of treatment based on her
‘first principles’ which insisted that:
love must be the ruling sentiment of all who attempt to influence

and guide these children. This love must indeed be wise as well as
kind … None can tell but those who have witnessed it, the respon-
sive love which is awakened in the heart of one of these forsaken
ones by a kind look or word, or the purifying effect of the feeling,
now by man experienced for the first time, that they are ‘loved for
themselves’. Love draws with human cords far stronger than chains
or iron. (Carpenter, M, 1851: 74)
Ultimately, however, the differences between Carpenter and the rest of

the reformatory movement resulted in her decision to open her own
reformatories where she would put her theories into practice. With
financial assistance from private benefactors she opened Kingswood
Reformatory in 1852 and subsequently established the first girls’
reformatory, Red Lodge, in October 1854. In 1857 she established Park
Row, an Industrial School for the ‘street Arabs’ of Bristol. She continued
to work in her schools until her death in 1877.
By December 1854 when the Conference on Juvenile Delinquency
held its annual meeting it was clear that the gulf between Carpenter’s
ideas and the rest of the reformatory movement had widened further,
as Manton (1976: 122) points out: ‘It is clear now that the believers in
punishment and austerity were in a comfortable majority’. There was
a firm belief that the ‘reformatory movement must be willing to adapt
in deference to public opinion’ (1976: 122), and of course public opin-
ion was of the view that these children needed to be punished. Whilst
Carpenter attempted to fight on the basis that public opinion needed
to be reformed there was little support. Indeed, it was at this conference

that the committee proposed a religious test ‘to get rid of Unitarians
and Roman Catholics’, in other words of Demetz and Mary Carpenter
(Manton, 1976: 122).
However, Carpenter’s overall contribution, through her books, her
evidence to parliamentary committees and her relentless campaign-
ing, had both stimulated debate and led directly to changes in the law.
In 1854 the Reformatory Schools Act was passed which addressed the
needs of Carpenter’s ‘dangerous classes’, and in 1857 the Industrial
Schools Bill was passed which ensured provision for ‘the rescue, care
and protection of younger children who were in danger of becoming
delinquent’, in other words those whom Carpenter had defined as
belonging to the ‘perishing classes’. The Act gave Magistrates the power
to sentence children between the ages of seven and fourteen to a spell in
one of these institutions rather than prison. Reformatory and Industrial
Schools were merged, in 1933, to create the Approved School System.
Concluding remarks: punishing, normalising and

biopolitics
Within the space of a few years Carpenter had made a significant con-
tribution to the reformatory movement; she continued to campaign
on behalf of poor children through her writings, her contributions to
parliamentary committees and in extending her work to India. And
some of her initiatives, for example, her pioneering girls’ reformatory
survived until 1917. However, whilst she and people like Demetz and
Tuckerman had always stressed education as the single most important
element in any programme for rescuing delinquent children, particu-
larly an education that valued each child as a unique individual, this
vital element was lost in state reformatories. The latter developed as
institutions which provided for the separation of juveniles from adult
prisoners but retained much of the ethos of punishment and retribution,
with education playing a minor role. This strategy of constituting differ-
ent populations of children for education is consistent with techniques
of normalisation through different disciplinary regimes, as Foucault
has explained (2007, 1981b). It could be argued that the difference in
approach between Carpenter and the Reformatory Schools movement
rests on the different interest which they promote: Carpenter had the
interest of the most disadvantaged and excluded children foremost in
her projects, whilst for the state reformers it was the interest of the good
order of society, security, particularly of property, the management of
Ragged Schools 117
labour and respect for the law. So, on the one hand, a governmental-
ity framed by political economy, and, on the other hand, an ethics of
responsibility for the other that, whilst tempered by realism, put into
practice a quite different view of human beings and society.
We know that the radical departures we have described were increas-
ingly marginalised as new explanations, this time drawing from Social
Darwinism and the new sciences of biology and genetics in the latter
decades of the 19th century, heralded a return to the ‘sui generis’ type of
explanations promoted by W. Miles and others. As Manton (1976: 245)
noted, ‘The average member of the public, somewhat in awe of modern
science, reluctantly accepted that deviant or anti-social behaviour was
biologically caused, and ceased to believe in Mary Carpenter’s theories
of social handicap’.
The genealogy of exclusion we have constructed, by uncovering the
submerged ‘knowledges from below’, reveals the underlying struggles
going on that themselves functioned as an important element amongst
the conditions of possibility for the kinds of institutions and specific
practices which emerged and have become institutionalised and nor-
malised. It throws light on current issues and debates about exclusion
by revealing the stakes in the formative period of governmentality,
stakes which relate to the effects of inequality and poverty, and to alter-
native pedagogical and ethical principles.
This chapter shows that at a crucial point in England there emerged
new techniques for dealing with ‘delinquent’ and troubled children,
developing equally in parts of the USA and Europe, which were more
explicitly committed to genuine inclusion. These techniques involved
the recognition of the class basis for inequalities and poverty and its
psychological and emotional consequences, whilst liberal governmen-
tality chose to foreground individual responsibility, innate defects and
inadequate or criminal environment. This basic division has remained
over the years, although ‘progressivism’ and its inclusionary goals
seemed to prevail during the period of the Welfare State until the era of
neo-liberalism in the UK has gradually returned to the cold and abstract
values of the market and accounting practice.
7
Mettray: Normalisation or Rescue?
When we were in Mettray there was only – and this is

much more persuasive – a hedge of laurels and a strip of
flowers; carnations and pansies. It’s much more difficult
to escape when it’s simply a question of crossing through
a patch of flowers than if there’s a wall for you to climb.
(Genet: 1991/2004: 191)
Jean Genet’s judgement of Mettray refers to the institution after it

had become incorporated as one of the French state’s educational
apparatuses. His description intimates the insidious character of
techniques of normalisation that get below the skin and into the
mind and secures conformity through invisible psychological and
affective binds. It agrees with Foucault’s view that normalisation aims
to produce docile subjects. Our question is not about normalisation
as a technique for the government of conduct but about whether
Foucault’s location of Mettray in the 19th century as part of the car-
ceral system misses something more important from the point of view
of counter-history and genealogy. Our argument is that it belongs to
the different series we have been constructing, whereby Carpenter’s
work relays Mettray and similar dissident and oppositional ini-
tiatives and movements, in establishing the existence of alternative
approaches to exclusion which worked, and that put more emancipa-
tory principles into practice.
For Foucault, then, Mettray is the place where the focus on the
body and on disciplinary techniques introduces new ways to change-
recalcitrant individuals’ behaviour and sense of themselves so that
they may re-integrate ‘normal’ society and become useful labour. For
us, Mettray stands out not only as a haven for destitute children who
118
Mettray: Normalisation or Rescue? 119
would otherwise be destined for a life of crime and insecurity, it applies

lessons learned from the reform movement in the UK, USA and parts of
Europe to invent new methods of schooling that prioritises the wellbe-
ing and rehabilitation of vulnerable and troubled children.
The contrast is clear: on the one hand, Mettray belongs to a history
of governmentality in which the Utilitarian, calculative interests of the
economy predominates; education there would simply serve biopolitics.
On the other hand, Mettray and other institutions like it belong to a
history of a critical genealogy that shows what resistances there were to
governmental power, what forms they took, what different values and
goals motivated them, what relays existed that linked distinct struggles
into a radical political culture.
Some elements belong to both histories, in that the state plays a role,
even if in the case of Mettray by approving or authorising the settle-
ment; additionally, one must recognise the role played by the social
sciences in the development of some of the techniques and understand-
ings common to both the regimes associated with technologies of the
social (Foucault, 1976) and alternative pedagogies. One should point
out too that different discourses, different, often conflicting, interests
are played out in how the elements are configured in practice. Thus in
terms of the location of Mettray as a point of relay or as a node in a
genealogy one can distinguish the following:
• An official discourse, expressed in government reports, policy state-

ments, legal provisions, institutional briefs and the like.
• A scientific discourse, about delinquency, crime, deviation, patholo-
gies, and so on. increasingly, from the second half of the 19th century,
developed in psychology, sociology and medical discourse.
• A critical discourse, such as Foucault’s own interpretation of Mettray
within his analysis of power and governmentality.
• A humanitarian, reformist or alternative/progressivist set of discourses
differently positioned according to circumstances which is more con-
cerned with the care of children, with moral and ethical issues, and
ideas of the ‘whole-child’ as the focus of intervention. This opposi-
tional or dissenting discourse has informed alternative education.
It is not possible to deal in detail with all of these developments.

However, showing the dynamic interaction amongst them provides a
way of understanding the conditions of possibility for developments
like Mettray. Furthermore one can then reconstruct the shifts that occur
later on in the 19th and in the 20th century, for example, the increasing
medicalisation and psychologisation of the ‘disruptive’ or ‘delinquent’

child and the changes in educational policy alongside these shifts.
Whilst Foucault used the example of Mettray to illustrate his thesis
that normalisation is achieved through the carceral network, he ignored
the significance of poverty, class and subjectivity in shaping life chances
and regimes of disciplining and punishment. In addition, his account
focussed on the discursive regime and the exercise of power from above,
and he thus did not take account of the alternatives actually available
at the time, why reform was necessary as well as other explanations for
Mettray’s early success. We suggest that Foucault ignored the possibil-
ity of Mettray as a dynamic transitional space which those who created
it tried to give concrete shape to: Blouet, the architect who advocated
using architecture to realise social reform, Demetz, the judge who
founded it with the aim of reclaiming disadvantaged young offenders
through reproducing an ideal family, as well as those who aspired to
develop similar institutions such as Carpenter, driven by universalist,
humanitarian and radical commitments.
Demetz’ Mettray: healing, holding, guiding, teaching
When Mettray opened as an agricultural colony in January 1840, it

represented an innovative experiment in provision for young crimi-
nals. France was experiencing similar problems to England in terms
of increased crime particularly committed by juveniles. And, as with
England, incarceration in adult prisons was the only option available.
We noted earlier that the response in England had been to establish a
separate juvenile prison with conditions which were clearly influenced
by the American establishments documented by William Crawford.
However, whilst Frederik Demetz and his colleague, the architect Blouet,
had also toured the USA and produced an influential report for the
French government, the institution which was established in Mettray
was profoundly different. Demetz was convinced that different and
unique provision may provide a more positive answer to what seemed
an insoluble problem. In his role as a judge, Demetz had become increas-
ingly concerned at the backgrounds of the young people who were
brought before him. As he said:
my attention was drawn to the subject of reforming young offenders

by the number of children brought before me in the performance
of my duty as a judge at Paris. Many of these were no higher than
my desk, and, as there were at that time no establishments for the
reformation of juveniles only, I was obliged to consign all to prisons,

where they were associated with grown up criminals, most of them
hardened of their class, where, moreover, the treatment for children
was the same as for adults, and which consequently, I knew to be
utterly unfit for them. (Report in The Times, 8th October 1855)
His solution was to found a ‘Societé Paternelle’, a small association of

sympathetic individuals who disseminated information and organised
fundraising as the first step towards founding Mettray. In the first
annual report published in June 1840 Demetz described how:
our aim was to rescue young offenders from the influence of a prison
life, and to replace the walls with which they had been surrounded
by liberty and labour in the open air. We proposed by persuasive
influence, by justice and kindness accompanied by strict discipline,
to reclaim lads who, from their infancy upward had never received
any moral training, and had been subjected to no other restraint
than that of brute force; we proposed in short, to turn ignorant and
dangerous vagrant lads into good, industrious and useful member of
society. (cited in Barnard, H: Reformatory Education: 1857: 168)
What Demetz identified here, much as Carpenter had done, was the
extent to which external conditions contributed to the downfall of the
‘dangerous and vagrant lads’. He rejected the belief in a ‘criminal class’
which had dominated debates in England and ensured that a retribu-
tive disciplinary approach determined provision. Demetz demonstrated
a belief in the possibility of change through ‘justice and kindness’ and,
whilst he mentions also the need for ‘strict discipline’, this was always
seen as a last resort. He examined the conditions which produced
unwanted and criminal behaviour and then planned provision which
would compensate for what was absent. A central feature of this pro-
ject was the idea of reproducing family life as a form of healing rather
than the confinement and punishment experienced in prison. He was
influenced by existing organisations such as the Orphan House of
Pestalozzi which opened in Switzerland in 1775 and the Raugh Hause
which had opened in Germany in 1833. Also, he had been sent by the
French government to inspect agricultural colonies already established
in Belgium, Holland and Germany. He was most impressed by what he
saw at the Raugh Hause which operated a family system. Indeed, he
was quite explicit in placing responsibility for the situation in society
itself which ‘is answerable for its neglect of these young persons. They
are abandoned to misery, and therefore, to mischief. Society owes it

to herself and to them, rather to prevent, than to punish their crimes’
(Demetz, cited in Barnard, 1857: 21).
In framing the problem in this way he shifted the agenda from punish-
ment, to that of prevention which, with evidence from other European
countries cited above, could be seen to be more effective. Demetz was
fortunate in that he had power and influence on his side which meant
that his views were listened to and his proposed experiment attracted
powerful supporters: the land on which Mettray was built was donated
by Vicomte de Bretiginerès de Courteilles, financial donors including
members of the Royal family, and with the assistance of the architect
Blouet the project was soon underway.
Given that the aim of Mettray was to reproduce family life, the con-
tribution of Blouet was critical. Demetz was clear that he did not want a
penitentiary-style building; as Ripley pointed out, ‘Demetz quite inten-
tionally took on the family structure as metaphor for that of Mettray’
(Ripley, 2006: 404). Thus the design would provide a challenge for
Blouet who, by 1839, was Inspecteur Général des Prisons for the French
Government. He had become an authority on prison design follow-
ing the period spent researching American prisons and subsequently
had been involved in designing more than 50 prisons all along the
Bentham-inspired panopticon type. The challenge would be to create
a different environment, one which would be an external representa-
tion of Demetz’ imagined community, serving as the ‘good’ family for
the dispossessed youth. Demetz was convinced that it was the absence
or failure of the family which led to the downfall of the young people
who then became vagrant or criminal. Blouet’s plan for Mettray owed
much to the ‘utopian projects of the social reformers of its time, such
as Fourier in France and Robert Owen in England’ (Ripley, 2006: 403).
Fourier emphasised an agrarian-handicraft self-sufficient community
whilst Owen stressed the role of education. One finds similar thinking
in the long history of the reformatory movement in Europe, as Barnard
has noted:
to Switzerland belongs the credit of having first applied the principles

of domestic and agricultural training for the reformation of young
criminals, and to the still higher purpose of preventing pauperism
and crime, by incorporating these principles into the early educa-
tion of orphan, pauper and neglected children. The Orphan House
of Pestalozzi at Neuhof opened in 1775, in which he lived with his
pupils as a friend, pastor, and teacher and on which he expended all
his limited means; the Rural School for indigent children, established
be Fellenberg in 1805 … the Agricultural Normal School of Vehrl, at
Krutzlingen. … The Reform School of Kuralti at Bachtelen, near Bere,
for vicious and offending boys. (Barnard, 1857: 15)
Those involved in the development of the reformatory movement,

such as Demetz and Carpenter, saw such establishments as providing
a radical alternative to incarceration in prison for children and young
offenders:
Life in the fields supplies a remedy for all the evils we have speci-
fied. Vigorous exercise in the open air strengthens the body; and
the spectacle of the beauties of nature excites in the human heart a
profound sentiment of admiration and gratitude toward the Creator.
(Demetz, 1855, cited in Barnard, 1857: 148)
And here Demetz identifies one of the key features of the alternative
reformatory movement, namely, the importance given to the healing
and beneficial effects of nature. Thus the ‘agricultural colony’ (Mettray);
‘farm schools’ and others identified above shared a common vision. It
is a vision which was a central defining feature of the Mettray project.
Indeed, the emphasis on rural settings, work with animals and activities
involving making things and cultivation are today advocated by some
people dealing with troubled or disadvantaged children as effective
forms of rehabilitation and learning.
The eventual design reproduced that of a small, self-contained village:
a series of houses each of which would contain 40 ‘colons’ or settlers
and their teacher, a chapel, an infirmary, a training school for teachers
and a director’s house where Demetz lived until his death. Barnard, who
visited it, described it as consisting ‘of a series of houses, each of a par-
ticular construction, and each adapted to a family of forty persons. Each
family has its own yard, fruit trees and kitchen garden. The whole is not
enclosed by brick walls, or high palisades, but by low, green hedges, over
which any person could climb, and through which a boy, so disposed
could easily creep without drawing attention’ (Barnard, 1857: 21).
However, why would a boy wish to escape from this environment? For
many this was their first experience of living in an environment which
was designed to meet their needs, provide shelter, warmth, food as well
as the opportunity to become part of a community, to be educated not
just in terms of skills but in taking responsibility for themselves and oth-
ers. The family system operated through trust and the implementation
of democratic principles with rewards for achievement. In a report for

the Minister of Justice in Belgium, M. Ducpétiaux reported that:
the classification by families establishes among the pupils who com-

pose them a sort of community of interest and a bond of brother-
hood. All feel under obligation to each and each to all. From time
to time are held general meetings of the pupils in the workshops;
the children decide on each others’ merits, and the highest receive a
small individual reward which is placed in the savings bank. (cited
in Barnard, 1857: 223)
Demetz demonstrated that the young people who entered the colony
were capable of positive change when placed in the right environment,
thus challenging the belief that criminality was inherent. In responding
to criticism that the discipline of Mettray destroyed family feeling, he
responded by pointing out that:
Mettray does not receive children from their homes, but from pris-
ons in which place the life they pursue is very different from that of
a domestic hearth; and further, that almost all these poor children
have been led to evil precisely because they have no families or only
such as do them harm. From its foundation to the 1st January 1856
the colony of Mettray has received 1,984 juvenile offenders. Of this
number there are: 346 illegitimate children, 376 children who have
lost father or mother or both, 116 foundling, 304 children who have
a stepfather or stepmother, 117 children whose parents live in con-
cubinage, 408 children whose parents have been convicted. What
does Mettray do for them? The very first principle called into action
at the colony is the esprit de famille. It therefore does not destroy
but restores this feeling in our young delinquents. (cited in Barnard,
1857: 213)
Demetz also extended the idea of family beyond the time that a young
person was resident in the colony. From their reception into Mettray
when the Directors (Demetz and Vicomte de Brétiginerès de Courteilles)
would accompany them from the prison, seeing the journey as a valua-
ble opportunity to spend time with the young person, learn about their
character and history and thus decide which of the ‘families’ would
best suit their needs. Contact was maintained throughout their period
at Mettray and after they left. For example, if they were situated locally
they were able to spend Sundays back with their family. ‘The same place
is laid for them at the family table which they had used to occupy; they
kneel at the same altar with their former school fellows; they dine with
them, and join them in their sports’ (Barnard, 1857: 715).
Any period of unemployment or sickness was similarly catered for ‘…
we claim the privilege of alleviating his sufferings and sorrow, as a father
does of his children … If he loses his employment, is overwhelmed with
difficulties, or falls sick, the colony is always open to him; it is a home for
him’ (Barnard, 1857: 715). In these key areas, the after care, the real sense
of responsibility and obligation of the ‘father’ to the ‘child’, Demetz’
Mettray went far beyond any other similar institution at the time.
Foucault’s Mettray: normalisation through the Carceral
Mettray, a punitive model, is at the limit of strict penal-

ity. It was the most famous of a whole series of institu-
tions which, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law
constituted what one might call the carceral archipelago.
(Foucault,1979a: 296)
In the final chapter of Discipline and Punish, Foucault selects Mettray

as representing the ‘completion of the carceral system’ (1979a: 293), a
system which he describes as ‘the carceral network, in its compact or
disseminated forms, with its system of insertion, distribution, surveil-
lance, observation, has been the greatest support, in modern society, of
the normalizing power’ (Foucault, 1979a: 304).
For Foucault, the introduction of the ‘carceral’ represents a critical
moment in which the body, rather than being the site for retributory
punishment, becomes a site whereby the individual is subjected to a dis-
ciplinary regime which works from the inside out: that is, the new puni-
tive process with its emphasis on incarceration, silent systems, enforced
labour and intense scrutiny is intended to ‘re-form’ the inmate’s very
subjectivity. The desired result is for the individual to become ‘nor-
malised’ and return to society as a productive worker. The regime of
‘re-formation’ is thus intended to become more coercive, subtle and
effective, operating through the ‘government of the soul’ (Rose, 1999a).
Foucault thus hails Mettray as the cradle in which all the techniques
he identifies as belonging to the normalisation process are nurtured: it
‘is the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which are
concentrated all the coercive technologies of behaviour. In it were to
be found “cloister, prison, school, regiment”’ (Foucault, 1979a: 293).
He goes on to list every aspect of life there as elements of ‘coercive
technologies of behaviour’, from the arrival at the colony where every

detail of the child is extracted during ‘a sort of interrogation’ (1979a:
294) to the ‘training’ which he sees as the intervention by ‘technicians of
behaviour’ (1979a: 294) whose task was ‘to produce bodies that were
both docile and capable’ (1979a: 294). In addition, such training was
accompanied by ‘permanent observation’ through which ‘a body of
knowledge was being constantly built up from the everyday behaviour
of the inmates; it was organised as an instrument of perpetual assess-
ment’ (Foucault, 1979a: 294).
Thus, Foucault’s Mettray exists in the final chapter of Discipline and
Punish as a stark and forbidding institution more akin to Parkhurst;
at times it is a ‘school’, at other times a ‘prison’ or ‘penitentiary’ and
always functioning as a site where ‘submissive subjects are produced’.
Whilst Foucault suggests that his choice of Mettray was arbitrary
(1979a: 296), it is difficult to reconcile his representation of the agri-
cultural colony with the contemporary accounts presented by Demetz,
Barnard, Ducpétiaux, Carpenter and the many others who visited and
wrote accounts at that time. What is clear is that Mettray was a very
different establishment from any that existed in France at that time. It
existed in a space outside state control; in the early years it was financed
through private donations; it operated its own separate school for train-
ing teachers and its methods were radical. It was set up to provide safety,
stability and opportunities through education and training which
ensured that the young person would re-enter the world equipped with
the necessary skills to begin a different life. In trying to recreate a fam-
ily as holding a safe place, it also indirectly recognised the destructive
effect of traumatic family experiences on young people, something yet
to be fully institutionally recognised in practices of exclusion in the
UK today. This combination of factors makes it difficult to understand
how it comes to occupy the space that Foucault ascribes to it, that of ‘a
prison, but not entirely’ (1979a: 296).
Interestingly Foucault does recognise that the alternative to Mettray,
namely, prison, simply reproduces the problem ‘although it is true that
prison punishes delinquency, delinquency is for the most part produced
in and by an incarceration which, ultimately, prison perpetuates in its
turn’ (Foucault, 1979a :301). In his analysis, however, he fails to take
account of the extent to which poverty and class were (and still are) the
main contributory factors which resulted in the ‘criminal acts’ by the
young delinquents.
We suggest that Foucault’s analysis of Mettray is overdetermined by
the fact that for him the crux of the matter is that Mettray occupies
a key point within the transformation which occurs throughout the
previous century and which he suggested ensures ‘that, in penal jus-

tice, the prison transformed the punitive procedure into a penitentiary
technique; the carceral archipelago transported this technique from
the penal institution to the entire social body’ (Foucault, 1979a: 298).
Thus, the argument which for Foucault over-rides the good intentions
of institutions like Mettray is that the non-coercive techniques devel-
oped at such places have subsequently been deployed throughout the
entire social body to more effectively ensure docility and conformity.
Targeted individuals thereby come to accept norms as normal and
good, by interiorising them or by making them his own, thus in a sense
‘owning’ them. Subjectification requires this recognition of the ‘right-
fulness’ of norms and their interiorisation, which Foucault explains
through the effects of power as dispersed throughout the social body
and operating beyond the surface only of bodies, reaching the ‘soul’ of
individuals. Mettray appears, within this account, as an ideal institu-
tion where this new form of subjectifying power becomes concretised:
in the design of the building, in the agents, in the activities and in the
formation of dispositions. But in locating Mettray within a genealogy
of normalisation and the carceral, Foucault neglects the political and
economic context which motivated its creation. The most obvious, as
we have been arguing, is the different ethos which has determined the
workings and purpose of institutions like Mettray, an ethos inscribed in
the early penitentiary in Philadelphia, or in the establishments outside
the penal justice system such as Pestalozzi and Raugh Hause, dedicated
to the rescue of poor children within an educational and social welfare
model. That ethos, as we have pointed out, was opposed to that which
motivated the supporters of liberal political economy and the utilitarian
model of social policy.
A similar divide continues to operate today splitting on the one hand
supporters of a neo-biopolitics that regulates the population accord-
ing to the values of neoliberal capitalism, and, on the other hand, the
advocates of more egalitarian politics. The issue therefore is an ethical
one and not simply one about governmentality. And there is an issue
relating to the archival material he relied on, for he constructs the case
against Mettray through his interpretation of the documents written at
the time by Ducpétiaux in 1851 rather than the original reports which
were produced each year by the Société Paternelle; indeed it was these
accounts which Ducpétiaux used as the basis for his reports to the
Belgian government at whose behest he had visited Mettray in the 1850s.
Demetz referred to Ducpétiaux in a speech he gave to the International
Conference of Charity held in Paris in 1855 where he discussed Ruyseded
in Belgium which was ‘under the admirable direction of our distinguished
fellow labourer M. Ducpétiaux and which may be considered a model

establishment’ (Demetz, 1855 cited in Barnard, 1857: 147).
For example, in choosing the 22nd January 1840, ‘the date of the offi-
cial opening of Mettray’ as the date for ‘the completion of the carceral’,
Foucault goes on to state ‘Or better still, perhaps, that glorious day,
unremarked and unrecorded, when a child in Mettray remarked as he
lay dying: “What a pity I left the colony so soon” (Ducpétiaux, 1852:
383). This marked the death of the first penitentiary saint’ (Foucault,
1979a: 293).
However, the account of this death was both remarked and recorded
in full detail in this account provided at the time:
A melancholy incident which we must not pass over in silence, will

convince you of their sensibility. For the first time since the founda-
tion of the colony, into which one hundred and forty three children
have been admitted, we have a death to record. This loss was a very
deep affliction to us, rendered the more severe by the gentleness
and pious resignation of the poor child who died. Seized before he
departed from Clairvaux (the prison from which he came) with a
fatal disorder, he never left the infirmary during the fortnight he
remained with us. A few minutes before his death, he said, “It is sad
indeed to leave the colony so soon”. His strength no longer permit-
ting him to raise himself in bed, he begged the chef of the family to
which he belonged, and who had watched all night beside him, to
bend down, and kissing him, thanked him for all his kindness … His
companions attended his funeral and we made the ceremony deeply
impressive. The words pronounced at the edge of the grave produced
a great effect on our lads, all wept, and no doubt they will retain a
solemn remembrance of a scene witnessed by them for the first time.
You well know, gentlemen, how these things are managed in our
prisons. (Demetz, May 1841, cited in Barnard, 1857: 675)
The details provided by Demetz provide a wider context within which

to understand the significance of the death of one whom Foucault
described as ‘the first penitentiary saint’. The considerable difference
from a prison regime is striking, as is the very different ethos in opera-
tion at Mettray with the description of the care extended both to the
victim and to the other colonists. It suggests that opportunities for
educating the colonists were embedded within the way of life in the
colony much as would happen within a family where death is mourned
and success is celebrated.
However, for Foucault all the elements which marked Mettray out as
‘different’ are made to serve as further evidence of its location within
the ‘carceral archipelago’:
Heads or deputy head of ‘families’, monitors and foremen, had to

live in close proximity to the inmates; their clothes were ‘almost as
humble’ as those of the inmates themselves; they practically never
left their side observing them day and night; they constituted among
them a network of permanent observation. (Foucault, 1979a: 295)
In contrast, Carpenter described how:
the accommodation, dress, food etc. of all the inmates, officers as well
as boys, are of the plainest description. M. Demetz lays it down as a
principle that self-denial in yourself is the essential condition of useful-
ness to others, and he teaches this in his own example, living himself
in all respects as he requires the officers and boys to do … Nothing
is merely routine, merely mechanical, all is pervaded and animated
with the real earnest character of the resident director. … The boy
feels that his master is not a mere officer to watch him and enforce
discipline, or a mere instructor to teach him, but is a relation, – a friend –
to sympathize with him and assist him. (Carpenter, 1851: 327)
A similar contrast concerns Foucault’s and Carpenter’s view of the role

of training at Mettray, the other innovation introduced by Demetz,
when he established a training school for those who would work in the
colony. Writing about the innovatory training school Demetz estab-
lished, Foucault says:
in order to train them themselves a specialized school had been

organized in the colony. The essential element of its programme was
to subject the future cadres to the same apprenticeships and to the
same coercions as the inmates themselves … They were taught the
art of power relations. It was the first training college in pure disci-
pline. (Foucault, 1979a: 295)
However, at the time, Demetz had recognised that the success or failure
of Mettray depended on the skills and qualities of those employed to
work alongside him. Carpenter described how:
a great portion of the singular success which has attended the efforts
of the directors is attributable to the attention paid to the education
and training of the masters, and the youngest assistants. M. Demetz

commenced his operations by establishing a Normal School, and by
devoting himself for some months to the education and prepara-
tion of young men to undertake the superintendence of the families
which he proposed to form. There is still a Normal School attached
to the colony, in which there are always from 12–18 pupils, prepar-
ing to replace the masters. (Carpenter, 1851: 328)
At stake in these conflicting readings is whether cases like Mettray

should be located within a history of biopolitical governmentality and
its political economic interest of making good, hard-working citizens
and saving money, or within the alternative genealogy we are con-
structing, for which issues of appropriate skills and understandings of
the educational as well as psychological and emotional problems the
children faced were paramount.
Indeed, one of the great difficulties that Carpenter and others in the
reformatory movement in England encountered was in finding suitably
trained and qualified staff. An article in the Quarterly Review had pointed
out that:
one of the chief difficulties with which the founders of such insti-
tutions have now to contend is that of finding proper persons to
manage them. Mr. Jelinger Symons says truly that ‘there is perhaps
no vocation which requires a more particular set of qualifications,
both natural and acquired, than that of the head of a successful
Reformatory’. It will take two years to train full even a well-disposed
man; and yet, he adds, with a natural misgiving, ‘reformatories are
being established as if masters for them could be raised like mush-
rooms’. (Symons, 1855: 41)
Jelinger Symons, who subsequently became an Inspector of Schools,

had visited Mettray and had given evidence to the 1852 Committee on
Criminal and Destitute Juveniles.
The emphasis on special training and on the ability to empathise with
the excluded children brings to mind the many cases of poorly trained
staff in today’s specialist institutions for delinquents and the excluded,
especially in the privatised parts of service providers.
We have earlier suggested that what occurred in England in the post-
Mettray period at a time when the Reformatory Movement was at its
height suggested a loss in terms of mis-application of the underlying ethos
which produced Mettray. Significant progress was achieved: the passing
of the 1854 Reformatory Schools Act and the 1857 Industrial Schools
Bill was both critical in terms of developing provision which began to
recognise that vulnerable young people required something more than
incarceration or exclusion. Yet, in much the same way that Parkhurst
Prison had transmitted the techniques of the penitentiary without the
underlying ethos, so the legislation and eventual provision required that
the framework of Mettray was adopted but only on the understanding
that the underlying ethos remained tied to a disciplinary model.
In conclusion we would like to stress that in analysing differently the
history of exclusion, we think it is important not to lose sight of the
place of Mettray in a different genealogy, which is more concerned with
the narrative of alternatives to prison for children driven to crime, or
abandoned to a life of destitution and ignorance. Such alternatives not
only existed but were successful. The ideas and ideals which motivated
these educationalists were not only at odds with state policy regarding
the treatment of delinquents and children of the very poor; they belong
to a different set of values and objectives that, whilst they rescued and re-
integrated such children into society, were far from normalisation within
the scope of govermentality. It could indeed be argued that if every kind
of ‘socialisation’ or education is normalisation, then nothing escapes the
‘system’ and there can be no room for resistance and counter-practices.
Foucault’s critique of Mettray misses out the theme of resistance and
counter-discourse which is so important in constructing a history of the
present, and in seeking practical alternatives. By contrast, our account
makes visible these alternatives and shows them to be part of a counter-
history that informs critique generally, including the critique of present
policy about exclusion. Our relocation of Mettray within a genealogy
of exclusion shows the importance of re-examining the archive to con-
struct a history which reveals lessons for fresh approaches to education
and exclusion today, particularly regarding the focus on the whole
child, the importance of attending to the emotional and psychological
needs of disturbed or troubled children, and the importance of envi-
ronments conducive for rebuilding trust, confidence, self-esteem and
enduring social bonds. What is clear in our narrative is the extent to
which the disciplinary and normalising regimes appearing around the
middle of the 19th century to deal with pauper or delinquent children
were becoming more sophisticated and systematised apparatuses of the
state. We have shown also that attitudes and policy, in England at least,
were hardening on the side of a regime of disciplining and of punish-
ment; these approaches have shaped exclusion to this day. The next
chapter provides further support for this line of analysis.
8
The Institutionalisation of
Exclusion within Education
The fact that England is the most pauperised country in

Europe, and that in which the Government has affected
little or nothing for the education of the poorer classes
Dr. James Phillips Kay. (1839: 5)
I would, first of all propose that it should be made unlawful

ever to take any children into the workhouse, or into any
establishment within three miles of one. (Mary Carpenter,
1861a:19)
What the genealogy so far reveals is the gradual consolidation of prac-

tices relating to exclusion in England, framed by increasingly elaborate
apparatuses and techniques of governance emerging as part of an evolv-
ing biopolitics that consistently categorised the population of destitute
children as the natural product of degenerate families, resistant to
change. Official documents rarely consider the causes of inequality and
poverty, except by reference to faults in the poor themselves. The pre-
vailing views seem to regard the bodies and minds of these children as
having been marked from birth with the defects that determined their
destiny as future delinquents and burdens on society. However, we have
argued with regard to the work of Carpenter, Demetz and others that
different discourses and institutions emerged which had put into prac-
tice the conviction that conditions in the socio-economic environment
were key determinants in accounting for destitute children’s behaviour.
The success of the educational and pedagogical techniques devised by
people such as Carpenter and Demetz vindicate their arguments that
alternative approaches guided by empathy, respect and recognition
are more effective for rescuing these children. Yet their approaches, as
132
The Institutionalisation of Exclusion 133
we have shown, have not been able to dislodge the dominant policies
that, far from intervening to change the conditions that produced pau-
perisation and inequality, have instead succeeded in institutionalising
exclusion in the education system. How this has been achieved, and the
consequences for the present, is what we address in this chapter.
Many of the key figures involved in the developments we go on to
analyse, like Kay and Tufnell, appear committed to education as an
important part of the means for rescuing destitute and disadvantaged
children from a life of crime or dependency. We argue that the apparent
contradictions between the intentions of the reformers and the reality of
what happened on the ground reflect the tensions within liberalism that
we highlighted in the Introduction, split as it was between the prioritisa-
tion of a moral economy motivated by religious convictions and the pur-
suit of the general interest, and a utilitarian framework for social policy
grounded in political economy. The situation is complicated by the fact
that many policy-makers and activists at the time were confusedly pulled
by both tendencies. One finds a degree of this confusion even amongst
the most radical reformers such as Mary Carpenter. It could be argued
that the absence of a critique of capitalism, as a zero-sum economic game
that necessarily pauperises, accounts for the persistence of the confusion.
In the light of this absence, arguments that naturalised the existence of a
criminal class, and presented inequality as an inevitable fact of life, held
an appeal for both the defenders of the status quo and those who rec-
ognised the injustice of the situation but wanted to find pragmatic ways
of limiting the damage to individuals and society as a whole. A role for
state-sponsored reform thereby emerged and became institutionalised.
The process as we noted in previous chapters began with the identi-
fication of a population of poor children who were living either on the
streets or in the workhouses. Whilst the former were seen to be always
at risk of falling into the criminal class, the latter were seen to carry the
hereditary stain of the pauper. In both cases they were seen to pose a
threat to the stability of society as well as being financial burdens. The
search for effective methods to control or contain these children, which
unfold in the long list of parliamentary reports and select committees,
illustrate more than anything else an unwillingness to confront fun-
damental issues about the causes of poverty and destitution. What is
revealed is a constant tension between, on the one hand, those who use
their official capacity to depict the conditions of the poor and propose
remedies, and on the other hand, the way in which the daily reality
for the objects of their attention, in this case, children on the margins
of society, remains largely unchanged in spite of the programmes of
intervention that seem to recognise the socio-economic dimension of

the problems.
Reconceptualising the pauper child
The statement made by Assistant Poor Law Commissioner James Phillips

Kay in the epigraph at the start identified two key issues, pauperisation
and education. These were not new concerns; we have already explored
the emergence and rejection of education as a solution to the problems
of juvenile delinquency by powerful lobbies and interest groups. Yet,
experts like Kay (or Kay-Shuttleworth, as he is better known) were con-
cerned about the fear of social disorder and argued that the state should
become involved in popular education as government needed to inter-
vene to extend education to the masses (Selleck, 1994). But the main
and enduring obstacle to any expansion of education lay in the power-
ful relationship between the established church and education, whilst
the extension of education to the masses was not considered vital in a
period when economic development, wealth accumulation and expan-
sion of Empire dominated the political arena. Yet education emerged as
a key site for educating pauper children in an unlikely arena, The Poor
Law Commission, during the period following the implementation of
the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, when the reconceptualisation of
the pauper child became important.
One of the significant effects of the move to centralise the manage-
ment of poor law relief was the appointment of Assistant Poor Law
Commissioners whose task according to Driver (2004) was to be ‘their
“eyes, hands and voice”; without their regular visits to individual Unions,
they noted, the centre would be left with ‘duties of control and regula-
tion without the means of observation or the power of investigation …’
(Driver, 2004: 34).
And it is through the reports of Assistant Poor Law Commissioners such
as Kay and Edward Tufnell that a new discourse was constructed with the
aim of reconceptualising the pauper child as an innocent victim in need
of rescue. The only effectual remedy for what they described as ‘the
germ of pauperism’ was the provision of suitable education or training.
This new conceptualisation was aimed both at the environments they
inhabited and the Malthusian-informed depiction which had constituted
them as the architects of their own fate. The debates which emerged and
subsequent interventions which were aimed at rescuing these children
were hugely significant insofar as they signalled possibilities for new
policies and practices aimed at this particular sector of the population.
In addition, what is also revealed is the emergence of the influence of
statistical evidence to authorise the arguments that were made. However,

as we will argue, the effects for the pauper child were limited and, indeed,
contributed to other forms of exclusion from society through their incar-
ceration in the Industrial Schools which emerged in the 1850s.
The initial focus of the Assistant Poor Law Commissioners (APLC)
was on separate provision for children in workhouses with an emphasis
on industrial training which would equip the child for the station they
would occupy, although such training would not be adequate to meet
the labour needs of a rapidly changing industrialised nation; the APLC’s
remedy was to train the boys to work in the fields and the girls to be
domestic servants with the skills needed to eventually become respect-
able wives and mothers.
The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act transformed the management
of the poor by imposing a disciplinary system with new Union work-
houses as the visible manifestation of the new regime. The architects
of the new Union workhouses, such as Sampson Kempthorne and
Francis Head, ensured that the new buildings were akin to the new
penitentiaries by designing structures which were barrack like, austere
and forbidding. Indeed the Union workhouses by embodying the prin-
ciples of classification, separation and surveillance could be seen as the
spaces where Bentham’s panopticon was brought to fruition alongside
Foucault’s carceral. Driver (2004) has pointed out that:
the forbidding look of the new workhouses was intended as a ‘ter-

ror to the able bodied population’ … The officially recommended
workhouse plans … were later described by George Gilbert Scott as ‘a
set of ready made designs of the meanest possible character … Even
sympathetic commentators readily acknowledged that Kempthorne’s
unhappy designs suggested the idea of the Bastilles. It is difficult to
imagine a better illustration of the semiotics of deterrence at work’
(Driver, 2004: 59)
At the heart of the 1834 Poor Law was a re-definition of the poor which
generated a new system of classification for poverty/paupers that reshaped
the landscape of the poor, reflecting the way that industrialisation was
beginning to re-shape the actual landscape. Whereas previously the poor
had been tolerated and supported at local levels with provision for out-
door relief within small, parish-administered Poor houses, the new law
overturned such community-based provision. As Driver has pointed out:
whereas it was quite possible for inhabitants of smaller, more local-

ised workhouses to be familiar figures within their own parishes,
those incarcerated in the ‘Union’ were cut off from the rhythms
of everyday life beyond the walls of a distinctive and imposing
institution. The transition from parish to Union thus signalled
a transformation in the scale and character of workhouse life.
(Driver, 2004: 66)
Clearly, the new regime ensured that the ‘rhythms of everyday life’ were
such as to discourage all but the really desperate and destitute from
seeking assistance. The implementation of national law, rules and regu-
lations ensured that administering the poor became depersonalised and
uniform, as Driver has suggested ‘the spatial separation of workhouse
populations was intended to function in at least three ways: as a basis
for appropriate treatment; as a deterrent to pauperism; and as a barrier
against contagion, moral as well as physical’ (Driver, 2004: 65).
The new regime deliberately sited the new workhouses and allocated
the inmates to ensure they were no longer known to the people manag-
ing them or in charge of the workhouse, thus ensuring detachment in
implementing the regime. This also marks the shift from the local to
more centralised provisions, from rural to urban, from church to state.
Furthermore, it implemented the project of a barrier against contagion
that shaped the emerging discourse around the pauper children of the
workhouses. Many of the features central to the governmentalisation of
poverty which we encounter today appear in these shifts
Education as ‘Remedy’ for the ‘Disease of Pauperism’
The desire to protect society from the threat posed by the ‘criminal
class’ enshrined in the 1834 Poor Law Act was the driving force for the
separation and education of pauper children with the aim of eradicating
pauperism as part of the wider objective of governmentality to reduce
crime, especially against property. The idea was to ensure that the
potential for ‘contamination’ would be reduced in line with the model
which constructed pauperism as both a ‘disease’ passed on from one
generation to the next and the result of individual choice and respon-
sibility. The theme of separation to avoid contamination was repeated
across many arenas such as gaols, transportation and workhouses
where the custom had been for all individuals to share the same space.
Contagion was a powerful metaphor and concept in the 19th century,
affecting the understanding of disease, racial strength, poverty and
morality; thus, the paradigm of hygiene could be applied to the regula-
tion or control of all of these phenomena.
The Act also specified that children in the workhouse should be

provided with a basic education. Whilst separation from adults was
achievable, the implementation of basic education was fraught with dif-
ficulties. These ranged from practical concerns such as the provision of
suitable accommodation and the availability of qualified staff, to more
serious concerns regarding the criteria of eligibility and the need to
ensure that the pauper child in the workhouse did not receive anything
deemed superior to that of the children of the honest and hardworking
poor who struggled to pay for their children’s education. However, as
will become apparent, the initial proposals made by Assistant Poor Law
Commissioners such as Kay and Tufnell for the establishment of District
Schools did not prove to be very successful.
It was the interventions by Kay, in his annual reports to the Poor Law
Commissioners, that became crucial both in terms of the way that he
reconceptualised the pauper child and for the remedies that he pro-
posed. His biographer Selleck suggested that:
Kay saw himself as rescuing the paupers of Suffolk, and later Norfolk
as well, from self-destructive dependence. He implemented the new
poor law rigorously, and in his own mind fairly, though to the pau-
pers he cross-questioned and forced into the workhouses he appeared
an unfeeling zealot. He pressed individual parishes into the unions
the poor law required, and when violence erupted he quelled it.
(Selleck, 2004: 169)
Using the knowledge that he acquired in his observations of the ‘pauper

class’ he wrote lengthy and detailed reports to the Commissioners and
his first ‘Training of Pauper Children’ report was included as an appen-
dix to the 1837–1838 Annual Report.
In the first paragraph (which was repeated in the fifth report in 1841)
he declared that:
education is to be regarded as one of the most important means

of eradicating the germs of pauperism from the rising generation,
and of securing in the minds and in the morals of the people the
best protection for the institutions of society … it is important to
acknowledge how far ignorance is the source of pauperism, and to
show how important an agent for the removal of pauperism is the
careful training in religion and industry. (Fourth Report from the
Select Committee on the Poor Law Amendment Act, 1837: 140)
Religion and industry in the 19th century context meant moral educa-
tion and good working habits and attitudes, respectively. Clearly, Kay is
not suggesting that pauper children should be ‘educated’ in the broad
sense but rather that they should be trained to become the ‘independ-
ent labourer’, the figure which was central to Poor Law Reform. By first
of all identifying a remedy for pauperism, he sets out the perils which
would occur if this were to be ignored:
The dependence of the majority of the pauper children is unavoidable

and absolute. The burthen (sic) of their dependence cannot cease, even
temporarily, unless the children be reared in industry. … Whether
the state acknowledges its interest in the education of the masses or
not, the consequences of a neglect of the pauper class evidently are
prolonged dependence and subsequent chargeability as criminals in
the prisons and penal colonies. (Fourth Annual Report, 1837a: 141)
Indeed, he pressed his case further by pointing out that:
if the army and navy were recruited by the workhouse children, it

is evident that it would be the interest of the state to rear a race of
hardy and intelligent men – instructed in the duties of their station –
taught to fear God and to honour the Queen. The state has not less
interest, though it may be less apparent, in supplying the merchant
service with sailors, and the farms and the manufactories of the
country with workmen, and the households of the upper and mid-
dle classes with domestic servants: it has the most positive and direct
interest in adopting measures to prevent the rearing of a race of pros-
titutes and felons (Fourth Annual Report, 1837a: 141)
So, what he had in mind as the destiny of the ‘educated’ pauper child
was that they would be sailors, labourers and domestic servants trained
to ‘serve’ and contribute to the smooth running of society. However
there was still the problem of overcoming the resistance and reluctance
of the state to be seen to be unfairly intervening at the expense of the
hard-working and deserving poor. At this point Kay makes an important
observation when he argues that:
a child should not be degraded in his own estimation by being a

member of a despised class. A child cannot be a pauper in the sense
in which that term is commonly understood, that is, he cannot
be indigent as the consequence of his own want of industry, skill,
frugality, or forethought, and he ought not therefore be taught to

despise himself. The pauper apprentice and the juvenile vagrant
were, under the old system, brethren of the same class – outcasts;
neither trained by frugal and industrious parents, nor by a well
devised system of public industrial instruction. The dependence of
these children is probably the natural consequence of the crimes or
follies (but it may also be of the misfortunes) of their parents, and in
any of these cases it is the interest of society that the children should
neither inherit the infamy, nor the vice, nor the misfortunes of their
parents. (Fourth Annual Report, 1837a: 145)
This new categorisation of the pauper child as victim of circumstance

and the arguments in support were a significant intervention at a point
where the ‘sui generis’ thesis proposed by Miles was still cherished by
the Poor Law Commission. However what was common to both Miles
and Kay was an interpretation of pauperism which placed responsibility
within the individual. In both cases the remedies proposed were primar-
ily designed to alleviate the burden on the rate-payer.
Kay’s solution, supported by an abundance of evidence, was for the
establishment of District Schools. He envisaged that District Schools
would be separate establishments which would house and train chil-
dren in an environment specifically designed to promote ‘industrial
training and moral discipline which was designed to inculcate the
virtues of obedience, honesty, labour and punctuality, sentiments and
habits foreign to the class to which they belong’ (Driver, 2004: 96).
His own area had 39 workhouses and he estimated that 4 District
Schools with approximately 500 children in each of them would be
more cost effective with savings of £2000 per annum. By anticipating
possible criticisms and rejections of his ideas, he demonstrated through
the data that he collected that the District Schools as well as being more
efficient financially would also be the best way of separating children
from the contaminating influence of adult paupers. The child, he said,
should be trained in the District School and not the Workhouse. The
evidence he submitted included an analysis of different categories of
children who were resident in the Norfolk and Suffolk Workhouses:
bastards, 543; orphans, 382; children deserted by father, 279; children
deserted by father and mother, 54; children of men undergoing punish-
ment for crime, 171; children of persons dependent on parochial aid
on account of mental or bodily infirmity, 116; children of able-bodied
widows, resident in the Union Workhouse, 144; children of able-bodied
widowers, resident in the Union Workhouse, 36; children belonging to
large families of able-bodied labourers, admitted into the workhouse as

relief to their parents, 122 (Report, 1837: 7).
Clearly, the great majority of children did not have parents, although
it isn’t clear whether the children classified as ‘bastards’ were in the
workhouse with their mothers. Nevertheless, what Kay’s evidence
illustrated was that the majority of children in the workhouse would
require some form of long-term institutional care and this supported
his argument that without a more complete system for training, the
result would be another generation of dependent paupers with all the
associated problems of crime and degeneracy. Kay’s first report on pau-
per training laid the foundations for the development of a new way of
positioning pauper children and redefining appropriate intervention.
By 1839 Kay had been relocated from Norfolk and Suffolk to London
where he was given additional responsibility to supervise the improve-
ment of establishments for pauper children in London and its vicinity.
He immediately starts out by describing his observations of the work-
house schools:
The schools in the workhouses were almost universally found imper-

fect … In some, children were not separated from adults; they were
instructed by paupers, no industrial instruction was given them;
their moral training was altogether neglected. In others, efficient
teachers had not been procured, proper books and apparatus were
wanting; the arrangement of the routine and organisation of the
school exhibited a complete ignorance of method, and universally
the industrial instruction was meagre and purposeless. (HCPP: Fifth
Annual Report, 1839c, Appendix C: 91)
The haphazard arrangements he had observed illustrated the extent to

which the issue of education was being neglected by the local Boards
of Guardians of the Unions. Kay tackled all of these issues in his report
‘The Training of Pauper Children’ where he proposed proper training
for teachers, a suitably designed curriculum which would focus on
industrial training as well as appropriate accommodation, ideally in
separate district schools. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of his
methods, he established a training college for teachers at Battersea in
1840, which he funded with financial help from his colleague Edward
Tufnell who shared his views and like him contributed to the Statistical
Society, and supported Edwin Chadwick.
Nevertheless, despite Kay’s efforts in his annual reports and his work
at Battersea College, little real progress was made. In each report he
restated the claim he had originally made in 1838 that ‘A child cannot
be a pauper in the sense in which that term is commonly understood’.
Another report in the same year on Workhouse Schools illustrated just
how little had changed. Inspectors visited workhouse schools through-
out the country sending back reports which highlighted deficiencies
such as those at Alcaster Union where ‘the children are taught by a
schoolmistress (the wife of the porter) and cannot, I should think
be properly taught; they are all, almost without exception, exceed-
ingly backward in reading, writing and arithmetic’ (HCPP: Workhouse
Schools, 1847b: 6). Similarly at Winchcomb Union the report stated
that ‘some of the grown boys are taught to read by a pauper. The girls
and the little boys are under the care of a schoolmistress and know very
little; they are for the most part very young; I recommend the establish-
ment of a proper school, by the appointment of an efficient teacher’
(HCPP: Workhouse Schools, 1847b: 6).
The situation at Evesham Union was particularly bleak:
There are 30 children who ought to be taught to read, to write and

to know the first four rules of arithmetic; but they are under the care
of a pauper man and woman, who are themselves ignorant of that
which children ought to be taught. No children can, in my opinion,
be more neglected as regards their education, than the children in
the Evesham workhouse. (HCPP: Workhouse Schools, 1847b: 8)
Thus, despite the extensive reports that had been submitted by Kay and
Tufnell, workhouse schools continued to operate very much as they
had done previously. As the bureaucracy associated with administering
workhouse schools expanded (the annual reports contained hundreds
of pages devoted to inspections, reports and recommendations), the
actual conditions for the children remained unchanged. The education
they received was so inadequate; one could say it was another form
of exclusion, in spite of the efforts of Kay, Tufnell and inspectors of
Workhouse Schools like Jellinger Symons who had visited Mettray.
It was clear that the Commission had not taken any steps to ensure
that the recommendations originally made in the Amendment to the
Poor Law in 1834 were carried out; indeed by the time of the 1849
report little progress had been made regarding the establishment of
District Schools, separate from workhouses. This was because ‘this plan
has hitherto been rendered inoperative by two restrictive clauses. The
first of these clauses was intended to continue the formation of districts
of unions for pauper schools to towns or very populous localities. The
second of these clauses, by limiting the outlay on the building to a

certain proportion of the assessment, has prevented the erection of a
single district school’ (HCPP: Minutes of the Committee of the Council
of Education, 1849: vi). The two major obstacles that Kay identified
illustrated the conflicts and tensions which existed between policy and
practice. Whilst, on the one hand, the Poor Law Commission issued
regulations regarding the reorganisation of the Poor Law, on the other
hand, a lack of financial support resulted in patchy, uneven and, in
Kay’s views, unacceptable development. In addition, it was clear that
some Boards of Guardians undermined the Poor Law Commission’s
recommendations.
A stark illustration of this occurred in 1849 when a cholera outbreak
resulted in the deaths of 200 pauper children in one of the private facili-
ties used by Metropolitan Workhouses. These had been set up with Poor
Law Commission grants so that London parishes would have access to
separate facilities for the education and training of workhouse children.
However, the ensuing scandal exposed both the shocking conditions in
which the children lived and the inadequate training for the boys and
clear exploitation of the girls who seemed to be mainly employed in
shirt making. The deaths of so many children resulted in the proprietor,
Mr. Drouet, facing manslaughter charges at the Old Bailey. Although he
was found not guilty, the widespread reporting of the case led to severe
criticism of both the Poor Law Commission and Boards of Guardians.
The most significant was a lengthy editorial in The Times which used
the case to launch an attack on the contradictions at the heart of the
Poor Law, stressing the shortcomings of a system which allowed Poor
Law Guardians to pay Drouet four shillings and sixpence per child per
week, which with almost a thousand children housed at his establish-
ment provided a considerable sum, whilst at the same time being negli-
gent in terms of ensuring that the children were properly cared for. The
sharpest criticism, however, was directed at:
the system, in the first place that has been the cause of this sad
tragedy … We would wish the public seriously to consider what it
is they do when they sanction the continuance of such a system. If
we leave out of the question anything like matters of humanity and
feeling, and take the subject up merely as an economic one, what a
waste of money is here! … The case may be put even more strongly.
Two shillings and threepence, or even four shillings and sixpence a
week, appears but a small sum, although to a labouring man it is very
considerable indeed. But give him nine shillings a week in addition
to his wages, and you will hear little more of the difficulty of bring-
ing up a family … We mention this point as one of direct economy,
but Mr. Wakley, and with great justice, pushes the case still further.
“The object,” said he, “of the plan might be economy, but when the
jury considered how much disease was engendered by the system –
disease of the lungs, of the mesenteric glands, of the joints, when
they considered that it created a rickety and scrofulous population,
where was the economy”. Something, of course, might be added of
the inhumanity and cruelty of separating children from their parents
at so early an age! (The Times, 25th January 1849)
The article concluded by arguing that:
the system is radically wrong and vicious. Why should there be a

child farmer interposed between the guardians and the children …
Every Union should have its own asylum at a convenient and short
distance from town and be managed by its inspectors and officers.
(The Times, 25th January 1849)
The writer no doubt recognised that the earlier arguments for money to
be given directly to parents to enable them to care for their own children
were perhaps too radical. The suggestion that Unions should manage
their own facilities provided powerful support for the campaign that had
been waged by Kay and Tufnell for District Schools. Indeed, Tufnell’s
report on the Schools of Parochial Unions in the following year makes a
point of describing how ‘the death of two hundred children by cholera,
in one establishment, so aroused public feeling that the authorities were
enabled to apply the appropriate remedy by establishing district schools,
and four have accordingly been founded in the metropolitan division’
(HCPP: Minutes of the Committee of Council on Education. Schools of
parochial unions: 1850a: 9). It had taken 18 years from the time of Kay’s
first report on Pauper Education for the first district school to be built,
and despite Tufnell’s optimism very few district schools were actually
built. The belief that the poor were architects of their condition put the
focus on the individual child as the point of intervention. As Johnson has
pointed out, ‘As moralists, educationalists were enabled to transfer cause
and guilt away from a system of social and economic organisation which
they more or less endorsed, on to the people’ ( Johnson, 1970: 116).
However, whilst these views had been dominant during the decades
since the introduction of the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), chal-
lenges were beginning to emerge, notably from within the reformatory
movement. Driver (2004: 99) has suggested that ‘debates over reforma-
tories spilled over into the domain of Poor Law policy and vice versa’.
This was not really surprising given the widely held beliefs that tied
poverty to criminality. What was significant at this point, however, was
that the Reformatory Movement in seeking new approaches to juvenile
criminality had begun to challenge existing practices such as transpor-
tation and incarceration, arguing instead for new approaches which
would educate rather than simply punish. Additionally, the reformers
were deeply critical of large barrack-style institutions, arguing instead
for family style provision based on the Mettray model. It was at this
point that the separate discourses began to merge.
Prevention and correction: industrial and reformatory

schools
When Kay initially set out to propose education or training as a ‘rem-

edy’ for ‘pauperism’, he did this through reconceptualising the pauper
child as an innocent victim. The campaign for reformatory schools also
proposed an approach founded in education as the way to eradicate
juvenile crime. It seems that in the early 1850s these two campaigns
around an appropriate education for poor child merged but with the
re-positioning of the pauper child from potential inheritor of pau-
perism to one of potential criminal. This can be understood through
the widely held beliefs which had tied pauperism to criminality and
which were most fully articulated through Carpenter’s description of
the ‘perishing’ and ‘dangerous’ child. The reformatory movement ini-
tially concentrated on provision for the ‘dangerous’ child’ which they
argued should take place in reformatory schools rather than prisons.
However, by the early 1850s attention also began to focus on the idea
of preventive measures which would ensure the ‘perishing’ child did
not become the fully fledged juvenile criminal. At this point there were
clear echoes with the aims to eradicate pauperism by making the pauper
child the point of intervention. Furthermore, it was also clear that the
‘perishing’ and the ‘pauper’ child were essentially the same with only
the entrance to the workhouse separating them: on the one hand, the
‘street arab’ and, on the other, the pauper inmate of the poorhouse. As
Mary Carpenter remarked in a letter to the 1852 Select Committee on
Criminal and Destitute Juveniles:
In practice, it will generally be found that there is very little dif-

ference between the physically destitute child who is thrown on
the parish, and the morally destitute one who is placed in the
reformatory school as both are in their actual condition from want of

good parental care; hence both should be equally treated as children
of the State, and, as such, so trained to make them good citizens.
Interestingly, Carpenter’s interpretation of parental neglect as the cause

of children’s destitution is remarkably close to the conclusions reached
by the Prison Discipline Committee in their report ‘Investigating the
alarming increases of juvenile delinquents in the Metropolis’ (1816)
which identified the chief cause as ‘the improper conduct of parents’
with ‘the want of education’ second. It is important to note here the
longevity of this narrative which blames the parent, when not blam-
ing the child, whilst ignoring the socio-economic causes of poverty.
Thus, from the 1850s the pauper, destitute or neglected child became
redefined and tied to the discourse aimed at reforming the criminal
child with the result that policy and, eventually, practice became rede-
signed as well.
In 1852 Joseph Fletcher, statistician and school inspector, presented a
paper to the Statistical Society in London entitled ‘Statistics of the Farm
School System of the Continent, and its Applicability to the Preventive
and Reformatory Education of Pauper and Criminal Children in
England’. Using a wealth of data from England and the continent
Fletcher presented a powerful argument for early intervention into the
lives of pauper children so that the connection between pauperism and
crime should be broken. This was the point when interest in European
models, and particularly the French system at Mettray, was at its height;
Fletcher himself had visited Mettray and been impressed by the family-
based, smaller-scale organisation of rehabilitative education. Against a
background of ever-increasing anxiety about juvenile crime and the evi-
dent failure of punitive measures to avert what was constantly viewed as
a ‘crisis’, Fletcher presented five ‘truths’ which he argued society should
both recognise and act upon. His rationale was that ‘this moral relation-
ship between the pauper and the criminal children is a painful fact’.
He used statistics showing that on the 1st January 1850 there were ‘no
fewer than 26,841, being 23,596 orphans’ in the pauper workhouses to
argue that this represented a huge number of potential criminals, unless
his recommendations were acted upon. He presented his five ‘truths’ in
the following claims:
1. That the farm-schools of the Continent, applied to education for the

prevention of crime, hold a social position precisely analogous to
that of our own workhouse schools.
2. That for the children in those schools, as in those of the Continent,

training in vigorous rural industry, and close domestic economy, by
means of farm-schools, conducted on the principles of a Christian
family, will yield the greatest attainable moral vigour, with the least
amount of indolence and self-deception.
3. That by far the greater number of the present workhouse schools
are now producing converse results; and that we have no experience
strongly favourable to regimenting and warding the children in large
district palaces, however pleasing their mechanism, while we have
ample testimony in favour of the farm school system.
4. That the children at a proper farm school, required to work steadily
at all its outdoor and domestic duties will not cost the public more
than under the present system, or that of the contemplated district
asylums; and will not cost so much, unless through a liberal employ-
ment of moral agency in their management which will be a wise
economy in the ultimate results, and therefore far preferable to the
expenditure of large sums in ornamental stone and brickwork.
5. That to have good preventive schools for the training of the pauper
children, is the great practical step towards obtaining good reforma-
tory schools for the re-training of criminal children, on principles
well understood and economically applied. (Fletcher, 1852: 43)
It is clear that Fletcher attributed the success of farm schools to their

location in rural areas alongside the emphasis placed on reproducing
Christian family values. Moreover there was clear statistical evidence to
support the success of the farm school system compared to workhouse
schools and, that, furthermore, the farm school method was economi-
cally sound. Fletcher was convinced that the failure of the current sys-
tem was due to the force of public opinion: ‘I am charging the fault, if
the fact must be called such, upon the state of opinion in this country
generally’ (Fletcher, 1852: 43). Interestingly, this echoes the point
made in The Times leader article of 1849 which had made the public
complicit in the scandal at Tooting. In many respects Fletcher’s ‘truths’
could be seen to function here as a template for much of what occurred
in discussions regarding the juvenile question both within parliament
and in philanthropic circles.
However, development of provision was complex. Whilst the Poor
Law Commission was responsible for the education of pauper children
in the workhouse, it was the Prisons Authority which managed the
needs of criminal children. Destitute children, especially orphans and
abandoned children, the children who were vagrant and lived on the
streets seemed to occupy a space which placed them beneath the pauper
and always one step away from the criminal. When a select commit-
tee on Criminal and Destitute Children was convened in 1852 under
the remit of the Prisons Authority, the main focus of the resolutions
presented to Parliament in 1853 was on provision for criminal children
with an emphasis on ‘correction’. Despite a wealth of evidence from
those who supported the development of a system based on Mettray, the
committee recommended Penal Reformatory Establishments for those
who committed ‘serious offences’ and Reformatory Schools for those con-
victed of ‘minor offences’. Provision for destitute children was limited to
a resolution that Poor Law Unions be encouraged to develop more district
schools with an emphasis on industrial training. The fact that the report
was drafted from within the framework of the Prisons Authority already
prejudiced the conclusions about appropriate provisions. Indeed, the
1866 Consolidating Act specified that the offender must serve not less
than ten days of imprisonment before being admitted to a reformatory;
this was not rescinded until the 1899 Reformatory schools amendment
bill which made preliminary imprisonment no longer obligatory. The
contradictions were clear.
Matters were not improved with the introduction of an Industrial
Schools Act in 1857 which ensured that the destitute and neglected
child was tied to a punitive framework. Industrial Schools had been
operating for some time as part of the philanthropic aim to rescue
and reclaim destitute children, but the reliance on charitable funding
meant that their future was always precarious. The introduction of
legislation guaranteed that there would be state funding for Industrial
schools which achieved certification, although the ‘cost’ was state con-
trol through regulations and inspections. The aspect we want to high-
light is that the Act resulted in the criminalising of destitute children
through the specification of the classes of children to be admitted and
detained in these schools. The 1866 Industrial School Consolidating Bill
identified the ‘classes of children to be detained in Certified Industrial
Schools’ as ‘any child apparently under the age of fourteen years’:
1. That is found begging or receiving Alms (whether actually or under

the pretext of selling or offering for sale anything) or being in the
street or public place for the purpose of so begging or receiving alms;
2. That is found wandering and not having any Home or settled Place
of Abode or proper Guardianship or visible Means of subsistence;
3. That is found destitute, either being an Orphan or having a surviving
parent who is undergoing Penal Servitude or Imprisonment;
4. That frequents the company of reputed Thieves. (HCPP: Industrial

Schools Consolidating Bill, 1866: 4)
Furthermore, it was specified that ‘any person may bring before two
justices or a magistrate’ any of the children who came within the above
descriptions. Significantly, the pauper child was included if the Guardians
of the Poor identified:
1. that any child apparently under the age of 14 years, maintained in a

Workhouse or Pauper school of a Union or parish, or in a District Pauper
School, or in the Poorhouse of a Parish or Combination, is refractory
2. or is the child of parents either of whom has been convicted of a
crime or offence punishable with penal servitude or imprisonment.
(HCPP: Industrial Schools Consolidating Bill, 1866: 4)
It is clear that the class of children identified included all those whom
Mary Carpenter had described as ‘perishing’, the children who were in
need of care and protection so that they would not become part of the
dangerous, criminal class. The Act gave sweeping powers to the authori-
ties and ‘persons’ to remove and detain children in institutions far
removed from the ideal which had been represented through Mettray in
terms of both design and function. Today the category ‘at risk’ extends
this line of reasoning, whilst the inclusion of ‘refractory’ amongst the
categories recall today’s ‘disruptive’ label.
Within four years the distinction between Reformatory and Industrial
Schools had been gradually eroded. In 1870, Sydney Turner, who had
been appointed as Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial Schools,
observed in his annual report that:
it is, in fact, very difficult to establish any real distinction between

these two classes of institutions, except that the industrial schools
deal with the younger or the less criminal portion of the class which
the reformatory schools receive. Before the passing of the Industrial
Schools Acts it was not so. The children received into industrial
schools were of what is commonly called the ragged and neglected
class, but they were not sent by a magistrate’s warrant to the school,
were not consigned to compulsory detention, and were not punish-
able by imprisonment for absconding or wilful disobedience … But
the acts now passed have successfully consolidated and developed
the legal status and operation of these schools, imposing on the man-
agers the duty and responsibility of the custody, maintenance, and
treatment of their inmates, defining the main conditions on which

children shall be sent to them to be that they shall be found guilty
of some offence against the law (vagrancy, begging and petty theft),
or that their parents and associates shall be criminal. The position of
certified industrial schools has thus completely changed, and though
still call by the name of schools, they are, in fact, but reformatories of a
milder type, and so institutions of a corrective and not a merely edu-
cation character … They are houses of detention for the young vaga-
bond and petty misdemeanant. (HCPP: Thirteenth Report, 1870: 15)
What Turner highlights in his reflections are the direct consequences of

the categories stipulated in the 1866 Act, categories that were ambigu-
ous and open to interpretation. Whilst the Industrial Schools Acts could
be seen as evidence that the State was becoming ‘parent’ as Kay had
urged, the changes introduced by the 1866 Act meant that any child
on the street at any time was at risk of being removed to an Industrial
School and, if the child subsequently tried to escape, could find itself
placed in prison before being removed to a reformatory school. In fact,
the class of children at risk of being sent to an Industrial School was
expanded following the 1870 Elementary Education Act when legisla-
tion was introduced in 1876 which allowed schools boards to send
children who truanted to Industrial Schools.
The consolidation of the punitive and criminalising impulse of
reformatories through the merging in practice of Industrial Schools
and Reformatories shows that the wellbeing of children were far from
the primary concern of the policies. The issue of the security of society
and perceived or imagined threats from juveniles were the determining
objective. The types of offences for which children were sent to these
institutions were relatively minor, but the punishments were severe and
depended on the whim of individual magistrates, as the following cases
from 1869 illustrate:
David Barry, aged 9 – stole a gold watch and a silver watch. Sentenced
to two-week imprisonment and at the expiration of that time to be
confined in a certified reformatory for five years.
Frederick Westcott, aged 12 – re-examined on the charge of stealing a
coco-nut from Mr. Milton, grocer and chemist, and was sent to the
Boys Industrial School for three years.
Emma Clapp, a girl, was re-examined on the charge of stealing a pair
of child’s boots from her mother and was sent to prison for fourteen
days and at the expiration of that time to a reformatory for two years.
George Brown, a lad 9 years was charged with stealing a brass candle-
stick from the Berkeley Arms beerhouse. The lad was sent to the
Reformatory School for five years, the father to contribute a weekly
sum for his support.
George Parker, a boy, was committed to Clifton Wood Industrial School
for five years for stealing £1.3shillings.
John Huggins, a boy of 10, was charged with stealing fivepence in coppers
from the house of his master, a baker, of Castle Mill Street. The mag-
istrates sent prisoner to the House of Correction for fourteen days
and to the Reformatory for five years.
Charles Fisk, 11, charged with stealing seven shillings from his parents.
Sentenced to one month’s imprisonment and five years in a reformatory.
(Taken from court proceedings in Trewman’s Exeter Flying post: 10th
February 1869; Bristol Mercury; 6th February 1869)
As institutions they were large, barrack-like buildings and operated a

regime of training in labouring work such as firewood cutting, tailoring,
shoemaking, wood chopping, hairteasing, gardening and field work,
paperbag making, printing, tailoring, needlework, housework and cook-
ing. These tasks geared to transforming the inmates into useful labour-
ing bodies dominated the timetable, with less than three hours a day
devoted to a limited curriculum.
By 1896 when the Home Office commissioned a report into
Reformatory and Industrial Schools, there were more than 200 institu-
tions and 24,000 children were ‘under order or sentence of detention’.
The Inspector for Reformatory and Industrial Schools, Mr. H. Rogers, was
questioned at length about the categories of children who were detained.
His responses confirmed that underlying attitudes had not shifted and
were primarily concerned with protecting society against crime:
Q: Is it your view then, that what justifies the State in lending

its sanction to the compulsory detention of children in these
schools, and in calling upon all tax payers to contribute towards
the maintenance of children in these schools is the interest of
the community to protect itself against crime?
A: Entirely in the interest of the community to protect itself against
crime, and for the prevention of crime. (HCPP: Reformatory and
Industrial schools committee report, 1896a: 7)
Thus Rogers presented his understanding of the system in a way that

echoes the views expressed almost 50 years earlier by Kay in his report
on pauper education which had emphasised that intervention into the

lives of children and young people was based on the need to protect
society from the threat of potential criminality.
What we want to highlight is the fact that the common factor was the
extreme poverty of the children under discussion. Statistics presented to
the Committee show that the majority of children had been admitted
to Industrial Schools because they had been found ‘begging or receiving
alms; wandering and not having any home or settled place of abode,
or proper guardianship or visible means of subsistence; destitute, either
being an orphan or having a surviving parent who is undergoing penal
servitude or imprisonment’ (HCPP: Reformatory and Industrial schools
committee report, 1896a: 9).
These were the first three categories of children as defined under the
1866 Industrial Schools Consolidating Acts and describe children who
were destitute and in need of care and protection rather than being
confined to a corrective institution until the age of 16. The Industrial
Schools Act remained in force until 1933 when the institutions were
renamed as Approved Schools. However, children continued to be sent
to these institutions for trivial offences; in 1947, for example, a 15-year-
old boy was sentenced to three years in an approved school for stealing
three oranges (Walter Unsworth, 2003).
Conclusion
Attitudes towards the poorest children were beginning to shift by the

end of the 19th century although it could be argued that the effects
on their daily existence were negligible. The 1889 Cruelty to Children
Act identified parental responsibility for the neglect, abandonment and
abuse of children; the Act still attributed blame for the destitute state of
the children who entered the institutional settings of the Reformatory
and Industrial Schools to parents, whilst the underlying attitudes
remained largely the same in ignoring the conditions which allowed
poverty to flourish, choosing instead to individualise or pathologise the
problem.
As late as the 1890s inquiries into conditions for children in
Reformatories, Industrial Schools and Workhouse Schools recom-
mended continuation of provision, albeit with the suggestion that
ideally institutions should be smaller, primarily to prevent the spread
of disease which had become increasingly problematic in the large
institutions. Dr. Barnardo, who gave evidence to the inquiries, was seen
to have achieved outstanding results in his development of cottage
homes, boarding out and emigration. The latter option was seen to be
the most effective and economical solution to the problem of parental
contamination and flourished. The 1896 Report into Poor Law Schools
recorded that:
the evidence which we have received upon the subject of the emi-
gration of children appears to show that this method of providing
for the children of the pauper class can be largely extended, to the
advantage of the children and of the ratepayers alike. One of the
chief difficulties which boards of guardians experience in success-
fully starting the children in life is the pernicious interference of the
children’s relations; and it has often been represented to us that the
only way to save the children is to remove them from their pauper
surroundings. Emigration effects this purpose … (HCPP: Poor Law
Schools Committee, 1896a: 131)
It is not difficult to view forced emigration as a continuation of trans-

portation which had ceased to be an option in 1852. Belatedly, in
2010, the injustice of this system, which persisted until 1967, has been
recognised by the State ‘apologizing’ to the children sent to Australia
from 1920.
The reality, however, was that children who were institutionalised,
whether in Industrial or Pauper schools, were deprived of much more
than individual freedom or parental contact in return for food and
shelter. As one witness, Mr. Ernest Hart, Chairman of the Parliamentary
Commission of the British Medical Association, Editor of the British
Medical Journal and with a long involvement in Poor Law Reform,
reported to the 1896 Poor Law Schools Committee that:
large pauper schools are detrimental to the health of the children and
create disabilities of three kinds – physical, mental and moral. Under
the head of physical disabilities the diseases which I would enumerate
as being created or fostered by the large school system are opthalmia,
diphtheria – which of course is not created but is fostered – fevers of
certain kinds, skin affections, and diseases of degeneration. The men-
tal disabilities and disadvantages which the schools produce I would
describe especially first a defective training of the children; second
that the schools produce feeble minded children, and third that they
result in turning out children with intensification of certain bad hab-
its. Then under the head of moral disadvantages of this way of treat-
ing pauper school children I think that many of those are especially
the result of the system by which they are deprived of individual care
and training. (HCPP: Poor Law Schools Committee, 1896a: 9)
What was shocking was that there had been abundant evidence avail-
able to support the development of alternative provision such as the
Mettray model which promoted family-style provision, thus avoiding
the effects such as those identified by Hart. The main reason for the
rejection of this option had always been financial: the dozens of reports
and enquiries into types of provision had been driven by the insistence
of policy-makers on the lowest cost possible in terms of buildings, food,
clothing, training and education. The evidence of our historical study
of attitudes to children’s education and welfare is that these cost-driven
measures have been a permanent feature of policy towards children in
difficulty through no fault of their own for a considerable time, surviv-
ing into the present. The large, impersonal, brutal, barrack-style institu-
tions provided the most economically efficient means of incarcerating
destitute and criminal children. Emigration was similarly embraced as a
financially sound solution giving the most effective means of disposing
of pauperised children and ensuring that they would never return as
adult paupers or criminals.
In terms of a genealogy of the present, we would highlight the follow-
ing points of comparison: first, a tension between advocates of educa-
tion and those of punishment often blurred at the level of policy which
combine punishment and education. Education, however, has been and
remains limited in scope, not just because of cost-driven provisions,
but because the inadequate training of those in charge, given the range
of emotional, cognitive and environmental problems which afflict
the poorest children and insufficient concern for the wellbeing of the
child. Second, the prioritisation of the cost factor in calculations of the
mechanisms for dealing with pauper, delinquent or refractory children.
Although the apparent savings result in much larger long-term costs.
Radical reformists, as we noted, regularly criticised inadequate provision
and training of staff well over a century ago. Third, none of the official
documents and discourses dealt with the causes of inequality, even
in Kay’s criticisms. This is not surprising since it implies dismantling
capitalism or at least instituting massive redistribution of wealth. It is
significant that the redistributive measures implemented by the Welfare
State resulted in a significant reduction in the gap between rich and
poor, a degree of security for the poorest section of the population and
an improvement in the educational achievement of children from the
poorer sector of society.
To conclude, we re-iterate the point we made at the start of this

chapter and in our Introduction regarding the tensions and ambivalences
in the thinking relating to poverty, inequality, juvenile delinquency and
the role of education. These tensions seem to have been hardwired in the
practices and provisions for those children who for one reason or another
formed the army of the excluded. Whilst changes in the 20th century
in the wake of the Welfare State made genuine efforts towards inclu-
sion and the recognition of systematic disadvantage due to a range of
special or specific factors, the turn to neoliberal political economy in
redrawing the categories and the framework for educational and social
policy appear to revive the worse aspects of 19th century thinking about
inequality, poverty and the treatment of children unable to cope for one
reason or another. The next chapter examines this turning.
9
‘No More Excuses’: Neoliberalism
and the New Exclusion
Those who were to be readjusted were always from the

working class, and usually from the poorest sections; they
came from families which had most conspicuously failed to
live ‘respectable’ lives. (Hendrick, 2004: 123)
Previous chapters have explored how poor children and young people
in the 19th century became the target for intervention. We traced how
the need for intervention was formed within a discourse which emerged
in response to several concerns about issues of security, the protection
of property and the formation of useful labour. Except amongst a net-
work of radical reformers, concern did not extend to a genuine interest
in improving the conditions of the working class. The dominant view
understood poverty as an inherited ‘condition’ which if unmanaged
would threaten the social and moral fabric of society and the economy as
a whole. These views, consistent with liberal political economy, informed
the development of measures which aimed to governmentalise poverty
and criminality through institutions such as the workhouse and the
Industrial and Reformatory schools. Our argument is that the establish-
ment of the latter system as a means of removing and containing specific
categories of children seen as a source of danger in the 19th century,
whilst educating them to a suitable standard for their allotted station
in life, has provided the conceptual framework which has continued to
inform policy and practice in spite of oppositional voices and initiatives.
The dominant element of the discourses which emerged from the
time of the Poor Law reforms constituted the children of the poor as
always potentially criminal; thus, the issues of security and prevention
were uppermost in the minds of policy-makers. Exclusion in one form
or another, from transportation, ‘export’ and transplantation to the
155
colonies to specialised institutions such as Industrial and Reformatory

Schools and Young Offender Institutions has been the preferred strategy
of containment generated by the priorities of biopolitical power. We
have shown that radical discourse developed alongside, guiding the
establishment of alternative approaches and institutions that, whilst
belonging to a history of ‘progressive’ education, have made little
inroads into exclusionary practices. We have presented support for this
analysis in the historical record which our genealogy has reconstructed,
whilst our extension of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitical governmental-
ity has brought to light the persistence of tensions in the discourse of
liberalism and political economy which have been manifested in the
conflicting effects they have had on how disciplinary, educational and
penitential institutions have operated in practice. Our argument is that
the institutionalisation of exclusion as a strategy for dealing with the
category of children targeted in previous policies is rearticulated today
in the fact that those who now tend to be subject to school exclusionary
procedures have profiles that match those affected in the past. Poverty,
inequality and their ‘diseases’ are the common factors from the time of
classical liberalism to neoliberalism today.
The historical work, besides, shows that there were significant differ-
ences in the policy and practice of exclusion which was developed in
England compared to what was being established in other European
countries, the most important of which was the tendency in Europe to
prefer rehabilitation whilst the balance in England has been weighted
towards retribution and punishment. This preference for retribution has
had clear and lasting implications and effects not just for provision but
for the way that cultural and societal attitudes have been shaped. We
connected this preference with the way that the boundaries between
children identified as either ‘threats’ or ‘victims’ became increasingly
blurred with the consequence that ‘victims’ have tended to be caught
in a net whereby they were also ‘punished’ as a ‘preventative measure’,
with increasingly punitive measures being introduced to contain and
reform them alongside those identified as ‘threats’.
Against the predominant exclusionary strategies, we have emphasised
the importance of the alternative practices that promoted a different
understanding of poverty and which privileged education as a redemp-
tive force, most notably through the work of Mary Carpenter guided
by Unitarianism. Such alternatives put into practice a universalist view
of entitlements and rights which their advocates defended on the basis
of the fundamental equality of all citizens and of equity as the prin-
ciple that should determine state policy. These are also the ideas that
‘No More Excuses’ 157
have motivated the institution of a providential or welfare state to care

for all equally, and that have been translated into increasingly inclu-
sive approaches in education. It is precisely these principles, existing
ambivalently within liberalism as we examined in our Introduction,
which neoliberalism has been subverting and made inoperative by dis-
mantling the state apparatuses that operationalised them. For example,
it has imported into education doctrines borrowed from the market and
business such as competition amongst schools and consumer choice,
and introduced management, accounting and auditing models that
convert education into a business. One consequence has been the devel-
opment of practices for dealing with ‘disaffected’ young people and
children that replay the binary categories of docile versus dangerous or
disruptive which were prevalent in the 19th century. Today these cat-
egories draw additional support from the dubious claims of geneticism,
socio-biology and ‘pop’ psychology. We shall take up these and other
issues in our concluding remarks.
Misspent youth and the new criminalisation
The connection which linked children who were excluded from school
to increased crime started to be made explicit in the wake of an offi-
cial report, Misspent Youth (1996), which was produced by the Audit
Commission. It is worth noting that there are interesting connections
to the Poor Laws of the 19th century through the Audit Commission, a
government body which had been established in 1983 and which situ-
ates its origins as follows:
District Auditors were first appointed in the 1840s to inspect the

accounts of authorities administering the Poor Law. Auditors ensured
that safeguards were in place against fraud and corruption and that
local rates were being used for the purposes intended. The found-
ing principles remain as relevant today as they were 150 years ago.
Public funds need to be used wisely, as well as in accordance with
the law. The task of today’s auditors is to assess expenditure, not
just for probity and regularity, but for value for money as well.
(Audit Commission, Misspent Youth, 1996: 125)
Misspent Youth (1996) was instrumental in asserting that there was a

link between school exclusion and crime, a link which, as Hodgson and
Webb (2005) pointed out ‘saw the increasing saliency of the notion
that school exclusion was by far and away the principal reason for the
upsurge in youth crime’ (Hodgson and Webb, 2005: 13).
The assumption that children out of school for whatever reason
were responsible for increased crime totally ignored the complexity
of the issues which contribute to exclusion and youth crime. There
are numerous other explanations in respect of school exclusion which
were absent in the narrow focus on exclusion and crime that began to
emerge in the aftermath of the Misspent Youth report. One effect of
this was that children became criminalised through their visibility, a
presence which became increasingly tied to their potential wrongdoing
and which produced an array of new ‘offences’ and disciplinary meas-
ures designed to eliminate them from public spaces: curfews, anti-social
behaviour orders, and so on were the official response in much the
same way that similar concerns about ‘visibility’ in the 19th century
had resulted in new offences being introduced in the Industrial Schools
Act. In addition, the uncritical acceptance of Misspent Youth confirmed
the emerging ‘fear of youth’ discourse and marginalised critiques, for
example, of an education system which was being increasingly tied to
the marketplace, and promoted an agenda which pursued inclusion at
the expense of meeting children’s special needs, and which placed chil-
dren with emotional and behavioural disorders in settings where they
were unsupported, a measure which contributed to their subsequent
exclusion from education.
Thus, the belief that school exclusion contributed to or was the
principal reason for an ‘upsurge in crime’ was both contradictory and
misleading. On the one hand, Home Office statistics at that time sug-
gested that crime by children and young people was actually falling
whilst, on the other hand, the report ignored the actions of schools
which were responsible for a sharp rise in the number of children being
permanently excluded.
The Audit Commission’s ‘mission’ is to ensure that budgets are man-
aged effectively and thus their research findings for Misspent Youth
were consistent with an approach which focussed on crime reduction
and the proposed strategies to achieve this. One of the effects of this
approach was that it produced an account in which the lived experi-
ence of children and young people was largely absent. Furthermore,
as Jones (2001: 378) pointed out, ‘there is an undercurrent of objecti-
fication and dehumanizing of young people’. We would suggest that
this was consistent with a fixation on how much money was being
wasted in the then youth justice system. Indeed, the term ‘Misspent
Youth’ managed to address concerns about both improper spending by
government agencies and reckless behaviour by young people. The find-

ings presented in Misspent Youth have been hugely influential in terms
of dominating the discourse around youth justice policy, although this
has been problematic, as Jones has argued:
they are regularly cited, but are rarely criticised or evaluated. Their
findings are often taken as the final word on the topic. It is as if the
critical faculties of youth justice academics and the practitioners are
suspended when confronted with financial costings, statistics, or ‘evi-
dence’ when it is gathered by accountants, auditors or economists.
( Jones, 2001: 363)
We would suggest the impact of this ‘audit culture’ approach was that
it produced a significant shift from seeing a child in trouble as in need
of care and protection to one which prioritised the ‘management’ of
the ‘problem’. It was a shift driven by an actuarial approach principally
concerned with counting, measuring, the management of resources and
minimising costs.
The effects of Misspent Youth went beyond the initial focus which
was the youth justice system. In particular, the connection between
youth offending, exclusion and truancy was asserted in all major
policy documents and proposals. In each case, the connection to crime
was expressed explicitly and uncritically in official documents such
as the 1997 Department of Education and Employment White Paper,
Excellence in Schools, which pointed out that:
as well as being a cause of low achievement, especially amongst boys,

truancy and exclusion are also associated with crime. A survey for
the recent Audit Commission study Misspent Youth indicated that
65 per cent of school age offenders sentenced in court had also been
excluded from school or were persistent truants. (DfEE: Excellence in
Schools: 1997: 57)
By the following year, the first document produced by the Social

Exclusion Unit, Truancy and School Exclusion, started out by stating
that ‘truancy and exclusions have reached a crisis point. The thousands
of children who are not in school on most school days have become
a significant cause of crime’ (Social Exclusion Unit: Truancy and School
Exclusion: 1998: 1).
Thus, the Audit Commission report was hugely influential in terms
of setting an agenda which tied troubled children to a ‘crime’ discourse.
The result of this was that it guaranteed any interventions would be

located within disciplinary practices rather than enabling a support-
ive framework which would address underlying issues. Furthermore,
responsibility for the activities which have led the child back onto the
streets is once more seen to be within the individual child with little
regard to the conditions which have produced a subject who is disaf-
fected and disturbed. Indeed, the main response has been to criminalise
damaged children. When looking at who was excluded from school in
1998 the evidence suggested that:
most excluded pupils are white, male young teenagers, but a number
of groups are disproportionately likely to be excluded –
Children with special needs are six times more likely than others to
be excluded
Afro-Caribbean children are six times more likely than others to be
excluded
Children in care are ten times more likely than others to be excluded.
83 per cent of excluded pupils are boys. 80 per cent are between the
ages of 12 and 15.
Exclusion rates vary greatly from school to school but tend to be
higher in areas of social deprivation. (Social Exclusion Unit 1998,
Truancy and school exclusion: xx)
A recent analysis of pupil exclusion in England (DFE, 2012) presents

similar findings to the 1998 report, and the Children’s Commissioner for
England points out that ‘certain groups of pupils are significantly more
likely than others to be excluded: boys, children from certain ethnic
groups; children with Special Educational Needs; and children eligible for
free school meals’ (Children’s Commissioner Report, 2012: 22). It should
be noted that children with a statement of special educational needs or
on School Action Plus for behaviour, emotional and social difficulties
are most likely to be excluded either permanently or for a fixed period.
The common factors within these groups are class, poverty, chaotic
families or no family at all, conditions reported time and again in
reports in the 19th century. In other words, these are the most vulner-
able children and the children who are least likely to have articulate
advocates to negotiate the system on their behalf. In the 19th century
Mary Carpenter had identified the inequalities of a system which
allowed the ‘higher classes’ to benefit from their ability to shield their
children whilst those of the ‘perishing’ and ‘dangerous’ classes were
left to face the dangers and institutionalised treatment meted out to
adults. A recent report from HMI Prisons records that young offenders
in Ashfield Young Offender Institution were ‘exposed to unacceptable
levels of violence’ (HMIP, 2013: 10). Thus the emphasis would seem to
have turned back towards regimes founded in punishment and disci-
pline with little space available to address the underlying conditions
which contribute to the continuation of factors long associated with
inequality and poverty, as we discussed in the Introduction by reference
to the work of Wilkinson and Pickett (2010) and Stiglitz (2013). There is
once more a utilitarian, cost-driven, doctrine-shaping policy although
this is incoherent, given the cost of incarceration: it can cost as much as
£200,000 to accommodate one child in custody for a year.
Context: the present
In this section we explore how particular groups of children and young

people in the present have become re-constituted as feral, dangerous,
to be feared and thus subject to the kind of disciplinary practices which
emerged in the 19th century. It is instructive to understand this shift
in the light of a number of changes introduced with the Welfare State.
For example, there was a greater focus on the family in the post-Second
World War, prompted by the diffusion of psychoanalytic research, par-
ticularly John Bowlby’s work from the 1950s on the maladjusted and
delinquent child and his stress on attachment and loss in psychic devel-
opment, and Donald Winnicott’s work on the importance of ‘holding’
within the family environment that he associated with ‘anti-social
tendency’ and ‘pre-delinquent behaviour’ if the child’s sense of security
were disturbed. Equally, the work of Piaget on child development had
an impact in shifting attention to concepts of child development and
readiness. A third strand which had transformative effects for pedagogy
and curricular development is that of the increasing recognition of class
as a determinant of educational achievement, notably as pioneered
in the findings of Jean Floud and colleagues, notably in ‘Social Class
and Educational Opportunity’ (1956). Altogether, these inputs altered
the vocabulary for child-centred educationalists and informed the
‘progressive’ turn in education in the UK. Interestingly, the initiatives of
those like Carpenter and Demetz had become part of a forgotten history
of struggle. In spite of these changes, there remained a population of
children categorised as criminal for whom a regime of confinement and
punishment was thought as the only appropriate remedy.
All that was to change with the rise of neoliberalism from the
early 1980s. Indeed, in hindsight one realises how brief the period of
‘progressivism’ in education has been, lasting 30 years at most. We want

to highlight the fact that the neoliberal emphasis on the centrality of
the market and the responsibility of individuals to manage their own
lives has been to pathologise specific categories of the population as
forming what has been described as an ‘underclass’, that is, those unable
to assume the role of the enterprising subject, that is, the subject who
is able to transform herself into ‘human capital’ (Foucault, 2008), thus
unable to compete. Yet, it is clear that this phenomenon is not particu-
larly new as many of the characteristics which have been applied to
this group are the same as those identified by the earlier explorers who
ventured into the landscape inhabited by the poor in the 19th century.
Furthermore, there is an echo of Malthus in the underclass discourse in
the way that pursuing a particular way of life is seen as a ‘choice’ recall-
ing our examination of Malthus’ description of the choices made by the
poor as imprudent and feckless and that thus rendered them unworthy
of sympathy or support. In addition, there has been a move away from
the post-war effort to take account of underlying problems, for instance
through psychoanalytically informed interventions or explanations;
instead, one has seen a return to a behaviourist psychology model, such
as in cognitive behaviour therapy, which reflects the demand for cost-
effective solutions and is more in keeping with a regime obsessed with
‘evidence based’ policy and practice and short-term budgetary objectives.
This shift is important because it mirrors the wider shift from the
idea of the welfare state that had prioritised the state’s responsibility for
every citizen and the commitment to reduce inequality through redis-
tributive measures (Beveridge, 1942), to the neoliberal doctrine of the
minimal state, whose role is limited to that of establishing and manag-
ing the frameworks within which markets operate and individuals make
choices and act (Foucault, 2008). This new approach individualises
behaviour and is not concerned with the causes of conduct but their
consequences, for example, regarding their effects for security and good
order or for costs to the state. The aim is always to minimise direct state
intervention and regulate conduct through the law, the idea being that
individuals can work out for themselves the costs and benefits of par-
ticular action, including delinquent or criminal acts (Foucault, 2008).
This is particularly evident in the discourse which has been constructed
around ‘delinquent’ children and young people who have become
increasingly demonised and ‘responsibilised’. Muncie has argued that:
an increasing tendency to responsibilise children, their families and

working class communities and a reliance on an expanding control
apparatus to ‘manage’ poverty and disadvantage have led to a relent-

less stream of ‘crackdowns’, initiatives, targets, policy proposals, pilot
schemes and legislative enactments. (Muncie, 2006: 2)
The observations that Muncie makes illustrate the extent to which

individuals, including children, who fail to ‘toe the line’, that is be
docile and disciplined, are now subject to an ever-increasing range of
measures designed to punish them rather than alleviate their impov-
erished or disaffected or troubled state. Whilst the disappearance of
institutions such as Reformatory and Industrial Schools, and the end-
ing of practices such as transportation, emigration and forced employ-
ment for the children of the poor who transgressed, might lead one to
believe in a society which has thrown off the horrors of the past, the
reality, however, is more complex. The reduction of options available
to manage the children of the poor has produced a situation in which
an increasing range of activities have become criminalised, leading to
more children and young people being drawn into the criminal jus-
tice system. This, in turn, reproduces beliefs that juvenile offending
is increasing and becoming more serious. A recent report ‘Violence
against children in conflict with the law’, which compared practices
in Belgium, England and Wales, France and the Netherlands pointed
out that:
in all four countries, the common discourse on children in conflict

with the law is basically the same: There has been a substantial rise
in juvenile crime and it is becoming more violent. It is true that there
was a substantial rise between 1950 and 1980 in most Western coun-
tries, but the bulk of it was non-serious property and petty crime.
There is no evidence for a similar rise in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed,
for most European countries, juvenile crime rates have been stable
over the last decade. Nevertheless, juvenile justice reforms have been
introduced in all of the four countries based on this premise of an
increasing crime problem. (Detrick, S et al., 2008: 35)
The belief that crime is increasing produces alarm and fear that then
authorises increasingly repressive measures; the United Nations report
noted that ‘the English and Welsh approach is more repressive than
that of most other European countries’ (2008: 35). Indeed, such a
strong consensus has been established regarding the need for young
offenders to be severely dealt with that criticisms from organisations
such as the United Nations are regularly ignored. Furthermore, research
commissioned by Barnardo’s (2008) which examined attitudes towards

all children concluded that ‘more than half the population think that
British children are beginning to behave like animals’. The findings of
their research demonstrated that:
• just under half (49 per cent) of people agree that children are increas-
ingly a danger to each other and adults,
• 43 per cent agree something has to be done to protect us from
children,
• more than a third (35 per cent) of people agree that nowadays it feels
like the streets are infested with children,
• 45 per cent of public agree that people refer to children as feral because
they behave this way,
• nearly half of people (49 per cent) disagree with the statement that
children who get into trouble are often misunderstood and in need
of professional help. (Barnardo’s, 2008: 1)
These findings illustrate the way that perceptions of children and young
people have been increasingly shaped by a ‘fear of crime’ discourse
which, as the international report pointed out, is largely unfounded. It
is unsurprising, then, that the United Nations reported that in England
and Wales ‘although recorded offending by children has been in decline,
between 1994 and 2004, the number of children sentenced to custody
increased by 90 per cent’ (Detrick, S et al., 2008: 35). This incongruity
has been examined in a report by Barnardo’s which analysed the cases
of a sample of children aged 12–14 who were sentenced to custody in
2007–2008. Key findings were:
of the 513 children aged 14 and under sentenced to custody between

1 January and 31st December 2007, 48 were sentenced for grave
crimes or given extended sentences for serious offending … The
remaining 465 children sentenced to custody had not committed
grave crimes or been given extended sentences for serious offend-
ing … The law requires that a Detention and Training Order (DTO)
should only be given to a child as young as 12, 13 or 14 if the court
decides that only a custodial sentence reflects the seriousness of the
offence, and the young child is a persistent offender Our research
shows that twenty two per cent of the children received their custo-
dial sentence for breach of a community intervention – such as an
ASBO, a supervision order or a curfew. (Barnardo’s, 2009: 4)
These findings highlight the continuation of practices which emerged

in the 19th century. Indeed, there is an extraordinary similarity in terms
of the contributory factors which were identified in the 1896 Report
into Reformatory and Industrial Schools and the descriptions in the
2009 Barnardo’s report which charted the ‘chaotic lives’ of the children
in their survey and identified poverty as the common factor in the lives
of the children, and young people who were sent to Industrial and
Reformatory Schools. The Barnardo’s report points out that:
a common factor linking children and young people sentenced

to custody is poverty. This research found that 37 per cent of the
children in our sample sentenced to DTOs in 2007-8 were living
in deprived households. Whilst a minority of children who offend
come from stable families, most live in homes which are at best cha-
otic and at worst abusive. (Barnardo’s, 2009: 18)
In addition, a significant percentage of the children surveyed had expe-

rienced abuse, had a statement of special educational needs and a his-
tory of running away from home. This is confirmed by Hendrick who
has pointed out that:
every survey undertaken with young people in trouble shows that

they are also ‘in need’. Among 15–16 year olds who have been locked
up approximately 35 per cent were not living at home prior to being
remanded in prison; more than 50% were not at school for one rea-
son or another; 75 per cent were already known to the local author-
ity through either the ‘looked after’ or the youth justice systems;
others had histories of mental health problems, self harm, and of
substance abuse. Recent figures show that 75 per cent of those held
in young offenders’ institutions had not attended school beyond the
age of 13. (Hendrick, 2003: 229)
Instead of the care and protection which these vulnerable children

needed, the imperative to ‘protect society’ which had been identified
in the 1896 Report in Industrial and Reformatory Schools prevailed in
determining the agenda:
Barnardo’s is realistic about the reality that some children, even

those as young as 12 need to be locked up. But the clear intention of
Government and Parliament is that custody for teenagers as young
as this should, genuinely, be used only as a last resort. Until 1998 it
would have been illegal to send a child of this age to custody unless
they had committed one of the so called ‘grave offences’. Now we
do this, every year, to more than 400 children aged 12, 13 and 14.
What are we thinking of? This is a tragedy for the young people
themselves, it’s a shocking waste of money and, in terms of reducing
their offending and doing anything to protect victims it is almost
invariably ineffective. (Barnardo’s, 2009: 1)
The Barnardo’s research cited the case of a 12-year-old boy, ‘Dean’,

who received an eight-month Detention and Training Order (DTO) and
argued that his story:
demonstrates how the rigidity of the system can accelerate children

into an early custodial sentence, grossly disproportionate to the
nature and number of offences. Dean is a child with a troubled his-
tory; he has autism, a diagnosis of special educational needs and he
was receiving services from the local Child and Adolescent Mental
Health Services. He was also the subject of a child protection plan
and had spent periods in respite care. (Barnardo’s, 2009: 18)
What is significant from the point of view of exclusion is that the fac-
tors identified as contributing to delinquency, namely, poverty, special
educational needs, unstable or insecure home background, living in
care homes, fit precisely the profile of children who get into trouble at
school and are therefore brought within the exclusionary procedure in
place. A revolving door connects school exclusion with juvenile deten-
tion and training institutions. The system now in place and the ethos of
punishment underlying it are avoiding addressing failings in education
and care and support services for young people in need by transforming
them into criminals.
We recall too that individuals such as Carpenter and James Phillips
Kay had argued that retribution should be balanced with a need to
reclaim pauper children through education, whilst the influence of
Mettray had shifted the focus to the need to develop a different type
of institutional provision. However, we have also pointed out that the
successful campaigns by individuals such as Sydney Turner and John
Clay, who argued for an approach founded in harsh discipline, ensured
that provision developed differently in England. A report from the
Howard League puts this policy in context: ‘The majority of European
countries see a child committing crime as a welfare matter, an occa-
sion to energise the various child welfare agencies to examine what is
causing the child’s offending behaviour and to address those causes, be

it educational difficulties, mental health needs or histories of abuse and
neglect. By comparison, our system is engineered to respond primarily
through punishment’ (Howard League, 2008: 2).
Furthermore, campaigns by organisations such as Barnardo’s and the
Howard League, that consistently point to failures within the current
system, are largely marginalised, or the evidence they present is rejected
as it does not fit within the current discourse. A recent statement from
the Howard League would suggest that little has changed:
Too many children end up in custody after being the victims of

abuse, bad parenting or mental health, drug or alcohol problems.
These vulnerable children need our help to turn over a new leaf
before they’re condemned to a life of crime. A prison sentence puts
troubled children into a violent atmosphere that only worsens their
problems. (Howard League, 2013)
This reconceptualisation of the ‘troubled child’ into the offender makes

it possible to reject the so-called ‘socio-liberal consensus’, one which
was fragile and short-lived but which had acknowledged the connec-
tion between deprivation, educational failure and offending. Moreover
it was a connection which had, for a brief moment, recognised that
‘offending’ by children and young people could be understood as part
of the normal process of growing up, as the observations made in a 1968
White Paper, Children in Trouble, pointed out:
juvenile delinquency has no single cause, manifestation or cure.

Its origins are many, and the range of behaviour which it covers is
equally wide. At some points it merges almost imperceptibly with
behaviour which does not contravene the law. A child’s behaviour
is influenced by genetic, emotional and intellectual factors, his
maturity, and his family, school, neighbourhood and wider social
setting. It is probably a minority of children who grow up without
ever misbehaving in ways which may be contrary to the law. (Home
Office, 1968: 3)
In recognising that behaviour which may be described as ‘anti-social’ is

often part of a transitional and complex process and not a predictor of seri-
ous criminality, it was possible to suggest protective strategies designed to
‘hold’ the child through periods of turbulence. Furthermore the relation-
ship between ‘anti-social’ behaviour and emotional, psychological and
developmental problems provide sufficient evidence for more enlight-

ened rehabilitative intervention, rather than exclusion as the ‘default’
response.
The telling break with this ‘progressive’ approach in educational
policy and policy dealing with ‘children in trouble’ came 30 years later
when New Labour adopted a ‘get tough’ stance that left no space for
explanations which pointed to a multiplicity of contributory factors.
The shift signalled the emergence of a consensus amongst policy-
makers that enshrined neoliberal values, including the contradictions
regarding cost that we highlighted in our Introduction.
No More Excuses
In the foreword to a 1997 White Paper, ‘No More Excuses – A New

Approach to tackling youth crime’, Jack Straw, Home Secretary for the
recently elected New Labour Government, signalled a significant shift
in attitudes towards children and young people when he stated that:
an excuse culture has developed within the youth justice system. It

excuses itself for its inefficiency, and too often excuses the young
offenders before it, implying that they cannot help their behaviour
because of their social circumstances. Rarely are they confronted with
their behaviour and helped to take more personal responsibility for
their actions. (Home Office, 1997a: 2)
This short statement set the tone for the rest of the report which
provided a new framework within which inequality and deprivation
were constituted as ‘excuses’. Thus, the social context for offending
was to be abolished and replaced by a new emphasis on ‘personal
responsibility’. This is entirely consistent with the neoliberal emphasis
on the individual at the expense of the social coupled to the use of
law as a mechanism to bend individual conduct to the rationality of
‘rational choice’ based on calculation of positive and negative costs. As
Foucault explains ‘good penal policy does not aim at the extinction of
crime, but at a balance between the curves of the supply of crime and
negative demand’ (Foucault, 2008: 256). Furthermore, the individual
is conceptualised as homo oeconomicus, so that ‘an element, dimension,
or level of behaviour can be postulated which can be interpreted as
economic behaviour and controlled as such’ (Foucault, 2008: 259). The
individual delinquent is assumed to be ‘“responsive” to some extent to
possible gains and losses, which means that penal action must act on
the interplay of gains and losses, or, in other words, on the environ-
ment’ (Foucault, 2008: 259).
The logic of this ‘technology of behaviour’ is that the costs, or punish-
ments, must be high enough to act as deterrent, freeing the state from
the need to help individuals overcome the kind of disadvantages that,
as we have been establishing in the book, have for so long been identi-
fied by a wide range of experts as likely to lead to disruptive, anti-social
or delinquent behaviour. Interestingly, the report confirms this when it
identified what it described as ‘key features’ related to youth criminality
which were listed as:
• being male;
• being brought up by a criminal parent or parents;
• living in a family with multiple problems;
• experiencing poor parenting and lack of supervision;
• poor discipline in the family and at school;
• playing truant or being excluded from school;
• associating with delinquent friends; and
• having siblings who offend. (Home Office, 1997a: 5)
This list points to the profound contradiction at the heart of the new
rhetoric: for, on the one hand, social circumstances were deemed unac-
ceptable in terms of understanding why children and young people
might offend; on the other hand, social circumstance is used as a sort
of route map in terms of identifying potential offenders. Furthermore,
the list of key features was not presenting anything that was particularly
new or unknown, including the connection between exclusion from
school and poor discipline at school. Unsurprisingly, the family would
be cited as the main point of intervention with the introduction and
implementation of a range of measures which included parenting orders
and fines alongside the threat of imprisonment for non-compliance. As
Hendrick remarked:
the ‘poor’ were long ago dismissed by the government as being in no

position to supervise their own children, hence the rash of ‘orders’
and punitive measures taken by New Labour to propel these families
into acting ‘responsible’. (Hendrick, 2003: 245)
If interventions failed, then the main casualty, the child or young

person, would bear the brunt of that failure. Typically, inability to
modify or change behaviour could lead to exclusion from school with
increasingly severe consequences. A current example of such interven-

tions is to be found in the most recent Exclusions Guidance for schools
which decrees that:
during the initial period of up to five school days of any exclusion,

whether fixed period or permanent, the parents of the excluded
pupil must ensure that he or she is not present in a public place dur-
ing normal school hours without reasonable justification, and that
parents may be given a fixed penalty notice or prosecuted if they fail
to do so. (DfE, 2013: 5)
The focus on visibility in a public place once more brands the excluded
child as criminal in potential waiting for the chance to offend.
Furthermore, the profile for excluded pupils would suggest that it is
unlikely that parents would be able to meet these requirements. The
irony is that in attempting to prevent the child or young person from
becoming caught up in criminal activity, there is the real possibility of
criminalising the parents. Thus, it could be argued that ‘responsibility’
has been successfully transferred from institutional or economic failure
onto the individual child or the parent. Krisberg (1998) had pointed to
a shift from an ‘excuse’ culture to a ‘blame’ culture as the underlying
ethos of the discourse which produced ‘No More Excuses’. We would
suggest that neither excuse nor blame is useful in understanding or
addressing the needs of the fragile and vulnerable children and young
people who are positioned as ‘other’. Perhaps the most significant dif-
ference between the 19th century and the present day is in the way
that the former was driven by a belief that both ‘perishing’ and ‘dan-
gerous’ children and young people could be rescued and transformed
into useful citizens through education and a supportive environment
as Carpenter, Demetz and others demonstrated. In contrast, the current
discourse appears to be driven by a more fundamental need to set an
example in the name of protecting the public and making public places
secure: the demands of security trump the needs of children in trouble.
This is particularly evident in the discourse which emerged in the late
1990s following the publication of ‘No More Excuses’, which, whilst
adopting a tough approach to youth crime, seemed unconcerned about
the reality of imprisonment for children and young people.
Another official report, ‘Young Prisoners’, which appeared in 1997
and which was written by the then Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir David
Ramsbotham, highlights this attitude, remarking ‘it is a great pity that
all too much informed and concerned discussion and recommendation
about dealing with delinquent young people stops at the prison gates,
ignoring what goes on behind them and the effect of this on those
who emerge through them at the end of their sentence’ (Home Office,
1997b: 7).
It is noteworthy that Ramsbotham’s comments were informed by
his experiences in inspecting the institutions to which children were
sentenced and which led him to recommend that ‘children under 18
should not be held in prison’ (Home Office, 1997b: 7). Interestingly,
Ramsbotham reached this conclusion having started from the same
evidence which had informed the ‘No More Excuses’ report (1997a)
and the Audit Commission’s ‘Misspent Youth’ report (1996). However,
Ramsbotham had identified what he saw as a ‘major deficiency’ of
‘Misspent Youth’, namely, its failure to address:
what went on in Young Offender Institutions or the rehabilitation

of young offenders back into society. Therefore, very deliberately,
Young Prisoners was also written to fill the gap and to be read along-
side Misspent Youth. (Home Office: Annual Report of Her Majesty’s
Chief Inspector of Prisons, 2000: 8)
His conclusion that ‘all the evidence from this review points to the fact
that warehousing children and young offenders in penal institutions,
rather than educating, training and reforming them according to their
individual needs is counterproductive’ (Home Office, 1997b: 25), evokes
those criticisms made by his predecessors in the 19th century such as
James Phillips Kay and Edward Tufnell.
Furthermore, we would also suggest that the institutions that are
described in the ‘Young Prisoners’ report are the contemporary equiva-
lent of Parkhurst Prison for boys which had closed in the 1860s. As we
saw, Parkhurst had closed at a time when Reformatory Schools were
being established and where the emphasis had begun to shift from incar-
ceration and transportation. In contrast, Young Offender Institutions
which were established in the 1990s are managed by the prison service
and have a distinct ethos which suggests that their purpose is primar-
ily one of incarceration rather than education, rehabilitation or care,
a point also made in the previous chapter in relation to the criticism
of the Reformatory and Industrial Schools (Reformatory and industrial
schools committee 1896b). Confining children to these institutions, in
Ramsbotham’s view, provided ‘just one further stage in the exclusion
of a group of children who between them, have already experienced
almost every form of social exclusion on offer’ (Home Office, 1997b: 3).
A glance at the list of identifying features of the backgrounds of young

offenders in the ‘No More Excuses’ report would tend to support the
arguments made by Ramsbotham. However, it would appear that his
attempts to intervene and challenge the get tough approach to young
offenders had minimal impact. Indeed, ten years after he had produced
his report on ‘Young Prisoners’ little has changed in terms of the daily
reality for children and young people who are in prison. The most
recent H.M. Prisons Annual Report records how ‘at Feltham, young
people could spend as much as 22 hours a day locked up’ (2012: 76).
A few years earlier, in an audit of conditions in Young Offenders
Institutions by the Howard League, based on data provided in
Inspection Reports, Frances Crook the Director pointed out that:
we keep children smelly and dirty, idle and frightened, bored with
education and cooped up in modern day dungeons. And we expect
them miraculously to pupate into responsible citizens. In reality,
these young people leave prison more damaged and more danger-
ous than when they first went in. It is frankly shocking that we treat
children in this way in the 21st century. (Howard League, 2009: 1)
This agrees with Crook’s evidence which she presented to the Joint
Committee on Human Rights (2004) when she had pointed out
how ‘they will not know, for example, that at most Young Offender
Institutions, the child in prison never sees daylight – they do not go
outside throughout the whole of their sentence (Joint Committee on
Human Rights, 2004, Volume II: 12). Crook’s evidence would suggest
that there has been deterioration in terms of both the actual conditions
for children who are imprisoned and an abandonment of any claim
to see custody as contributing to reformation of the delinquent child
through education and a rehabilitative programme. This agrees with
the observations on the conditions which children experience whilst
locked up in prison are evocative of conditions that pauper children
endured in the 19th century, whether in Parkhurst Prison for Boys in
the 1830s, the workhouse schools or in the barrack like Industrial and
Reformatory schools.
We would recall too Mary Carpenter in her preface to Juvenile
Delinquents (1853) had pointed out that:
whatever views may be entertained respecting adult criminals, all

agree that reformation is the object to be aimed at with young offend-
ers; nor is it doubted that the Gaol is not a true Reformatory School,
though at present the only one provided by our country; since thou-
sands of young children annually committed to it come forth not to
diminish but to swell the ranks of vice. (Carpenter, 1853: 1)
It is clear therefore that today the concern with reformation has become
increasingly marginalised as the focus shifted to retribution and pun-
ishment as part of neoliberal governance, particularly since the 1990s.
As Crook also points out, the expectation is that young prisoners will
‘miraculously pupate into responsible citizens’. This is the other side
of the ‘responsibilisation’ ethos which we discussed earlier and which
assumes that individuals somehow know how to behave but simply
choose not to conform. This would seem to be the logical progression
from the belief that excluding children from school for bad behaviour
will by itself enable them to return, transformed into model students
with no support or intervention. In both models, that of the Young
Offender Institutions and of the education system, the emphasis is on
the ability of the individual to ‘fix’ themselves. Failure to achieve this
leads, inevitably, to further punishment.
Current practices and institutions seem to have abandoned the ethos
of the reformers in the 19th century. The issue of poverty and its effects,
though discussed, is not tackled in terms of causes of inequality such
as class; instead intervention is limited to constantly reshaping the
framework, introducing new laws, regulations and regulatory bodies,
run according to the rules of an audit culture that requires calculable
‘inputs’ and ‘outcomes’, thus targets, evidence-based decisions, that
is statistics, and management practices that necessarily make caring
secondary to ‘value for money’. The fact that the ‘value for money’
principle is itself incoherent, as we have pointed out about the cost of
excluding troubled children or incarcerating them, points to the basic
irrationality in the system.
Conclusion
Our examination of school exclusion in the present puts the question

we asked at the beginning of the book about ‘why exclusion’ into per-
spective. For it is clear that the problems are well known, for instance,
the correlations linking exclusion with juvenile delinquency and with
children categorised as ‘special needs’. We know too that children act-
ing out or being disruptive tend to come from broken or abusive homes,
or from homes with parents who have severe problems relating to men-
tal illness or addiction. An abundance of reports, both governmental
and from NGOs, have long established the futility of exclusion as a

strategy, and highlighted its enormous costs.
So, our question about the resilience of exclusion is not about lack
of information today regarding such facts, but about the kind of ques-
tioning that this conundrum opens up. The line of enquiry we have
pursued throughout has foregrounded inequality and poverty as central
components of the problem. Using the standpoint of political economy
we have located exclusion within the wider context of capitalism and
liberalism, thus indicating that the underlying issues are not just about
the economy but also about politics. That is to say, exclusion is not just
about what suits the market, say, in terms of minimising costs and meet-
ing the needs of the labour market, but is equally about class relations,
issues of inequality, social order and the role of the state; it thus essen-
tially concerns the relations of power invested in education. This way
of looking at the question of exclusion brings up a number of problems
that are more fundamental than exclusion and that we think identifies
the wider issues that would need to be tackled if altogether different
kinds of intervention are to emerge. We note two of these issues, as we
think they encapsulate the forces preventing significant change.
The first relates to the arguments we developed regarding the criti-
cal role of the social sciences and statistics in providing the conceptual
framework and the evidence that informed educational and social
policy and so helped in the establishment of apparatuses of discipline,
regulation and formation which emerged as part of biopolitics. Our
point draws attention to the extent to which behaviourist psychologi-
cal and biological sciences now play this role of authorising policy and
practices of exclusion that would otherwise have been subject to fiercer
criticisms. The behaviourist paradigm, by privileging instrumental and
mechanistic approaches to cognition, child development and emotional
problems, reduces them to the order of the calculable and individualis-
able; it is thus congruent with the logic of an audit culture, and suits
the neoliberal market-driven objective of reducing everything, includ-
ing education, to the calculable and marketable. Ethics does not fit into
this worldview as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek well knew. For
those who are deemed disaffected or refractory and thus candidates for
exclusion, the outcome is often medicalisation in terms of disorders,
thus promoting chemical forms of intervention to achieve docility
and conformity. This ‘scientific’ explanation and the biotechnological
solution have the effect of countering arguments that counsel a more
complex understanding of the problems that suggests interventions at
the economic, social, cultural, psychological and environmental levels.
The second issue became clear in our analysis of forms and prac-
tices of exclusion in the different chapters, namely, that poverty and
inequality are important not only because of the effects we detailed
but because they are the products of capitalism as an economic system
that, if unchecked, necessarily produces poverty and inequality. In the
19th century radical thinkers recognised this zero-sum game aspect of
capitalism and wanted the state to intervene to try and equalise oppor-
tunities for all. There is more at stake here however, given that the
legitimation of the state in a democracy implicates the idea of a social
contract underlying citizen’s consent to the authority of the state. Such
consent would not be given if citizens (or the people) understood that
existing legal, administrative and institutional arrangements reinforce
existing relations of power and privilege, and that those in power seek
to maintain this situation. It should be remembered here that one of
the outcomes of struggles in the nineteenth century to which we drew
attention is the emergence of radical alternatives, motivated by uni-
versalist values prioritising equity, equality and responsibility for the
welfare of all, both at the level of oppositional discourses and practical
solutions. We argued that these dissenting initiatives and voices belong
to the history of ‘progressivism’ in education, in the UK and elsewhere,
a history which in more recent times one can detect in campaigns for
greater effective inclusion. Indeed, that history has marked shifts in
official discourse and policy that appear to support inclusion for all
categories of children. But, as we examine shortly, there exists a chasm
between the rhetoric of inclusion and the reality of exclusion.
In part this is due to the long history of failure to learn lessons from
approaches that recognise the complex character of the ‘diseases of
poverty’, which refer not just to the obvious disadvantages and their
consequences for learning, for cognitive ability and thus achievement
but about traumas and stresses that are transmitted from generation to
generation unless the cycles are broken for one reason or another. So
we have the continuation of the stigmatisation of poor, troubled or dis-
ruptive children in practices that exclude them by stealth or by default,
echoing the regressive values in the ‘No More Excuses’ document,
values which linger in the underlying attitudes shared by a powerful
section of ‘public opinion’ and the media. Policy often stumbles when
faced with these archaic forces, as Kay and Tufnell discovered long ago.
And good intentions constantly falter because of the countervailing
arguments of economists, today and in the past, as we showed.
But the disconnect between intention and the reality of exclusion
relates not just to resistances to initiatives seeking a fairer deal for the
poorest citizens as in the 19th century but to the changes in the rules
of the game introduced by neoliberalism. Its marketisation of education
has introduced new principles and frameworks that present obstacles
to effective inclusionary practices which seem almost insurmountable,
especially in the context of the current policy of austerity.
Political economy once more emerges as the determinant parameter
reshaping the domains of educational and social policy, and here the
crucial shift is from a Keynesian and Beveridgian liberalism to the neo-
liberal repositioning of the role of the state. It is easy to forget that the
idea of the Welfare or providential state had been the result of long
struggles against the fixity of social class and the distribution of wealth
and life chances. The settlement of these struggles in modern times has
taken the form of redistributive programmes based on the principle of
universal entitlements and rights. Neoliberalism rejects this politics in
favour of a Hobbesian model of the struggle of each against each and
the ontologisation of self-interest.
As we discussed in our introductory chapter, the defining shift locates
the state as working for the market and according to the rules of the
market. That means prioritising competition, individual choice, an
enterprise culture and the privatisation of the public sector, including
social and educational services, and the assessment of costs and ben-
efits in terms of an audit culture that replicates commercial accounting
practice. Targets that are set for schools and other educational estab-
lishments must conform to this accounting system. Economic or class
disadvantage has been audited out of the equation. Translated into
practice, the neoliberal turn has more recently resulted in the following
kinds of changes in how exclusion is managed. Ironically, the new set-
up is supposed to operate according to a rhetoric of inclusion.
The first thing that practitioners such as educational psychologists
and others working within support teams funded by local authorities
have discovered is that such teams are being broken up, in part because
of new financial constraints imposed on the funding authorities.
Joined-up intervention has thus become more difficult. Additionally,
schools as well as agencies must now compete for diminishing resources.
The granting of power to head teachers to choose alternative provisions
for the excluded has resulted in the uneven allocation of resources and
priorities. The fact that in 2009/10 only 1.4 per cent of children in
Alternative Provision for those permanently excluded achieved five or
more A* to C GCSE grades is a telling context for assessing these changes.
Other consequences are the regional variations, depending on
resources and funding available, and the dispersal of oversight. Matters
are not helped by the fact that the privatisation of some public sector
providers has meant that corporations with little relevant expertise
now ‘own’ previously public resources or have become monopolistic
providers setting their own operational targets. They often employ less-
qualified staff who cost less; this must add to the deprofessionalisation
of agencies that managerial styles and vocabularies of action copied
from business practice tend to produce. The situation has resulted in
chaotic systems in some regions, leaving room for illegal exclusions
and for deals amongst schools and providers that suit them, but that
are not necessarily for the benefit of children in trouble (Children’s
Commissioner for England Report, 2013). A whole new generation of
poor or troubled children are paying the price.
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Index
Abolition of Slavery Act (1833), 102 child-centredness, 100, 114

ADD, 11 children
ADHD, 11 abuse, 8, 9, 12, 31, 37–47, 66,
apprenticed labour, 36–8, 45, 52 151, 165–6
and conditions, 40–3 crime, 31, 69, 71, 81, 84, 160
Approved Schools, 151 delinquency, 7, 34, 84–5, 107,
architecture and social reform, 120 112, 117, 162, 167
Armstrong, Derrick, 9, 10 disadvantage, 7, 8, 165
‘at risk’ category, 148 disruptive behaviour, 5, 148
audit culture, 9, 159, 173–4, 176 emigration of, 51–62, 68, 152
Audit Commission, 12, 157–8 feral, 8, 12, 161
austerity, 5, 27 ownership of, 38
poverty, 1, 2, 8, 51–62, 137–8,
Barnard Henry, 121–5, 128 163–5
Barnardo’s, 121, 164–6 street children, 31, 50
Beaumont, Gustave de and ‘surplus’ or waste, 51–2, 56, 58–9
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 89 troubled, 5, 160, 163, 167
behaviourist paradigm, 174 warehousing, 171
Beveridge, William, 22, 162 Children’s Commissioner Report,
big data, 22 5, 13
biopolitics, 14, 16, 49, 68, 71, 90, 99, Children’s Friend Society, 54–65
116, 119, 132 Children’s Society, 9
Blair, Maud, 12 class, 8, 16, 21, 32, 33, 36, 47, 73,
Blouet, Guillaume, 90, 120, 122 81–2, 101, 111, 120, 126, 160–1,
body and the carceral, 118, 126 174, 176
Bowlby, John, 161 see also, political economy,
Bradlow, Edna, 55, 56 inclusion, social exclusion
Brenton, Edward Pelham, 54, 55 Coghlan, Andy, 3
Bretignerès, Vicomte de, 122 cognitive behaviour therapy, 162
Brewer, Mike et al., 2 Coghlan, Andy and Mackenzie,
broken society, 3 Debora, 25
Byron, Lady, 105 colonial economy, 49, 99
Colpit, Frances, 37–46
capitalism, 4, 20, 27, 51, 99, 133, Comte, Auguste, 22
153, 174–5 Crawford, William, 91
carceral system, 125–7 criminal type, 81
Carpenter, Joseph Estlin, 99, 106 criminal class, 86, 109, 133
Carpenter, Lant, 100–2 criminalisation of the poor, 7, 31, 58,
Carpenter, Mary, 25, 100–17, 129, 82, 94, 155, 157–61, 163
145, 156, 166, 172–3 Croker, Louisa, 60–1
see also Reformatory Schools, Croker, Mary, 60–1
Ragged Schools, Class Crook, Frances, 172–3
Chadwick, Edwin, 24, 26, 77 Cruelty to Children Act (1889), 151
191
192 Index
Daniels, Harry, 9 failing schools, 8

Demetz, Frederik, 90, 120–5 Farey, John, 31
Department of Education, 7, 9, 13 family system of Mettray, 122–4
Detrick, Sharon, 163–4 farm colonies, 108
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of farm school, 104, 123, 145–6
Mental Disorder (DSM), 11 fear of crime, 164
Dickens, Charles, 90, 112 fear of youth, 6, 7, 158
disability, 5, 10 feckless parents, 8, 31, 34, 50
discourse of race war, 26 Fletcher, Joseph, 145
disciplinary society, 16, 17 Floud, Jean, 101
disorder, emotional and behavioural, Foucault, Michel, 13–16, 70, 73, 79,
9–11 162, 168
Dissenters, 100 biopolitics, 99
district schools, 139, 142–3 genealogy, 13–23
Driver, Felix, 139, 144 governmentality, 13–21
Dunlop, Olive, 29, 31, 36 market, 27, 162
Mettray, 125–30
Eekelaar, John, 50 normalisation, 16, 17, 83
education penitentiary, 88–9
alternative, 123, 131, 132, 156 prison, 14–15
as remedy, 136–44 statistics, 21, 71
crime, 29 Frances, Allen, 11
delinquency, 107–8 Fraser, Antonia, 25
established Church, 113 Free, Industrial and Reformatory
exclusion, 6–13, 110 Schools, 111
normalisation, 118 Friedman, Milton, 174
reform, 99, 108
Elementary Education Act (1870), 149 Gane, Nick, 19
Emancipation Act (1834), 50 Gavron, Kate, 8
emancipation, 20 genealogy, 4, 13–23, 69, 119
Employment of Children in Factories archive, 16
Act (1833), 38 history of the present, 17, 131
Engels, Friedrich, 36 of the present, 20, 153
Enlightenment, 20, 26 general interest, 18
environmental politics, 23 Genet, Jean, 118
equity, 19, 20, 26–7, 156, 175 geneticism, 157
exclusion, 6–13, 159–60, 169–71, Giddy, Davies, 32
174 Gilborn, David, 7
biopolitics, 49, 68, 156 girls and exclusion, 13
cost of, 161, 173–4 Glyn, Andrew, 3
crime, 2, 7, 12, 13, 110, 157, 166 Goldman, Lawrence, 24, 107
genealogy, 15, 21, 49, 69, 131 good society, 4
inequality, 2 government of the soul, 103, 125
school, 6–13, 169–70 governmentalisation, 48, 68, 155
short-term, 6 governmentality, 13–21, 37, 70, 99,
special educational needs, 9, 158, 156
160 normalisation, 1
see also, political economy, political econonomy, 13, 18, 90,
education 117
Index 193
Graham, John and Bowling, Ben Kay, James Shuttleworth, 132, 143–4,
12, 13 166, 171
Greenberg, Gary, 11 Krisberg, Barry, 170
Habermas, Jurgen, 25 less eligibility principle, 80, 110,

habits, 16, 30, 138 137
Hacking, Ian, 21–2, 71 Levitas, Ruth, 8
Hackney Kidnappers, 57–62 liberalism, 4, 18–21, 100, 156–7,
Hadley, Elaine, 51, 69 174–6
Haileybury College, 75, 77 Long Depression, 24
Hayden, Carol, 7, 9
Hayek, Friedrich, 20, 174 Malthus and the poor, 7–3
Hendrick, Harry, 10, 155, 169 Malthus, Thomas, 20, 26, 72, 75, 77,
Hodgson, Philip and Webb, David, 162
12, 157 Malthusian realism, 74–5
Howard League, 166–7, 172 Malthusian utilitarian view, 26, 52,
Howard, John, 83–4, 87 61, 62, 68
human capital, 162 Manton, Jo, 101, 106, 110, 112–15
market fundamentalism, 4
immigration, 49 marketisation, 27, 176
Ignatieff, Michael, 90 medicalisation, 10–11, 13, 14, 120,
inclusive education, 5, 10, 175–6 174
individualisation, 11, 69, 151, 162, 168 Mettray, 17, 104, 118–31, 166
individualism, 21 Miles, William Augustus, 26, 74–82,
individual liberty, 18 95
Industrial and Reformatory Schools, Mill, John Stuart, 19, 24
105, 111, 144–51, 155, 165 minimal state, 162
Industrial Schools Act (1857), 147 Mirowski, Philip and Plehwe, Dieter,
Industrial Schools, 147–51 20
industrialisation, 23, 70–1, 99 Mises, Ludvig von, 19, 20
inequality Misspent Youth Report (1996),
causes, 71–2 analysis of, 57–161, 171
classical political economy, 156 Mont Pelerin Society, 19
crime rate, 2 moral entrepreneur, 26, 74, 77
educational achievement, 2–3 moral panic, 67, 94
health, 3, 6 Muncie, John, 162–3
struggle, 1, 160 Munn, Pamela and Lloyd, Gwnedd,
see also, Wilkinson & Pickett; 11–12
poverty Murdoch, Lydia, 50
inequity, 3
neo-biopolitics, 127
Jackson, Tim, 3 Neff, Charlotte, 54–5
Jones, Denis W., 158–9 neoconservatives, 26
Jones, Karen and Williamson, Kevin, neoliberal political economy
29, 30 inequality, 18, 36
just society, 1 neoliberalism, 8, 20, 27, 117, 154,
juvenile delinquency, 5, 12, 34, 84, 107 157, 161, 168, 174, 176
crime discourse, 162–3 New Poor Law Amendment Act of
inequality, 2 1834, 48–9, 59, 71, 80, 136
194 Index
No More Excuses, 168–73 power

normalisation, 6, 9, 16, 17, 48, 83, 91, discipline, 16
116, 118, 125 economy of, 15
technology of, 14
Osler, Audrey, 6, 13 prison, 3, 4, 35, 83, 86–7
Owen, Robert, 34, 122 privatisation, 5, 176–7
Owers, Anne, 7 progressivism, 117, 156, 161–2, 175
psychologisation, 120
panopticon, 17 public sphere, 18, 20, 25
Parkhurst Prison for boys, 87, 91–7, punishment, 7, 35, 73, 79, 88–91,
131, 171 113–14, 156
Parsons, Carl, 5–7, 12
pathologisation, 10–11, 132, 151, Quetelet, Adolphe, 21
162
pauper child reconceptualised, 137–8, radical liberals, 114
145 radical reformers, 155
Pauper Children Emigration Bill, 68 radicalism, 100, 175
pauperism as disease, 137, 144 Ragged schools, 106
penitentiary, 87–9, 90–1, 126 Ramsbotham, David, 170–1
perishing and dangerous classes, 33, Rand, Ayn, 20
108–9, 144, 148 Raugh Hause, 121, 127
Pestalozzi’s Orphan House, 121–2 Reay, Diane, 6
Philips, David, 74–6 Reform Bill (1832), 102
Piachaud, David, 9 reform, 23, 87–8, 103, 113–15, 120
Piaget, Jean, 161 reform movement, 122–3, 144
Pilcher, Jane and Wagg, Stephen, 12 reformatory asylums, 108
Pitts, John, 12 Reformatory Schools, 114–15, 147–8,
political economy 150–1
biopolitics, 49, 71, 90 Reformatory Schools Act (1854), 116,
education, 3–4, 30, 176 130
exclusion, 2, 13, 174 rehabilitation, 84, 88–9, 104, 123,
inequality, 3, 154 172
liberalism, 18–20 relations of power, 174
policy, 49 see also, power
political/economic nexus, 2 resistance and counter-practice, 131
Poor Law Commissioners, 74, 81 responsibilisation, 72, 170, 173
population, 14, 23, 30, 33, 49, 58, Ripley, Colin, 122
71 Ritalin, 11
poverty Rose, Nikolas, 9, 11, 103, 125
crime, 82, 85
as danger, 30, 33, 155 Scraton, Phil, 12
demonised poor, 162 security discourse, 73, 170
deserving and undeserving, 8, 110, self-interested individuals, 4
138 Selleck, Richard Joseph Wheeler, 137
diseases of, 3, 99 Sen, Amartya and Nussbaum,
Malthus, 29, 49, 52, 71–2 Martha, 4
reconceptualisation, 49, 134–6 sexuality, 14
utilitarian approach, 49 Shore, Heather, 13, 71, 86
power/knowledge, 17, 69 silent system, 35, 83, 89, 91–2
Index 195
Slee, Roger, 5 Unitarians and Unitarianism, 20,

small world network, 25 25–6, 71, 103, 105, 156
Smith, Adam, 16, 19, 23 universalism, 4, 156, 175–6
social contract, 20 urbanisation, 70–1, 99
Social Darwinism, 117 urban-rural relationship, 32–3
Social Exclusion Unit, 9–10, 159 useful labour, 150, 155
social insecurity, 8, 30 utilitarian social policy, 4, 17, 52, 107
Social Science Association, 21, 23–5, utilitarian, 19–20, 70
107
Sodha, Sonia and Margot, Julia, 6 Vagrant Act, 95
Southall, Angela, 11 Venn, Couze, 18, 20, 71
special educational needs (SEN), 9–10, Vulliamy,Graham and Webb,
165–6, 173 Rosemary, 7
see also, Exclusion
Statistical society, 21 Wach, H. M., 103
statistics, 21–2, 174 Wacquant, Loic, 8
Stiglitz, Joseph, 2, 27, 161 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 74
street arabs, 32, 111 Warnock Enquiry, 10
street children, 32–5, 50 Warnock, Mary, 6
subjectification, 125, 127 welfare state, 20, 27, 72, 153–4, 157,
surveillance, 16 161–2, 176
Symons, Jellinger, 130 wellbeing, 3–4
syndicalism, 73 Whig values, 58
Wilkinson, Richard and Pickett, Kate,
tambour work, 37 1–2, 161
Taylor, Harriet, 25 Winnicott, Donald, 161
trained teachers, 6, 10, 110, 130 workhouse, 31, 36–8, 55, 139–42
transitional space, 120 indentured labour, 36–8
transportation, 91, 95
trauma, 9 young offender institution, 161, 171–3
Trubshaw, Edward, 62–3, 67 youth crime profile, 169
Tuckerman, Joseph, 103–4 Youth Justice system, 7, 159, 163, 168
Tufnell, Edward, 137, 140, 143 youth offending and truancy, 159

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Inequality, Poverty, Education

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1 Introduction: Elements for a Political Economy

6 Ragged Schools, Child-Centred Education and the

We would like to thank librarians and archivists from Westminster

… health and social problems like violence, mental

illness, delinquency, imprisonment rates, life expectancy (2010: 19).

latter is the restoration of order and discipline conducive to a good

The problem of exclusion

But where should one start in problematising exclusion, and in estab-

Let us start by clarifying what school exclusion is and why it is a prob-

targets for reducing exclusion, it has instead become a point at which

(1998) report contained sections on why African Caribbean children

example, in eugenics discourse (Rose, 1985), and that lends credibility

locates responsibility for behaviour and therefore for exclusion with

One of the effects of this process of medicalising behaviour is the

with disaffected children and young people; indeed, many European

Indeed, whilst there is no doubt that some excluded school children

Indeed, their empirical research challenged the accuracy of the link:

from the findings of research conducted on behalf of the Youth

Nevertheless, widespread acceptance of the link between school exclu-

Genealogy and governmentality: elements for a

In order to do this, we here outline the reasons for turning to the

governmentality is an historically specific form of the exercise of state

different devices such as CCTVs, monitoring internet traffic and other

the relationship of liberalism, capitalism and political economy will

to promote it’ (Smith, 1812 [1776]: 354). The reformulation of Smith’s

with the authority of the natural sciences; the application of mathemat-

Reform and the political economy of exclusion

The questions which the focus on biopolitical governmentality and

intermediary in generating and disseminating the new reliable knowl-

crises, and structural transformations, including the second industrial

emphasising the equality and intrinsic worth of all God’s creatures, a

welfare and salvation of all’ (Foucault, 1979: 12), grounded in ‘a good

the domination of the economy by financial capitalism, as evidence of

In Covent Garden Market there is a party of between thirty

Poor Law officers paid manufacturers about £5 a head for

Threats and victims

instruction was seen as a mode of improving that moral state of the

Early in the 19th century two distinct discourses started to emerge

in most newly-erected cotton spinning mills the demand for children’s

however specious in theory the project might be of giving education

Giddy articulated many of the concerns associated with the working

investigate various areas of concern from education to crime and to

individuals who are struggling to achieve access to basic education and

The problem of prison discipline was increasingly addressed as the

The parish apprentices, meanwhile, received little attention or protec-

In what follows, we tell the story of victims using as much as possi-

even children from the workhouses were employed in multitudes,

The case of Frances Colpit: 1819–1829

Indeed, the First Report into the Employment of Children in Factories

it appears in evidence, that of all employments to which children

The St. Martin’s workhouse reports on apprentices reveal a wide

Thus, Frances was engaged to ‘learn the business of a tambour-worker’

we used to have half a slice of dry bread, and sometimes we used to

The general standard and availability of food had deteriorated within

Working practices at the Hibner’s were brutal, although certainly not