Young Criminal Lives is the first cradle-to-grave study of the experiences of some of the thousands of delinquent, ‘difficult’, and destitute children passing through the early English juvenile industrial school and reformatory system. Applying biographical research methodologies to digital data, we have reconstructed the lives, families, and neighbourhoods of 500 children who were sent to reformatory and industrial schools in the north-west of England from courts around the UK over a fifty-year period from the 1860s onwards. For the first time, we have been able to follow these children on their journey in and out of institutional care, and then though to their adulthood and old age. We centre on institutions celebrated in this period for their pioneering approaches to child welfare and others that were investigated for cruelty and scandal. Both were typical of the new kind of state-certified provision offered, from the 1850s onwards, to children who had committed criminal acts, or who were considered ‘vulnerable’ to predation, poverty, and the ‘inheritance’ of criminal dispositions.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract