Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-11, Section: A, page: 4051.

Adviser: John Merriman.

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, French politicians, government administrators, journalists, charity-workers, and other social activists looked to prison reform as one possible solution to the apparently ever-expanding problem of crime and social disorder. During the July Monarchy (1830-1848), prison reformers engaged in a vehement debate over the best possible means of reforming and rehabilitating imprisoned criminals, concentrating much of their attention on child prisoners, who were considered both more susceptible to reform and more deserving of charitable attention than their adult counterparts. The campaign to improve the treatment of imprisoned children resulted in the elaboration of a variety of experimental penitentiary regimens, culminating in the creation of two competing model institutions--the Petite Roquette prison and the Mettray agricultural colony. More importantly, it also resulted in a significant increase in state control over and intervention in the lives of working-class children.

As an attempt to outline the "total" history of the July Monarchy juvenile corrections system, this dissertation begins with a detailed discussion of the laws regulating the incarceration of minors, arguing that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century legal reforms provided child criminals with a distinct legal identity and set specific restrictions on their treatment within the criminal justice system. Chapter II describes the movement to reform the treatment of imprisoned children, focusing on July Monarchy reformers' theoretical debates about the effectiveness of various rehabilitative strategies and on their concrete efforts to establish public and private penal institutions for children. Chapter III moves beyond this purely institutional history of prison reform and attempts to reconstruct reformers' conceptualization of the criminal child through an analysis of the idea of "precocious perversity."

Chapter IV describes the actual outcome of reform initiatives, providing a chronological history of the construction and organization of children's prisons in Paris during the July Monarchy. Chapter V rounds out the history of these prisons with a demographic portrait of the child prisoners and includes a detailed description of these children's geographic origins, residency patterns, occupations, criminal activities, and mortality rates.