o a prison if they do not reform,
they will think it an awful place." These are wise words. It is
impossible to make imprisonment such a severe discipline for children
as it is for grown-up men and women, and as it is not so severe,
children leave our gaols with a false impression on their minds. The
terror of being imprisoned has, to a large extent, departed; they
think they know the worst and cease to be much afraid of what the law
can do. Hence the fact that society has less chance of reclaiming a
child who has been imprisoned than it has of reclaiming one who has
not undergone that form of punishment although he has committed
precisely the same offence. In England, many authorities on
Reformatory Schools are strongly in favour of retaining preliminary
imprisonment for Reformatory children; in Scotland, experienced
opinion is decisively on the other side. On this point, the Scotch are
undoubtedly in the right. The working of prison systems, whether at
home or abroad, teaches us that any person, be he child or man, who
has once been in prison, is much more likely to come back than a
person who, for a similar offence, has received punishment in a
different form. The application of this principle to the case of
Reformatory children decisively settles the matter in favour of
sending such children to Reformatories at once. If this simple reform
were effected, the child population of our prisons would almost cease
to exist. In the year 1888, this population amounted to 239 for
England and Wales under the age of twelve, and 4,826 under the age of
sixteen, thus making a total of 5,065 or 2.9 per cent. of the whole
local prison population.

In the preceding remarks on juvenile offenders under 16, it has been
pointed out that the great decrease in the numbers of such offenders
among the prison population is mainly owing to the development of
Industrial and Reformatory Schools. In order, therefore, to form an
accurate estimate of juvenile delinquency, we must look not merely at
the number of juveniles in prison; attention must also be directed to
the number of juveniles in Reformatory and Industrial Institutions.
Although these institutions are not places of imprisonment, yet they
are places of compulsory detention, and contain a very considerable
proportion of juvenile delinquents. All juveniles sent to
Reformatories have, indeed, been actually convicted of criminal
offences, and in 1888 the number of young people in the Refo