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14 Liverpool L. Rev. 3 (1992)

handle is hein.journals/lvplr14 and id is 1 raw text is: The Liverpool Law Review Vol. XIV(1) [19921 3 THE GOVERNMENT OF A GENERATION: THE SUBJECT OF JUVENILE DELINQUENCY Peter Rush It is recorded on June 11, 1852 that a certain M M testified before a Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles. At mid- century, the Committee was one of a long line of fact-gathering par- liamentary committees the purpose of which were to investigate the problems of the day. Witness after witness came before this partic- ular Select Committee to testify to the existence of the problem of juvenile delinquency and to suggest solutions. M M however is an expert witness of a novel sort: an eighteen year old self-professed ju- venile who had spent time at the Hardwicke Reformatory School and who firmly advocates the necessity for the Reformatory School and its efficiency in achieving a successful plan of correction. The elliptical name of M M may thus stand as a figure in which is linked the subjectification and subjection of juvenile delinquency. In any case, M M stands before the Committee as the exemplary side of that by now familiar figure of the juvenile delinquent. The other and horrific side is the incorrigible juvenile. As Pasquale Pasquino has remarked, the incorrigible child is one of the genealogical precursors of the modern figure of the criminal.1 There have however been few histories that have described the specificity of the figure of the juvenile delinquent and the distinctiveness of the punitive rationality within which it has an effectivity.2 It is such a * Lecturer in Law, Department of Law, Lancaster University, Lancaster LAl 4YF. Many colleagues have talked this project through with me. Particular thanks to Gerry Johnstone for his close reading and discus- sion of an earlier version, and to Peter Goodrich who pointed out the chronographia to which the paper is prone. 1 P. Pasquino, Criminology: the birth of a special knowledge, in The Foucault Effect (ed. G. Burchell et.al.), Harvester, 1991, 245. 2 The few histories of juvenile delinquency and its administration are: M. May, Innocence and Experience: The Evolution of the Concept of Ju- venile Delinquency in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, 17/1 Victorian Studies (1973), 7-29; S. Magarey, The Invention of Juvenile Delinquen- cy in Early Nineteenth-Century England, 34 Labour History (1978), 11-

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