Delinquency
Over the course of the nineteenth century, it became clear that imprisonment was a poor solution to the problem of deviant youth. Jails came to be seen as “nurseries of crime” that fostered rather than discouraged bad behaviour. Meanwhile, the idea of “juvenile delinquency” was born. It fuelled concerted efforts to protect society from “rowdy” youthful behaviour and to protect vulnerable children from family environments seen as unhealthy. In 1869, legislation for establishing reformatories and industrial schools provided an institutional solution that was also in keeping with the values of the time. Delinquents between the ages of 7 and 16 were to be sent to reformatories, and vulnerable youth under the age of 15 were to be enrolled in industrial schools.
“Protective” Justice
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Recorder’s Court embraced the principle of “protective” justice, which would go on to shape the entire juvenile justice system. According to this principle, punishment should be proportional to a young person’s vulnerability rather than the seriousness of their crime. Without protective justice, a boy accused of stealing cigars or horse bridles risked becoming a hardened criminal…
Reformatories
Until the 1860s, young offenders in Quebec served their sentences in a jail. Under new legislation passed in 1869, delinquent girls from Montreal began to be sent to either the city’s Bon-Pasteur Institute or the Girl’s Cottage School on the South Shore. Those from the Quebec City area were admitted to the Saint-Charles Hospice. Quebec boys could be placed in care at two new institutions: the Mont-Saint-Antoine Catholic Reformatory in Montreal and the Protestant Reformatory in Sherbrooke. But Quebec still lacked a Protestant institution separate from a jail. In 1908, the Boy’s Farm and Training School finally opened in Shawbridge, a town in the Laurentian Mountains.
The Mont-Saint-Antoine Institute
In 1873, the Brothers of Charity opened a new reformatory for boys in Montreal. The Mont-Saint-Antoine Institute broke with its predecessors by having residents sleep in dormitories rather than cells, by rejecting corporal punishment, and by introducing a reward-based approach to education.
At the reformatory, boys were under constant observation. They followed a strict schedule with little unsupervised free time. They had to remain completely silent, except during recess. Staff sometimes strayed from the institution’s high-minded principles and subjected the most uncooperative residents to solitary confinement or the strap.
The facility mainly housed teenagers from working-class families who had been convicted of minor offences. Given the lack of an adequate school system, families in crisis would also sometimes ask the court to send a troubled son to the “institution” so he could learn “respect for authority” and a useful trade.
The reformatory sought to re-educate these boys through discipline, religious instruction, and vocational training. Residents spent much of the day learning the basics of tailoring, carpentry, shoemaking, and printing. In keeping with the principle of so-called protective justice, judges normally sentenced young offenders to a reformatory for a few years, which was considered long enough for them to be re-educated.
Life at the Mont-Saint-Antoine Institute
The reformatory focused on disciplining boys’ bodies, by ensuring they adopted a manly posture in both the workshop and the outdoor courtyard. These three photographs were taken between 1900 and 1914. They depict the daily life of boys required to follow an educational program that sought to reform them through religious instruction, physical education, and manual labour.
The Bon-Pasteur Institute
In 1870, the Good Shepherd Sisters of Angers opened two schools for girls in Montreal: a reformatory for delinquents and an industrial school for abandoned and orphaned girls, as well as those in need of protection. In 1847, the congregation opened the Bon-Pasteur Convent on Sherbrooke Street. In addition to serving as a regional headquarters, it housed the congregation’s nuns as well as girls deemed deviant.
Unlike the boys at the Mont-Saint-Antoine Institut, most of the girls at the Bon-Pasteur Institute were placed there at the request of parents who cited moral issues like disobedience, vagrancy, keeping bad company, or expressions of sexuality considered improper. Clearly, juvenile deviance was defined differently for girls than it was for boys.
Upon arriving at the reformatory, girls were shut off from the outside world and plunged into a life of work, study, and prayer. Under the constant supervision of the nuns, they were expected to see the error of their ways and repent. In rare instances, residents who found it all too much did try to escape. An 1895 newspaper article published in La Patrie describes how these would-be fugitives chafed under a strict regime that left virtually no room for personal freedom.
The institution began to face public criticism in the 1910s, especially from the mainly Protestant child protection movement. But resistance was not entirely external. For example, violence broke out at the Bon-Pasteur Institute’s facility in Laval after the Second World War. Such events highlighted the need to rethink institutional approaches to youth care.
The Saint-Charles Hospice for Girls
In 1870, the Good Shepherd Sisters of Quebec opened a reformatory for girls, which would become known as the Saint-Charles Hospice. This Quebec City institution also began serving as an industrial school for abandoned and neglected girls in 1884. In 1892, both the reformatory and the industrial school moved to larger premises at the site of the former Marine Hospital, on the shores of the Saint-Charles River. This allowed them to accommodate even more children.
The fact that a reformatory and an industrial school operated side-by-side at the Saint-Charles Hospice highlights the lack of a clear boundary between delinquency and vulnerability, between petty crime and destitution. Many girls were incarcerated at the reformatory because they were “homeless,” which meant there was little to distinguish them from their counterparts at the industrial school. Meanwhile, magistrates often ordered that girls be placed in a hospice at the request of their parents, in response to moral rather than criminal concerns.
Hospice residents generally came from poor farming or working-class families. Most had lost one or even both parents. Placements lasted about three years, during which the girls of the Saint-Charles Hospice led lives cut off from the outside world—lives dedicated to prayer, work, physical exercise, and short periods of study. Learning focused almost exclusively on domestic work, in anticipation of a long life as a housewife in a family home.
Protestant Reform Institutions
Montreal’s Protestant elite was reticent to establish reform institutions despite the confessional nature of the 1869 legislation. The Montreal Protestant House of Industry and Refuge hoped to assume this role but could not secure sufficient financing. In the absence of any reformatory, girls entered the Bon-Pasteur and boys were sent to the state-run Sherbrooke Reform School for Protestant Boys (1873-1909), located inside the Sherbrooke prison on Winter Street. Both the living conditions and the training program left much to be desired. Once they were in a position to do so, the Montreal Boys’ Home built the Boys’ Farm and Training School near Shawbridge. Accredited as a reform school in 1908, it received Protestant boys from across Quebec. The new institution used a novel approach for Quebec. The Directors hoped that a cottage system design without any locked doors would give boys a sense of freedom and responsibility. Training focused on farm work, good food, plenty of fresh air, and physical activities.
Since it housed adolescent boys 13 and older, the Montreal Boys’ Home was the ideal candidate to serve as a Protestant industrial school. However, the Board refused to assume this role when requested. Unlike a congregate industrial school, boys worked out in the city during the day preferably in trades and returned to the Home on Mountain Street (near St. Antoine) in the evening. Night school, manual training classes, physical education, and religion were part of what the Board considered a ‘citizen-training’ program, rather than a reform program. In 1930, the Boys’ Home moved to a new building on Weredale Park.
Instead, after an appeal from Quebec in 1883 to open Protestant institutions, the Ladies’ Benevolent Society was accredited as an industrial school and retained this certification until 1923. Most of the boys and girls who entered the industrial school did so as a result of parental poverty or illness. Once admitted, they received the same treatment, education, and training as the ‘charity’ children who lived alongside them. The institution’s managers made no distinction between the two functions. In response to increasing demand for industrial school places for boys, the Society for the Protection of Women and Children opened Belmont Home, an industrial school for Protestant boys at Sweetsburg in the Eastern Townships. It operated from 1916-1920. When it closed, the boys entered the Ladies’ Benevolent.
Industrial schools
Beginning in 1869, industrial schools opened their doors to destitute children under the age of 14 who were homeless or orphaned, who had been implicated in criminal activity, or whose home environment was deemed immoral. Provided with room and board, the children were taught to perform manual work. Placement orders could be signed by either a judge or two justices of the peace in response to a request from a parent, a guardian, a charitable institution, or even a mayor. Children could spend years at these schools, but they had to be released when they turned 16. Opened in 1887, the Notre-Dame-de-Montfort Industrial School was one of several such institutions established in newly settled regions of Quebec. Nevertheless, the railway ensured that this “agricultural orphanage” remained integrated with the industrial economy.
The Saint-Joseph-de-la-Délivrance Hospice for Boys
In 1883, the Saint-Joseph-de-la-Délivrance Hospice in Lévis began operating an industrial school for vulnerable boys, who were mainly drawn from working-class or farming families in the Quebec City region. The boys lived together, sleeping in dormitories. They followed a rigid schedule and were subjected to strict discipline, reinforced by religious instruction.
Although children were usually placed in care after a parent fell ill or died, institutionalization was sometimes intended to protect them from an abusive family environment. The case of Georges Gagnon provides an extreme example. His older sister, Aurore, was known as the “martyr child.” She died in 1920, following years of heinous abuse at the hands of her parents. After both his mother and father were convicted of homicide, Georges was sent to the Saint-Joseph-de-la-Délivrance Hospice. At the age of 13, while still living at the facility, he wrote to the Ministry of Justice asking for his parents to be pardoned and released. Despite everything he had been through, Georges hoped to return to his family home. He promised he would be able to convince his parents “not to do what they had done.” The authorities chose not to grant his request.
The Juvenile Delinquents’ Court
At the turn of the twentieth century, reformatories and industrial schools came under fire from the child protection movement. Reformers championed the creation of juvenile courts, which reflected a new model of judicial intervention that sought to be more respectful of families. The Montreal Juvenile Delinquents’ Court opened its doors in 1912 on Champ-de-Mars Street. In 1932, it moved to a new location on Saint-Denis Street, north of Mont-Royal Avenue.
This independent institution combined the judge’s traditional role with that of a medical and social services provider. These father figures were expected to be both strict and compassionate. Placing young people on probation was the preferred course of action, since it kept children in their home environment while allowing the court to quietly keep an eye on the family. The existing network of reformatories and industrial schools was able to adapt itself to this expanded approach to dealing with wayward youth. But by the 1940s, new research in child psychology, along with a new understanding of children’s rights and family law, began prompting calls for reform.
