Churchill and his successors were continuing a trend not creating it. The most symbolic year was 1902: it was an end and a beginning. Newgate prison was demolished, ending an eight-hundred-year history of penal notoriety, and the first institution for juvenile-adults, handsomely funded by Asquith who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was opened by Ruggles-Brise on the site of an old convict prison – an annexe of Chatham – in Borstal in Kent, starting sixty years of penal optimism.

He was not the first or only reformer who wanted to divert children from the penal system and help juveniles on the cusp of crime. In the second half of the eighteenth century both the Marine Society and the Philanthropic Society had established schools for waifs, strays and the children of convicts. Their work was preventive. Elizabeth Fry, Charles Dickens, Mary Carpenter, Lord Ashley, and Dr Barnardo are notable examples in the nineteenth century of those concerned about the lot of children both without and within the criminal justice system. Their ambitions were reformative as well as preventive. Ultimately many parliamentarians were persuaded to take action. As early as 1811 and 1819 parliamentary inquiries had condemned the incarceration of young children, but to little effect. Pressure grew especially when reports of a child of three being imprisoned for contempt of court, and a six-year-old homeless vagrant being kept in silent and solitary confinement, came to public attention. In 1838 the Parkhurst Prison Act created out of a former military hospital on the Isle of Wight a national ‘Reformatory’ for 120 boys under the age of twelve and 200 aged between twelve and seventeen sentenced to transportation or imprisonment. The regime was intended to be as reformative as corrective. Ten years later Redhill Farm School was established by the Philanthropic Society as an agricultural colony for boys.