Foucault identifies as “the birth of the prison” the 1840 opening of Mettray, the French prison farm for juvenile offenders. In its effort to regularize child punishment, Foucault notes, Mettray collapsed the discourses of moral, man-made, and scientific law into a materialist, hybrid “science” of punishment based in large part upon perpetual surveillance: “the entire parapenal institution … culminates in a cell, on the walls of which are written in black letters: ‘God sees you.’” The camp “was related to other forms of supervision, on which it was based: medicine, general education, religious direction.” Foucault concludes that this “birth” eventually led to a “great carceral con-tinuum that diffused penitentiary techniques into the most innocent disciplines, transmitting disciplinary norms into the very heart of the penal system and placing over … the smallest irregularity, deviation or anomaly, the threat of delinquency.” Mettray certainly played a significant discursive role for nineteenth-century British reformists who, newly preoccupied with the problem of urban crime—and in particular child criminals—looked to it as an example of a successful juvenile reformatory. Reformists in this historical moment focused on child criminality as simultaneously distinct from and emblematic of adult criminality, with mixed results for the child criminal himself. Yet in blurring the science, pedagogy, and religion of child punishment into one conceptual “continuum,” Foucault misses the fact that this penological development was the product of two distinct public discourses with corresponding legal ramifications.

On the one hand, as Foucault indicates, the forces of social reform—ostensibly concerned with protecting children—eventually proceduralized juvenile punishment en masse, fueled by a cultural fetish around the figure of the child criminal as an object for rehabilitation. Yet at the same time, the nineteenth century also produced what I will call the “evolutionary” moment in the representation of child development. The Victorian era is famous for creating the idea of childhood as sacred and distinct from adulthood. In this rendition, paradoxically—and specifically because they are closer to divinity and therefore pre-fallen—children lack the knowledge of good and evil, making them less capable of acting according to fixed moral principles.