La niñez desviada

This carefully researched and well-written volume addresses the condition and treatment of abandoned and delinquent children in Buenos Aires city during the belle epoque's height. Street children during this time attracted the attention of all sorts of commentators, and two key actors in particular, the city police and the juvenile public defenders, influenced their lives. What was paradoxical, Claudia Freidenraij claims, is that both abandoned and suspect children were temporarily locked in police detention centers, asylums, and penal reformatories. This attempt to rescue and correct them meant that many children of the working poor were imprisoned alongside hardened criminals.Paternal neglect was connected with the uncontrolled behavior of children on the streets and an eventual life of delinquency. Responding in the 1890s to demands from the “moral elites”—a term that includes criminology experts, crime journalists, educators, medical doctors, and philanthropic ladies—the police, empowered by edicts, criminalized certain working-poor activities and games. Thus, small problems of traffic, noise, or vulgarity became correctional offenses penalized with arrest and temporary confinement in correctional houses and police detention centers. Furthermore, though motivated by humanitarian concerns, juvenile defenders contributed to a cycle wherein abandoned and delinquent children, when not on the streets, inhabited the stores or houses of exploitative and abusive employers, the cold and crowded police detention centers, or the national penitentiary's special pavilion.Spurred by public criticism of the inadequacy of existing institutions for reforming minors, state authorities were spurred to create a juvenile reformatory. The first such institution, the Cárcel Correccional de Varones, functioned only from 1890 to 1892, and it was nothing more than a detention center for abandoned children and those sent by the police and public defenders. A more serious reform institution was inaugurated in 1898, the Casa Correccional de Menores Varones, yet it got off to an inauspicious start. It was administered by a religious order, and its director, Father Pedro Bertrana, was indicted in 1900 for using corporal punishment on children. In 1902 the state took over administering the institution and launched a program of reforming children by means of labor in workshops and elementary instruction, their conduct closely monitored. The experiment lasted until 1905, when the institution was renamed the Cárcel de Encausados and started to admit large numbers of adult prisoners. Again minors were placed in close contact with hardened criminals, undoing the project of an institution devoted to children and adolescents.Freidenraij makes three distinct arguments: the idea of “deviant childhood” was a social and discursive construct not based on evidence; the children detained were of the urban working class, whose families were damaged by the state's criminalization; and moral criticism of abandoned and delinquent children helped build a powerful state apparatus for children's tutelage, which Freidenraij calls, following Michel Foucault, the “penal-custodial archipelago.” The discourse on abandoned and delinquent children allowed the state to intervene directly into working-class families' lives. How serious were the problems of child abandonment and delinquency? Children never surpassed 8 percent of total police arrests during the period from 1890 to 1919, peaking at about 7,500 children in 1913. Similarly, the number of abandoned children processed by juvenile public defenders ranged between 800 and 1,800 per year. Quantitatively, the problem seems less alarming than the moral elites claimed. Though Freidenraij shows that these children served prison terms and suffered abuses disproportionate to their misdemeanors, scholars interested in the question of crime would like to know how many ended up embracing criminal careers.This is a wonderful, well-organized book that says much about the condition of working-class children in modern Buenos Aires: their undue and often illegal detentions, their life in institutions of confinement, their perambulations from the street to the prison and back, and their close contact with the world of adult crime. Freidenraij indirectly speaks about the hard times suffered by these children's parents, who, pressed by family misfortune and poverty, were forced to give their children to public defenders or police chiefs. The author has made good use of multiple sources: police “ordenes del día”; reformatory and prison reports; public defenders' memoirs; crime journalism; penal and correctional legislation; works by criminologists, pedagogues, physicians, and other experts; and, when available, crime and prison statistics.Full of amazing stories and telling details about children's lives, this book is a salient example, due to its rigor and complexity, of the good work being done by young scholars in the field of family and childhood history in Argentina. Freidenraij exposes the unnecessary cruelties that state agencies dispensed to small children in the era of progress. The reader will be surprised to learn that the police arrested children for playing games on the streets and that children sentenced for misdemeanors carrying penalties of up to three months' imprisonment ended up spending most of their youth under the tutelage of state institutions or working for uncaring tutor-employers. Arrested for activities that were not illegal, some of them spent more time in prison than hardened adult criminals.La niñez desviada is a solid work representative of the best scholarship, a book that deserves a wide readership and whose propositions will illuminate our understanding of childhood in golden age Argentina for years to come

Criminal justice · Criminology · Juvenile delinquency · Misdemeanor · Neglect · Political science · Public defender · Sociology · Suspect · Historical Studies in Latin America · Law · Psychology