The substantial movement for reform dates from the protests of Charles Dickens, who roused public opinion to such an extent that the first Reformatory School Act was passed in 1854. Sporadic efforts to meet the evil had indeed been made earlier. In 1756 the Marine Society established a school for the reception and reform of younger criminals; in 1788 the City of London formed a similar institution, which grew much later into the farm school at Redhlll. In 1838 an act of parliament created an establishment at Parkhurst for the detention and correction of juvenile offenders, to whom pardon was given conditional on their entrance into some charitable institution. Parkhurst was technically a prison, and the system combined industrial training with religious and educational instruction. These earlier efforts had, however, been quite insufficient to meet the evils, for in the years immediately preceding 1854 crime was being so constantly reinforced in its beginnings, under the existing penal system, that it threatened to swamp the country. Unofficial, but more or less accurate, figures showed that between 11,000 and 12,000 juveniles passed annually through the prisons of England and Wales, a third of the whole number being contributed by London alone. In 1854 the total reached 14,000. The ages of offenders ranged from less than twelve to seventeen; 60% of the whole were between fourteen and seventeen; 46% had been committed more than once; 18% four times and more.
The Reformatory School Act 1854, which was thrashed out at conferences held in Birmingham in 1851 and 1853, substituted the school for the gaol, and all judicial benches were empowered to send delinquents to schools when they had been guilty of acts punishable by short imprisonment, the limit of which was at first fourteen and became afterwards ten days. A serious flaw in this act long survived; this was the provision that a short period of imprisonment in gaol must precede reception into the reformatory; it was upheld by well-meaning but mistaken people as essential for deterrence. But more enlightened opinion condemned the rule as inflicting an indelible prison taint and breeding contamination, even with ample and effective safeguards. Wiser legislation has followed, and an act of 1899 abolished preliminary imprisonment.