Volume 1 / Athens 1999 by Pothiti Hantzaroula Review ofRica Benveniste, Penal Repression of Juvenile Criminality in Nineteenth Century (1833-1911), Athens-Komotini, Sakkoulas Publications, 1994 Rica Benveniste's book can be located in the field of the social history of juvenile criminality. Until now, apart from a few exceptions, Greek historiography has not paid attention to the exploration of the legal apparatus, penal institutions and practices of the nineteenth century, and although young criminals were conspicuous in criminal justice and in the discourses of contemporaries, they are still invisible in historical narratives. Benveniste recognises law as an important source of historical knowledge. She points out that legal discourse produces symbols and norms, while recognising law as a product of social transformations and as a force for the crystallisation or transformation of social relations. Benveniste's book contributes to an understanding of the administration and control of juvenile criminality by placing it in the intellectual and social context of nineteenth-century Greece. The aim of Benveniste's study is to trace the positioning of juveniles in legal discourse and institutions as well as to examine the ways in which the judiciary and the penitentiary dealt with and envisaged young criminals in nineteenth century Greece. Furthermore, it seeks to illuminate the relationship between social structures, ideology and repressive institutions. Benveniste adopts the term criminality instead of delinquency for it was the term used by contemporaries when referring to the antisocial behaviour of the young. In this way she avoids a dogmatic conceptualisation of juvenile antisocial behaviour, while allowing for an understanding of penal law as a cultural element that reflects and crystallizes cultural change. Moreover, the term delinquency itself reflects encoded socio-psychological criteria used by specialists after the Second World War. Benveniste deals in fact with two projects. First, using a quantitative approach she tries to trace the presence of children and young people in criminal statistics and to examine how an age category, namely youth, was defined by penal justice. This involved inquiring whether juveniles were treated differently than other offenders, the kind of crimes they committed and the punishment applied, whether their crimes were interpreted less seriously and punished less severely. For Benveniste, statistics, rather than revealing the reality of juvenile criminality and measuring criminality, speak more about the practices and the stereotypes that a particular society constructed, as well as about the vision of reality the categories conveyed and the model of social structure embedded in these categories. From the analysis of crime figures, Benveniste elaborates three hypotheses. First, the high proportion of juvenile delinquents in the first decades after the establishment of the Greek state has to be related to demographic factors as well as to the social structure of the society. Greek society in the second half of the nineteenth century was a society of youths. Moreover, by defining youth as the category of people under 21, Benveniste argues that juvenile criminals were not actually so "young" since they started their working and marital lives early. Second, concerning the structure of juvenile criminality, it seems that the punishment of youths for crimes considered "dangerous" to society, such as banditry, did not differ from that of adults, while the jury showed less severity towards young people for crimes considered minor in the general climate and trend of illegality. Third, it seems that the weakening of banditry and the increased effectiveness of the state apparatus led to a redefinition in the conceptualisation of the penal responsibility towards youths, which led in turn to a decrease in the proportion of youths who were punished. The second project deals with the position and the image of young delinquents in the penitentiary, as well as with the doctrines and interpretations produced by nineteenth century legal scholars. Examining the role of the prison in 19th century legal thinking, Benveniste points out that all the attempts to establish the modern penal system operated around the idea that punishment should involve not only the protection of society but the betterment, the normalisation and the education of the incarcerated. Trying to trace the gap between stated intention and actual outcomes, Benveniste explores the organisation of prisons, the models of penitentiary and the techniques applied in institutions in the framework of the discourses and the practices that dealt with the above issues. Benveniste argues that in practice there were more similarities than differences in the way adults and juveniles were handled in the penitentiary system. The segregation of the inmates by age was implemented through the establishment of a sector for young people in Siggrou prison and the foundation of Averof prison, and this came in response to the demands of a group of scholars who where concerned with the organisation of prisons and theories about punishment. She illustrates two reasons. First, the nineteenth-century conceptualisation of the prison was inextricably linked with the function of the prison as a mechanism to measure, assess and categorize individuals in order to facilitate control and moralisation of them. Her second point is that in nineteenth-century Greek society, the child comes to the center of public interest. What follows is an embryonic discussion of the representations of children in literature and art and the ideas of childhood these representations conveyed. More explicitly, what comes out of these representations as well as from pedagogic and medical discourses is the idea of childhood as a separate stage of human development and a romantic idealisation of children as innocent, which influenced legal discourse and defined the ideas of scholars about a different treatment of children in correctional institutions. Moreover, the failure to apply in the penitentiary system the techniques that were considered suitable for young people as well as to provide a different etiology of juvenile criminality from those which existed is attributed by Benveniste to the idealistic and sentimental conceptualisation of childhood and to the ideological function of these ideas, which served to close off social and political issues. Yet, I believe, one should bear in mind that the middle-class vision of childhood which is reflected in the representations of children in literature and painting was not a universal value, in the same way that the experience of being a child was not universal in the 19th century. Besides, there were many contradictions and ambivalences in the conceptualisation of childhood conveyed in the discourses of philanthropists and legal scholars. It might have been the case that the romantic idea of childhood served as a framework for state and philanthropic action. Yet, poor children (the children which legal as well as philanthropic institutions mainly dealt with) were not provided with the same experience of childhood, nor were they entitled to the same ideal of what a child should be as were middle class children. Trying to explain state inertia towards the treatment of children in institutions, Benveniste establishes a link between public policies toward children and the role that children played in the economic and social life of communities. By applying a Foucauldian analysis, she traces the technologies of power of a disciplinary society and connects the disciplinary techniques of penal institutions to those of schooling. Thus she argues that the disciplinary techniques applied to children in schools as well as the importance of the economic contribution of children account for a treatment of children in the penitentiary that was not different from that of adults. Yet, the explanation of state inertia has to be related to philanthropic discourses and action that blossomed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. There are many instances of philanthropic discourses that appear in Benveniste's book and cut across legal discourses and practices, that unfortunately remain unexplored: tensions between philanthropists and state employees over expertise and scientific knowledge; the attempts of specialists to promote their own status through state policy and the elaboration of the discussion in gendered terms; the takeover of functions of social control carried out by private groups by police bodies; and, at the same time, the coexistence and complementarity of the forces of law and philanthropy. I believe that the examination of these interlocking discourses would more clearly illuminate state policies directed at juvenile criminality. Overall I would like to make three points. First, the quantitative analysis that explores the handling of juveniles by the courts and the ideological analysis of the penal apparatus constitute two projects that run in parallel, as Benveniste does not attempt to develop a dialectical relationship between the two methods and does not bring together the results of each analysis. Second, it remains unclear why the research is confined to the period between 1833 and 1911. It was in the early twentieth century and especially in the inter-war period that the child became the object of legislative action and normalisation by the state. Besides, there was an increasing number of studies, criminological, pedagogical, medical and psychological, that dealt with juvenile crime and extensive discussion and action on the establishment of the institution of juvenile courts and the transformation of the penitentiary apparatus. For these reasons, it would have been beneficial if the work took a longer view of juvenile criminality. Finally, Benveniste raises important questions concerning the interconnection between penal repression of juvenile criminality and social structures, but we need more work that examines children as social beings as well as the ideologies and practices of other institutions. Return to Top