Abstract
This article explores continuity and change in Spain's reformatories. Looking at legal and normative documentation, we could argue, on the one hand, that the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) found little need to change how the reformatories worked. The juvenile court system, on which they depended, displayed strong similarities to those operating elsewhere in the West, and my empirical study of 2,300 personal and administrative records indicates that the reformatories were always characterized by archaic practices and were chronically underfunded throughout Francoism. On the other hand, after analysing the evolving profiles of adolescents confined under Francoism, we can see the connections with both specific processes of regime-sanctioned change from the end of the 1950s – in particular massive, accelerated, internal rural-to-urban migration – and the goal of the dictatorship of preserving a particular form of social order by maintaining tight control of those sectors of the population it considered a danger (i.e., predominantly marginalized, male adolescents living on the edges of Spain's cities – in the shanty towns (chabolas) or poor suburbs (banlieues)). The article also looks at how families from different social classes interacted with the reformatories to achieve their own goals, which overlapped with the dictatorship's while remaining partly distinct.
Keywords
Introduction
This article explores the role played by reformatories under the Franco dictatorship, in particular the contribution they made to the regime's policies of social disciplining and control – which we can define as the desire to keep a tight grip on sectors of the population deemed politically, morally or socially ‘suspect’. This referred to those sectors of society – whether worker constituencies or from the professional or lower middling classes – who had been explicitly politically aligned with the democratic Republic's goals of achieving a more mobile and thus relatively less hierarchical society (including by secularization of the state). But those deemed ‘suspect’ went far beyond these sectors. In the wake of the war, and the profound shock it had sent through conservative Spain, the dictatorship was also targeting much broader social constituencies of people – mostly from the urban lower classes – who were seen to be insufficiently ‘obedient’, as well as ‘uncontained’ by traditional structures of social deference, patriarchal family, conservative religion and its moral norms. In all this, the objective was to ward off what the dictatorship considered the damaging forms of social change on display under the Republic. Francoism aimed from the start to eradicate any institutional trace of the defeated progressive Republic, but also to reconfigure completely the memories, social values and even thought processes of ‘defeated’ sectors of society. 1 In the latter regard, however, as this article indicates, its success was more mixed, or at least we can say that the nature of the reconfiguration, as a by-product of economic change, did not occur in the forms envisaged by regime ideology. It is well known that from 1939 Francoism pursued its repressive agenda by deploying the new mass mobilized base of supporters which had emerged from the radicalizing experience and processes of the civil war of 1936–39. But the new state would continue to deploy pre-existing entities, and the reformatories are here a case in point. They were inherited by the Franco regime almost untouched in their modus operandi since the time of the monarchy (1874–1931). The ensuing Republic of 1931–1939 had had neither the time nor the resources – even before the war began – to tackle the system. 2 For this reason, Francoism had relatively little to do by way of purging reformatory staff – and there was nothing comparable with the widespread purges across other state sectors, such as schools, universities and indeed in the prison system itself. In the reformatories there was a substantial presence of the same authoritarian Catholic elites as in the 1920s, both religious and lay personnel, who, as before, ran them on a minimal budget. Nor was the role of religious personnel in reformatories unique to Spain, but there their presence had always been much more pronounced, something which in part corresponded to the very particular, virtually para-state role of Spain's Catholic Church from the early twentieth century onwards. 3 And, from 1939, the new Franco state conferred on the religious orders a virtual monopoly on managing the reformatories.
This article is structured in two parts. The first part looks at the legal framework and practices within which Franco Spain's reformatories operated, and at their similarities with the Western juvenile justice system elsewhere – given Francoism belongs broadly speaking within the socially ‘sculpting’ continuum of twentieth-century ‘gardening states’. 4 Indeed, for Francoism there was great repressive utility to be derived from the Western-wide ‘protective’ model of juvenile justice as it already existed. 5 But the article will also discuss how the Franco dictatorship was able to potentialize Spain's form of juvenile justice in further repressive ways. The second part of this article will look at the continuities and changes in the profiles of the children and young people incarcerated in the reformatories across the decades from the 1940s to the 1970s. It will explore why they were considered either ‘dangerous’ or ‘in danger’, not only by the Francoist authorities but also by their own families – for families too, in Spain as elsewhere, acted as disciplinary agents/units and were sometimes instrumental in interning their children. The article will look at continuities and changes in the justifications given for internment, and at the demography and the social background of the internees. These evolved greatly under the impact of the vast and accelerated rural to urban migrations which transformed Spain (including its rural backwaters) in the 1960s and 1970s. Marginalized working-class adolescents living on the urban peripheries, of Barcelona and Madrid especially, but also of other growing urban centres like Valencia, and for whom the state provided virtually no educational or training opportunities and minimal social provision, were involved in petty crime (pickpocketing, stealing cars, small-scale robbery) and as such became major fodder not only for the reformatories but also for Franco's expanding adult preventive detention system, which also operated as a special legal jurisdiction. By the later Franco years, too, more teenagers aged 16 and above were channelled into the adult system, which under Franco expanded greatly, with an escalating use from the late 1960s of the same sort of open-ended ‘special measures’ (in lieu of sentences) that had long existed in the juvenile system. 6 Through a history of the youth reformatories we can help map the extent of social and cultural change, in spite of Francoism's key goal of ‘stasis’, but also discern how that goal itself both limited, and shaped, actually-occurring forms of change in Spain. To date there has been little historical work done on Spain's reformatories and the little that has been carried out has not used primary sources. 7 Those on which this article is based are drawn from the legislative and judicial record, as well as from the institutional record of two major reformatories, the Asilo Durán in Barcelona, and the Colonia San Vicente Ferrer in Valencia. This institutional material consists of administrative documentation and some 2300 personal records consulted by the author. 8 The archives of the religious orders involved in the long-term running of Spain's reformatories still remain largely inaccessible to professional historians. 9
‘Protecting’ and Reforming Juveniles: Legal and Institutional Frameworks and Practices in Spain
Spain's reformatories came under the auspices of its juvenile court system, established in 1918. It is scarcely coincidental that the foundational law of 1918 which embedded the juvenile justice system dated from immediately after the First World War, which had accelerated industrial production and, with it, urban growth and migration in Spain, and in Barcelona's peripheries especially, with the panoply of attendant social problems that alarmed establishment opinion, predominantly because of the public order implications. 10 The passage of this law, the Montero Ríos bill (25 November 1918), saw a marked increase in the number of reformatory institutions because the law itself stipulated that the new juvenile courts should be supported by a network of reformatory schools. The state allocated control of these to a number of religious orders, by far the most significant of which was the order of Amigonian Friars (Terciarios Capuchinos), which came to manage most of Spain's reformatory schools. Gradually, from 1918, the juvenile court system and the reformatory network was rolled out across Spain, although with some regional and local variation.
Like other Western systems, Spain's juvenile justice took its cue from the US judicial system, which had pioneered the separation of the legal norms governing young persons from those governing adults. 11 Juveniles would thus be judged by separate bodies. 12 In Spain the 1918 law denominated the new entities ‘special juvenile courts’ precisely to underscore their singular legal status. Juveniles were no longer to be considered criminals for sentencing, but rather subjects in need of protection and re-education. If the intent was to make things safer and more hospitable for children, the result in practical terms conferred a great deal of power on the governing authorities. Instead of fixed-tariff sentences as for adults, juvenile courts prescribed ‘educational measures’, and where these involved the committal of a young person to a reformatory it was for an open-ended period of time: in other words, the juvenile courts had the power to intern indefinitely (until they reached the age of majority) those children and adolescents deemed ‘dangerous’ or ‘in danger’. How things evolved thereafter for the young person depended on how the authorities judged their subsequent behaviour. In adopting such measures, Spain was part of a much broader Western trend: the Dutch had created juvenile courts in 1901, Germany and Great Britain in 1908, and France and Belgium in 1912. But the ‘protective’ system in Spain had another particularity which further tipped the balance in favour of state and institutional authorities: the 1918 law established the juvenile justice system as a special legal jurisdiction, outside the unitary system of ordinary law, which lessened the legal guarantees for children and adolescents, and this long before Francoism. 13 For this reason, and in spite of their name, the juvenile ‘courts’ could hardly be considered as courts in the usual sense: they were not overseen directly by the judiciary but rather by a separate administrative entity, the Council for the Protection of Minors (Consejo Superior de Protección de Menores), which reported directly to the Justice Ministry. Children were therefore not presented to a properly constituted judicial entity. This was what distinguished the Spanish system, from its inception, from its main European counterparts: in Italy, France and Germany, although the juvenile courts also represented a separately identifiable institution, they were placed squarely inside (and thus bound by the norms of) the integrated system of ordinary justice. 14
After the end of the war of 1936–1939 and throughout the 1940s, while the new Franco state enacted some legislation in the sphere of juvenile justice, most notably two decrees in 1948, in general terms it found already present in the existing juvenile system the basic tools it needed to pursue its objective of tight social control (what it termed ‘social peace’). 15 Already under the terms of the 1918 law, children were not allowed access to defence council (the logic being that it was unnecessary as they were not subject to the criminal code) and all hearings were held in camera. What Francoism was able to do was to exploit the grey areas and potential for abuse already present in the existing system of ‘special jurisdiction’ and push these to their limits. 16 In particular here, the Francoist decrees of 1948 augmented the powers conferred on the juvenile court judges who acted not only as the judge but also as prosecuting and defence councils simultaneously. The legal norms directed that these judges consider not only the objective facts of the case, but also the juvenile’s attitude, personality and the social and personal environment in which they had grown up (article 16, decree of 11 June 1948). The judge was called upon to make decisions as if also simultaneously a psychologist, doctor and in loco parentis. It is clear that the legal refinements of 1948 meant huge discretionary powers for these judges.
Most crucially, the legal changes adopted in the 1940s further reinforced the dual brief of the juvenile courts as a ‘protective’ but also an overtly repressive body. Now these courts had conferred on them the ‘power to reform’ (facultad reformadora). 17 What this in fact meant was they could now ‘indict’ not only those juveniles who had been accused of specific crimes or misdemeanours featuring in the Criminal Code, but also those suspected of undesirable behaviour, or who might be about to engage in it – sometimes this meant a clandestine category such as prostitution, but it could very frequently be much more vague, such as those suspected of being ‘indecent … or vagabonds’ (article 9, paragraph 1). While under the 1918 law, no young person could be brought before a juvenile court unless ‘charged’ with a crime or misdemeanour specifically stipulated in the Criminal Code, under Franco they could be preventively detained and processed. Here, Franco was in fact borrowing from the Primo de Rivera military dictatorship of the 1920s, which had first mooted the expansion of the juvenile court ambit to suspected prostitution, indecency and vagrancy, even though these behaviours were not stipulated in the Criminal Code then in force. The Franco dictatorship channelled these 1920s innovations in its 1940s juvenile amendments and even added a new category of ‘idleness’ (‘vagos’), which was soon being applied to the many thousands who became migrants in response to the excruciating levels of war- and regime-induced impoverishment. 18 In this manner, the judiciary was given extensive powers of control over the behaviour of young people: the court could intervene not only in cases of the putative commission of crimes, but also if a child or adolescent failed to conform to social expectations, which the authorities deemed the antechamber of ‘crime’. The distinction between ‘threatening’ and ‘threatened’, between ‘dangerous’ juveniles and those ‘at risk’, tended to lose meaning given that Franco's juvenile courts deemed each to be equally ‘delinquent material’. This principle of youth surveillance was not specific to Francoism or to Spain of course, indeed it is one of the foundations of the ‘protective model’ implemented throughout the West from the early twentieth century and regardless of regime type. As more European states came to decriminalize juvenile delinquency across 1880–1914, youth courts everywhere increased the implementation of ‘protective’ measures. In practice this extended surveillance/control to ever larger swathes of the population which were considered as innately more prone to certain types of behaviour. 19 What is specific to the Spanish model under Franco however is that the link between these two briefs – protection and repression – was explicitly formalized, intensified and placed at the heart of the institution: it was in 1943 that the Council for the Protection of Minors took on direct oversight of the juvenile courts. 20 This Council was also the same national body which oversaw the work of child ‘protection’ (via a committee structure of Juntas de Protección de Menores). Thus, a single entity, the Council, was now coordinating and managing repression against juvenile delinquency, and also the provision of state and para-statal (religious) assistance to the poor, to orphans and expectant mothers. It was due to this hybrid system that the large numbers of people who had been reduced to extreme poverty in the aftermath of the war were then placed under the direct scrutiny of the judiciary.
For those children and adolescents who ended up in the reformatories the future was uncertain. They were not serving a set tariff or sentence, but rather were subject to open-ended special measures which could be further extended as the juvenile court deemed necessary.
21
There was no real appeal against its judgement, precisely because the juvenile system was not part of the unitary judicial system. Moreover, the real decision on the children's futures belonged overwhelmingly with the religious personnel running the reformatories, because it was from them that the courts’ delegated representatives, who would regularly visit, received their updates.
22
The children and adolescents detained thus had no idea how long they would be inside, whether for several months or several years: there are numerous cases of juveniles who remained in the system for 15 years or more until they reached the age of 21 or 23, respectively the ages of male and female civil majority in Spain.
23
Nor did the decision depend only on the young person's behaviour: in a not untypical case from 1942, the Barcelona juvenile court wrote to the mayor of the small Catalan town of Porrea to explain that: the aforementioned minor has been placed in a reformatory school for an indefinite period of time after having been indicted for a number of thefts. […] The decisions of juvenile courts are not limited in time and depend not only on the behavior of the minor but also of the family.
24
Thus we see how the system also allowed for wider forms of social surveillance and disciplining.
The fact that the entire juvenile justice system would always be starved of investment and resources meant a further turn of the screw. The courts could decide to put a young person ‘on probation’, but when they opted for a custodial ‘sentence’, the youth was in theory supposed to be first placed in a more open ‘observational facility’ for evaluation. But very few of these ever existed. And there were no public institutions for children or adolescents with mental health issues. Those with mental or behavioural problems were routinely mixed with the general reformatory population. In the juvenile sector, just as in Franco's expanding, and highly judicially unsafe, adult ‘preventive detention’ system, far from addressing real health problems, the authorities saw their role simply as a one of containment. The entire reformatory system remained archaic in both ‘plant’ and practices throughout the long Franco years, which intensified the disciplinary effect. This was, moreover, often seen as fitting, given so many of the internees came from what the authorities viewed as ‘recalcitrant’ subaltern sectors. If ‘suffering’ could teach them their place, then that was to the good. Especially as, in the dictatorship's view, these internees were drawn from sectors deemed ‘socially dangerous’. This did not only mean those for whom an explicit political alignment with the defeated Republic could be shown; it also extended to entire social groups who were seen as unlikely to be ‘loyal’ to the Franco order. Unsurprisingly here, the urban lower middling classes, as well as worker constituencies, were over-represented, precisely because the state authorities saw them as ‘naturally’ disruptive of the desired form of social order. The same thought process had been rather more brutally enunciated in the only half-joking remarks made by Franco's wartime press officer, Gonzalo de Aguilera, to foreign correspondents and visitors, that all the bootblacks should be shot out of hand, because such people were invariably already ‘communist’, or would become so – their ‘guilt’ was already ‘self-evident in [their] profession’. 25
The Impact of Post-war Poverty and Accelerating Mass Rural to Urban Migration: The Picture from the Reformatories 1940–1970
From the limited official statistical data available, it is not possible to determine how many reformatory institutions existed in Spain in 1940, or to estimate the number of children and adolescents they contained. Nor did the Council for the Protection of Minors itself know. 26 But at ground level we know that the numbers of children coming under state tutorship/guardianship increased greatly in the 1940s because of the desperate conditions, and the numbers of executed and imprisoned parents and/or destitute ones. The analysis which follows is based on a large quantity of micro-data from the personal files of some 2,300 young people held in the Asilo Durán in Barcelona and the Colonia San Vicente Ferrer in Valencia. This documentation is particularly useful because, taken overall, it covers the whole Franco period (1939–1975) and offers a good indication of the internees’ demographic and social background. It also makes it possible to compare and contrast the reasons given for institutionalizing the children. Interestingly too, apart from the period of massive economic dislocation in the 1940s, when petty theft predominated overwhelmingly as the reason for reformatory incarcerations, of the many other varied reasons only a fraction corresponded to any clear violation of the criminal code. Theft came to reappear prominently by the second half of the 1960s, continuing into the 1970s: as the international economy slowed down Spain's external migrants started to return from France, Germany and Switzerland and crisis once again closed in on the poor and unskilled/semi-skilled workers. But between circa 1951 and 1965 the single most frequent reason for reformatory internment, whether of boys or the small minority of girls interned, was ‘insubordination’, a somewhat dense term which will require some historical unpacking. But we turn first to the 1940s.
Between 1939 and 1950, an allegation of theft was the main reason given for sending children to reformatories. The terms used in the personal files are quite diverse – ‘thief’ (ratero), ‘petty thief’ (ladronzuelo), ‘kleptomania’ (cleptomania) – but in most cases the vocabulary indicates that these were petty thefts. 27 In more than half of the cases where the accusation was of theft, it was the police (including the rural Guardia Civil) who initiated the proceedings. The 1940s were years of raging hunger and savage deprivation of the basic necessities of life for large parts of Spain's population. The dislocations caused by the war of 1936–1939 were further and massively exacerbated by the dictatorship's autarkic policies, which were at their height in the 1940s. 28 In such conditions, children and teenagers sought to help their families survive by stealing, or indeed stole to enable their own survival – for there were many children and young people without families, living hand-to-mouth on the streets and in derelict buildings/slum areas. In the 1940s, around 10 per cent of the juvenile population sent to reformatories were there for stealing food. Children would pilfer anything they could lay their hands on: potatoes, fruit, nuts, tomatoes, sardines, eggs and so on. In most cases, these thefts would take place directly where these goods were produced or sold, i.e. in fields and orchards in the countryside, or at docksides, markets and shops in urban areas. For example, one boy, called Angel, got by selling on the eggs and miscellaneous other food stuffs he stole from Barcelona's San Andrés market to the black marketeers (estraperlistas) who hung around the market's vicinity waiting to trade with the kids. 29 Another case was José, who would break into the deserted holiday homes of the Valencian well-to-do once the holiday season was over – he was caught not only with metal objects in his possession but also potatoes. 30 Youngsters would also loiter around train yards, docks and markets to take the goods that were stored there. They would purloin just about anything that they could find that had a resale value: electrical cables, copper wires, lead pipes, bales of cotton, bricks, tyres, empty straw (produce) sacks, doorknobs, sinks, blankets and even items of clothing that had been hung out to dry. Juan was arrested by the police in November 1945 because he had stolen eight kilos of metal scrap. Even though he was only 13 at the time, he had already been up before Barcelona's juvenile court on four previous occasions. 31 For so many in Spain's ordinary population who were then living in a state of extreme poverty, stealing construction materials in particular seemed to offer a viable means of survival, and the documentation suggests that the extreme nature of the conditions in the 1940s meant that such practices were tolerated – sometimes even encouraged – by other relatives to help ensure the whole family could survive. The courts came down hard on children who were caught, whether they had stolen to feed themselves or to support their families by reselling goods, but the scale of need and desperation meant that brutal measures did little to deplete the wave of petty crimes committed by children, and it is these which dominate the reformatory records for the 1940s.
From 1951 and until the second half of the 1960s, theft became more peripheral and secondary among the reasons given for the institutionalization of juveniles, with ‘insubordination’ coming to the fore as the main justification. Indeed, of all decades of reformatory records perused by this author from the 1920s onwards, it is in the 1950s that the greatest concentration of cases of ‘insubordination’ is found, when it accounted for one out of every two cases of juvenile institutionalization in the two major reformatories whose records were consulted. And here families rather than the police or courts were the main players – one in three cases had been referred by the juvenile's own family, and precisely because what was perceived to be at stake was ‘parental authority’. In these cases, and files, it is the families which loom large. But once again, the ostensibly unitary category of ‘insubordination to parental authority’ has to be disaggregated according to the social class of the young person. However, one constant factor regardless of social class was the addition of a moral dimension with female juveniles. Girls constituted only a very small minority of internees, but when they committed the same forms of misbehaviour (staying out of the house, petty theft) these were judged differently. 32 Girls but not boys were in danger of ‘indecency’, of ‘sullying’ themselves for life. But whether girls or boys, for families of modest means or who were poor, then the behaviour of all their children, irrespective of gender, was a grave matter because it represented a threat to the financial viability/organization of the family unit as a whole. It was not unusual for parents in their testimonies to emphasize that juveniles committed for insubordination had ‘refused to work’. The questions surrounding work were indeed central to family relations in Spain at what was a highly precarious time economically. Mutual solidarity was an integral component in explaining the nature of ordinary family bonds, and that solidarity had an economic core: parents fed and housed their children and (at least sometimes) saw to their education, so that the new generation could progressively take over the duties and responsibilities of their elders, thus ensuring, by their labour, the entire family's ability to endure as a unit. Delinquency (as now perceived) threatened this model. By the 1950s, it was occurring against a background of huge economic flux in Spain, when other economic options were opening up for younger generations from these families of modest means. This context must also be computed when considering the explosion of what parents/older generations termed ‘insubordination’. The profile of youth delinquency may seem familiar and unremarkable, if viewed only in close-up, for example: young Josefa, who refused to work, came and went as she pleased whatever her mother said, and then, to pay for the cinema, stole from the room of the family's lodgers, would spend three years in the Colonia San Vicente Ferrer; or Antonio, also interned there in 1953 at his mother's behest, because even though his sister had found him a stable job, he repeatedly refused to work, especially if it meant getting up early. 33 But these forms of behaviour, and parental/societal responses to them, also have to be understood in what was psychologically and socially a new context. There was an awareness among both parents and children that the whole of society was in flux. What was threatening, indeed gradually dissolving, traditional forms of working-class ‘parental authority’ was not so much the misbehaviour of an individual adolescent, as the fact of this flux, and most specifically, accelerating internal migration during the 1950s. This phenomenon was opening up, through economic change, other possibilities for life, for job opportunities elsewhere, for mobility.
From 1951, Spain's economy started to pick up: there were important changes in Franco's cabinet appointees, which would see the beginning of the reining in of the autarkic policies that had taken the country to the verge of bankruptcy in the late 1940s. There were also the first US loans of 1951, which paved the way to the bilateral agreements of 1953, Spain's own Marshall Plan of sorts. All of this meant that from 1951 there was a crucial increase in domestic confidence, and Franco-regime-aligned sectors who had made fortunes via black-market speculation in the 1940s now began to invest in industry and the service sector inside Spain. As this happened, new job opportunities appeared in both urban centres and coastal areas, for the early 1950s also saw the beginnings of foreign tourism. Other jobs included those in, for example, food processing plants in smaller provincial centres which provided new and expanding sources of employment for young women and offered relatively better wages than domestic service or agricultural labour. As did the building sector for unskilled or semi-skilled young men, and which already notably included coastal tourist development. The ensuing gradual acceleration of the internal rural-urban migration patterns already visible in the 1940s can be crucially defined as a movement of younger components of the population seeking out new opportunities, but also escaping the restrictions of rural and village life where work and life was closely controlled by Francoist elites, both old and new, in a socially feudal way. The concomitant of younger generations on the move was of course an upsurge in intergenerational tensions, which blended economic, but also socio-cultural factors: younger men and women were not only escaping the Francoist powers-that-be in village or small town, they were also shrugging off the ‘patriarchal’ controls operating to some extent also inside working-class families. That said, mothers were more often the ones explicitly asking for their children to be confined in a reformatory, as they were in the frontline of ensuring family viability, both economically and as a social unit.
Working-class mothers likely sometimes had ‘moral’ concerns, especially if daughters were involved, but those kinds of anxieties surfaced much more overtly in cases featuring affluent middling-class families, or sometimes even, upper-class families who had had their children institutionalized. Both were of course a statistical minority in the case files. But they existed, and, even, at Barcelona's Asilo Durán, as a notable minority and something of a sociological anomaly – constituting as they did some seventy cases out of the total of 2300 consulted. These were juveniles with a secondary-school education, something which put them on an entirely different educational level to the vast majority of reformatory inmates. Almost never had this group committed public misdemeanours, still less crimes. Rather they had been committed to the institution as an explicit form of disciplinary ‘therapy’. These were the children, obviously overwhelmingly the sons, of families of means (self-employed professionals, businessmen and similar) for whom sending their offspring to a reformatory was considered a legitimate means of exerting control and putting them back on the ‘straight and narrow’ if the first recourse – sending the child to a religious boarding school – had proven unsuccessful. For girls of whatever class, however, there were far fewer options reformatory-wise. Boys were frequently sent to institutions that came directly under the authority of the Council for the Protection of Minors, although for their day-to-day management the state delegated the running of these public institutions to private religious orders. For girls, however, usually the only option under Franco was for them to be sent directly to a convent or other religious institution which was prepared to take them, such as the Adoratrices, Hermanas de la Caridad, Oblatas, Trinitarias, Hijas de María Auxiliadora or the Hijas de San Vicente de Paul) because almost none of the state reformatories had provision for young women or girls.
34
One of the few exceptions was in Valencia where a female section of the Colonia San Vicente Ferrer had been established in 1929. And while a lack of money was a constant of the whole reformatory sector under Franco, as it had been before – i.e. the reformatories were always run on an absolute shoestring with minimal state funding – this impoverishment was even more extreme where girls were concerned.
35
Until at least the mid-1950s, this lack of public provision tended to see those girls and young women brought before the juvenile courts sent straight to convents, because there was nowhere else.
36
Those worst off were the young people with physical or mental illnesses, above all girls: Rosa, who suffered fits, was twice interned in the Colonia San Vicente Ferrer, but she represented such a challenge for its staff that she was sent on to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (Adoratrices). Then, in January 1956, the nuns informed the Valencia Juvenile Court that they could not deal with 18 year-old Rosa's mental handicap: the final decision of the Court reads as an admission of lack of resources: given that the manifest abnormality of the minor has been established by two distinct institutions and that there are no specific institutions capable of re-educating abnormal minors, it is declared that the actions of this court pertaining to this minor are deemed terminated.
37
Although this one child/young woman was released, we know from other sources that the reformatories, just like Franco's prisons and adult preventive detention process, continued to contain the ill, and inevitably especially harrowing were the psychiatric cases.
Nor did the relative economic improvements of the 1950s much change this aspect of the picture, nor the abiding penury of the reformatories as suffered by a majority among their internees. We have yet to investigate in detail the degree to which the notable ‘sociological anomaly’ of juveniles from more affluent homes increased in relative size inside the reformatories from the 1950s to the 1960s. (By 1956 the official statistics report that there were some 3,000 minors interned in Spain's reformatories, and nearly 25,000 juveniles subject to an order of the juvenile court system, which represented 0.29 per cent of the Spanish population between the ages of 0 and 16 years of age. 38 According to these figures, then, the reformatory population had decreased from the 1940s.) One can observe that the potential ‘catchment’ for more affluent reformatory internees increased from the 1950s into the 1960s, but we would need to undertake more research to assess whether this group of internees did increase proportionally in the 1960s. This was the period when Spain's middle classes increased in overall number. They also became much more internally variegated, by dint of the economically developmentalist policies of the dictatorship. Most salient here were the new urban white-collar cohorts. These were more superficially ‘modern’ than the old Francoist middling classes of the provincial market towns (and sometimes in bigger urban centres too), but with whom they still shared many fundamentally conservative social ideology/values, not least because they saw Francoism as the generator of their newfound economic standing. These managerial middle classes aspired to the new material goods being produced by developmentalism and consumerism – the little flat, produced by the burgeoning construction industry, to be acquired on the instalment plan – and a relatively higher living standard, epitomized by the greater availability of a range of domestic goods – fridges and electric appliances first and foremost, and by the 1960s television and small cars (the Seat 600).
But the rewards of the ‘economic miracle’ were of course not equally shared or experienced by all sectors of the population, and it would be those at the sharp end of the ‘miracle’ who would become the bulk of the reformatory inmates during the 1960s. From the records of both the Asilo Durán and Colonia San Vicente Ferrer we can see that these sectors were frequently (though not always) youths and children from families who had come to the cities as post-war migrants, very often from the ‘deep south’ of Andalusia and Extremadura, or sometimes from other poor rural areas (the two Castiles of the centre-north and centre-south, and Galicia in the north-west). From the 1940s, this traffic had been fed almost always by intertwined political and economic circumstance, and accelerated from the 1950s. But of course internal rural-urban migration in Spain, especially to Barcelona, but also to Madrid, Bilbao or Valencia, had begun long before the 1940s, indeed it was a twentieth-century constant (including intra-regionally, for example, from rural Catalonia to Catalan towns), so it is not easy to identify a ‘migrant’ profile in any absolute way from a reformatory, or any other state record, only sometimes to discern, from specific places and patterns of residence, those who belonged to more recent and less well-integrated cohorts. To take Barcelona's Asilo Durán across the period from the 1920s to the 1970s, its internees’ places of residence were overwhelmingly Catalonia and above all (80 per cent) from Barcelona, city and province. But where exactly they came from within the area would change significantly from the 1940s to the 1960s.
In the 1940s, the majority of young reformatory internees still came from derelict inner-city areas (the pattern is repeated in Valencia), where very precariously placed workers lived, often, as we have seen, recent migrants made exceptionally vulnerable by war, the ensuing political repression and the integral poverty of the post-war years, all of which frequently broke down family cohesion. Neither then, nor in later decades, was there any significant reformatory presence of children or adolescents from more long-established (and also often quite topographically central) blue-collar neighbourhoods where the working classes had been established for many decades, and which had, correspondingly, relatively more cohesive communities, notwithstanding the still considerable ravages of war and repression –for example, neighbourhoods like Sants or Poble Sec in Barcelona, or in Valencia, Beteró, Natzaret or La Malva-rosa. But by the 1950s, and accelerating in the 1960s, the majority place of residence of reformatory internees (and juvenile court cases) shifted from derelict or run-down areas of the old inner city (in Barcelona classically represented by the Raval, the so-called ‘Chinese Quarter’ (Barri xinès) of urban legend 39 ), to the vertiginously growing outlying suburbs (suburbios) and new (or expanded) industrial towns on the peripheries of greater Barcelona – such as l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Tarrasa, Badalona or Sabadell. The very word suburbio in (Castilian) Spanish (or suburbi in Catalan or Valencian) carries the charge of marginalized and deprived populations, home to the rural uprooted where there was no state/urban planning or resources to provide for even their most basic needs. 40 By the 1970s, most Asilo Durán internees came from these suburbs or outlying towns, with only one in four coming from the twilight zones of the city centre. For example, the proportion of residents of the Asilo Durán who came from the outer district of Horta-Guinardó in Barcelona increased progressively to make it the most represented place of origin by the second half of the 1960s. Here, as elsewhere, especially on the peripheries, any scrap of unoccupied land filled up with shacks and huts as large shanty towns speedily formed – El Carmel, Montjuïc, Can Tunis and others. By the 1960s then, the sons (literally) of the post-war migrations were overrepresented in the reformatory population, as indicated by their numerical presence in both the Asilo Durán and the Colonia San Vicente Ferrer. Contemptuously nicknamed murcianos or charnegos – that is to say, terms which alluded to the mobile rural poor of the centre-south, these pejorative names could, nevertheless, be applied to any migrant from a poorer (rural) place, even those from within Catalonia itself.
In the mid-1960s, Antonio, a young man who had earlier been interned in the Asilo Durán for car theft, was still living with his mother and brother in a shack in a corner of El Carmel (part of Horta-Guinardó). The family had made the journey from Granada in the south in the immediate post-war period. 41 Similarly, another (Asilo Durán) internee, Francisco Castro Villena, from the southern town of Jaén had come as a lone child migrant to Barcelona, a relatively less common, but still far from unusual profile. 42 He had left the south because ‘there was simply nothing there’ (‘porque allí no había nada'). His three-day journey to Barcelona was fraught with difficulty because the police harassed would-be migrants along the route, and did so, at least until the end of the 1950s, with some legislative backing. Francisco arrived destitute and disoriented at the major Barcelona rail terminus, the Estación de Francia, and in the absence of any social support network or public welfare to which he could have had even minimal recourse, he set about ducking and diving to find a means of survival. By July 1965, he fetched up in the Asilo Durán, committed for a three-year stretch for the theft of motorcycles. By then the theft of cars and (motor) bikes was common and fed the exaggerated newspaper image in the regime-controlled press of a wayward, devil-may-care brand of young male delinquent, serially stealing expensive cars from rich inhabitants or tourists and joy-riding them around the outskirts of the city. This did sometimes happen, indeed it features on young Francisco's ‘rap sheet’, but it was also an influential, regime-generated image of crime, which fed the fear and moral panics of the comfortably-off, as such representations had long done in previous decades and across Europe. It was common for the Francoist press to underscore the danger represented by the suburbios, by focusing on stories of repeat-offender car thieves, or those who combined theft with menaces (aggravated theft), especially if they were also on the run from the reformatories. 43 These fearful and fear-driven representations/images of ‘hoodlums’ (‘golfos’) then began to feed back into the personal files written up by the reformatory personnel, and also into the writings of state-employed criminologists of that time – the ‘golfo’ being frequently associated not only with theft, but also ‘insubordination’/living beyond the control of parents, away from the family home. 44 The old category of ‘vagrancy’ also now came to have many new uses and connotations, both in reformatory files and in those of adult preventive detention detainees, where it came to represent everything that was increasingly assailing the ‘social peace’ presided over by Franco's order. 45
By the 1960s, reformatory committal was mainly triggered by police detention, rather than family denunciation to the juvenile courts – and increasingly the authorities demonstrated a keenness to take repeat offenders into the adult system, which there is some evidence started to happen by the late 1960s – certainly any adolescent who had reached their sixteenth birthday was at risk of this, even though they were legally still minors. 46 The echo chamber of the Francoist press, with its images of dangerous – and glamorous – ‘golfos’, acted as a screen that veiled the widespread, mundane and destructive reality of continuing integral poverty combined with endemic and perpetual lack of opportunity. For every Francisco driving an Aston Martin or Renault Floride convertible, with the wind in his hair, there were many more unschooled and malnourished youngsters stealing and fencing staple goods, and even clothes from washing lines, as they had done in the 1940s. The 1960s did of course look in many ways qualitatively different from the 1940s: trickle-down consumerism and a new, much larger urban middle class meant that there was a greater array of goods ‘on offer’ to be stolen, including roads full of ordinary small cars and motorbikes, a ‘horizon of opportunity’ that had not existed in the 1940s. But the hinterland of such crime, in both its more spectacular but also more pitiful forms, remained the absolute lack of educational or training opportunities in the suburbios and the industrial overspill towns. Moreover, virtually all jobs, we should remember – other than precarious and harsh casual labouring – required personal contacts. There was in the 1960s a sparse presence of social provision, which the state had virtually delegated to the Church and lay Catholic bodies. But it was a sticking plaster on a gaping wound. The more flamboyant golfo minority used violence to make their way, reflecting back what the state had taught them about life. Along with their bodies, it was their only ‘capital’, the violence manifesting an ugliness which, rather than the ‘picaresque’ genre it is often superficially compared to, was a devastating eruption of Spain's esperpento, where deliberate distortions reveal, and critique, the structural ugliness of the entire society. Nevertheless, in the everyday 1960s, unlike the pages of the controlled press, the aspirations of most young migrants remained remarkably modest and unviolent, given the scale of what had been inflicted on them – limited perhaps by just how little their previous life had taught them to expect. For example, Francisco, one of five siblings from Santa Coloma and the son of an agricultural labourer, was twice sent to the Asilo Durán for stealing and then ran away on the day of his first communion (he is said to have left with his new set of clothes and 160 pesetas). He was arrested by the police in Valencia two days later. 47 In some case records too, once can sense the glimmer of an awareness that other horizons existed and other possibilities for life, this even among the most impoverished and desperate. 48 There were signs of a certain rage to live now, in what little time might be available, as, for example, in the case of Juan, who took money from his parents and spent all of his nights out, returning at five or six in the morning. He would pick up cigarette ends from the pavement, and spent his time chain smoking, even though he was already ill with tuberculosis, which at that time still wrought disaster on Spain's poor and marginal populations devoid of public health care. 49
In terms of the horizon of historical research itself, the study of reformatories in the 1960s and 1970s remains a wide-open field, as does the study of how the adult preventive detention system meshed with juvenile justice (those aged 16, or nearly, were increasingly taken into the adult system). Needless to say, this is work which has great potential for expanding our understanding of the developmentalist Francoism of the 1960s onwards.
Conclusion
The profile of juvenile delinquency in Spain by the mid-1960s indicates that this was, first and foremost, the product of a singular new social moment and of the social process of mass migration. But the ‘new’ here had unbroken links back to the still unquiet ‘old’ of post-war repression and ‘routes out’. For what had driven the speed and scale of post-war internal migration was the political repression and the integral poverty of the immediate post-war years, which was itself also inextricably linked to that repression. All of this worsened the challenges and problems confronting migrants, as did the total lack of infrastructure, planning or resources in the migrants’ (sub)urban destinations. Taken together, this brought ever larger numbers of young men to suffer lasting and endemic social and economic marginalization in the prison system, and, for some of them, that process began in the reformatories (it is possible to trace through individual reformatory profiles to the records of adult prisons and the preventive detention system). The Franco dictatorship manifestly succeeded in breaking the links between these new (sub)urban masses and an older Republican worker culture, but it had not done so according to its own ideological plan – the new dwellers of the urban margins were not integrated into any recognizable Francoist ‘nation’, which is scarcely surprising in a larger sense. As for the reformatory experience itself, the question remains as to whether Francoism was repressive in any qualitatively novel way once the dictatorship ‘became modern’, i.e. entered its 1960s developmentalist phase. What we can certainly underline is that the warehouse function of the reformatories increased significantly, as did their swingeing, and enduring, repressive capacity. This occurred because the latent abusive potential of ‘special jurisdiction’ was pushed to its limits, and, also because, for the first time, children and young people who had not necessarily committed any offence stipulated in the criminal code were able to be detained indefinitely on the basis of social profiling.