This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The article reveals the problem of organising support to juveline lawbreakers who were released from correctional shelters in the Russian Empire in the late 19th - early 20th century. For this purpose Association for helping underage ex-prisoners was established, which opened special shelters for this category of people.
The article discusses the problem of reforming criminal legislation in relation to juvenile offenders in the Russian Empire in the late XIX-early XX centuries. At that time, among the "judges of justice", who were based on ideas of humanity, values of a child’s personality, protection of his or her rights, the idea of changing the existing criminal legislation in relation to the child offender arose. One of the key issues in the article is consideration of the justification of the terms of staying children in correctional institutions. In order to ensure the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders in colonies-shelters, the authorities of the country attempted to amend some legislative acts. This had a great impact on the organization of juvenile justice, reflected in the practical activities of educational and correctional institutions of the Russian Empire in the late XIX-early XX centuries. The innovations in the criminal legislation became a big step towards the humanization of the process of raising delinquent children in pre-revolutionary asylum colonies. That was the first time that a child was considered not as an object, but as a subject of the pedagogical process, an individual with rights. The activities of educational and correctional institutions ceased to be punitive and were directed towards human treatment of children.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.