0 (especially in the past) a type of school where young people who have broken the law are sent instead of prison:
1 intended to change something in order to make it better:
the reformatory objectives of liberal free trade
In the 1920s we had the setting up of the borstals which were supposed to be a more civilised form of custody than the reformatories.
Few of us will agree that it is due to anything more than mere mischief that many of these lads are in reformatories or prisons.
One can send boys to reformatories; but, as the minimum period is two years, that would seem far too grave a punishment for this offence.
There was a committee appointed last year to report on the salaries and conditions of service of officers in industrial schools and reformatories.
The numbers are, for reformatories forty boys and four girls and for industrial schools eighty-one boys and four girls.
In the case of certified reformatories half the cost was to be so borne.
The children cannot wholly be sheltered from the world as it is, even when we shut them away in reformatories and boarding schools.
Our prisons, our reformatories, our remand homes, are filled to overflowing, many prisoners living three in a cell.
