Inventing Young Offenders: The Legal and Medical Categorization of Juvenile Delinquency in Hashemite Iraq, 1921–1958
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article traces the emergence of juvenile delinquency as a legal and medical category in Hashemite Iraq (1921–58). We argue that as children and youth became increasingly visible through actions and inactions that highlighted the weaknesses of political and social structures, state institutions adopted international frameworks and vernaculars concerning the participation of youth in labor. Medicine played a key role in defining the “juvenile” and determining young people’s physical abilities and, by extension, their productive potential. Focusing on children and youth who were for the most part unaffiliated with organized political groups, the article demonstrates that Iraq’s correctional facilities, including reformatories, were integral to the Hashemite state’s attempt at crafting and regulating citizens. Juvenile delinquency was also a uniquely gendered and classed category. Gender in particular became a distinguishing marker that in effect deprived young women and girls of the juvenile status that allowed mostly lower-class young men and boys to access reformatories rather than adult prisons. While defiant young men and boys who were considered as potentially redeemable gained access to judicial and social institutions that aimed to rehabilitate the juvenile delinquent, the crimes of young women and girls were often sexualized and assessed according to interpretations of maturity determined by the onset of puberty rather than legal age.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it