This chapter summarizes the insights on Mettray's regime as a carceral institution for boys. Mettray's birth in 1840 marked the initial diffusion of the modern disciplinary realm. Yet, by the time of its close in 1937, Mettray was not a laboratory of modernity but a shell of its former self, having devolved from the reformist vision of its founder to little more than a custodial care facility. What started out as a progressive and utilitarian project, based on the optimistic belief that juvenile delinquents and wayward youth could be reformed, grew increasingly carceral and punitive amid creeping doubts about whether such changes were possible. By the dawn of the twentieth century those doubts had accumulated into a pervasive sense of futility and failure.
