reformatory
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
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"They put me in a reformatory when I was 17."
From BBC ● Nov. 15, 2025
In the film about two teens in a reformatory school, the camera becomes the point-of-view of a couple of characters, while other characters look directly into the lens.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 17, 2024
For people like them, the reformatory offered one of the few pathways to a degree inside.
From Seattle Times ● Dec. 6, 2022
This reformatory housed youngsters who had been convicted of theft, truancy or ill-disciplined – the types of children whose parents didn't want to know, outcasts.
From Salon ● Sep. 30, 2022
Impertinence to a teacher was almost a reformatory offense in Brooklyn.
From "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith
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As a teen, Clayton-Thomas lived on the streets and passed through a series of jails and reformatories.
From BBC ● Jun. 25, 2026
In 1972, in a controversial action that would bring sweeping changes to juvenile corrections across the United States, Dr. Miller began shutting down Massachusetts’s reformatories.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 15, 2015
In examining the state child-care system in Ireland, the series brought to light a Dickensian network of reformatories and residential schools for poor, neglected and abandoned children known as industrial schools.
From New York Times ● Jan. 12, 2012
The result -- for Mayan, at least -- was a three-year odyssey through various ultra-Orthodox reformatories and foster families.
From Salon ● Feb. 18, 2010
Recent experiments in reformatories have demonstrated the immense advantage of methods which attempt something like this.
From A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of Evolution by Williams, C. M.