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Visualizations of “Hooligans”. A Bulgarian Film of the 1960s According to Bulgarian penal law at the time (the Law from 1896 and the following laws and codex), there were special rules excluding children and minors from criminal responsibility. But the minimum age changed over time—from 10 years in the first Bulgarian criminal law of 1896 (Art. 42) to 12 years in 1943 in Zakon za sadilishta sa malovrastni (‘Law for Courts for Underage’). The communist regime raised the minimum age for criminal responsibility to 14 years (Nakazatelen zakon (‘Criminal Codex’] of 1951); youth age 14 to 18 years were excused from criminal responsibility if they lacked the capacity to form the mens rea of an offense. Differentiation within two categories, minors (maloletni), age 8 to 14 years, and adolescents (nepalnoletni), age 14 and 18, was preserved also in the passage in 1958 of Zakon za borba sreshtu detskata prestapnost (Art. 10).'7 The legislative framework reveals many issues. In the period before World War H, the efforts of the Bulgarian Child Protection Union (founded 1924) aimed to put all children at risk, including children with “criminal predispositions”, in the full glare of publicity, to evoke wide social sympathy for children’s life, to unite the efforts of the institutions, on which the improvement of children’s living conditions depended (Popova 1999). This became radically changed with communist legislation. The law for combating juvenile delinquency from 1958 defined the LES as a place for serving sentences and as an “institution for compulsory education” (zavedenie za prinuditelno vazpitanie) wich the aim “to prevent various forms of crime, violations of legal order and deviations from proper development and education of minors (maloletnite i nepalnoletnite)” (Art. 1). This quite unclear definition did not list the acts that might be considered deviant, potentially including everything that someone might consider improper or immoral. The state established a continuous chain of quasi juridical institutions that totally encompassed childhood: specialized commissions, pedagogical rooms for children, LES, homes for temporary accommodation, penitentiary houses. Measures of surveillance over minors were expanded, executed by a semivisible network including the educational institution'®, the Narodna militsia (‘People’s Militia—police), the juridical institution, the prison institution, and mass organizations as the Otechestven Front (‘Fatherland Fronv), and the Dimitrovski komunisticheski mladezhki sayus (Dimitrov Communist Youth League, Komsomol’). The LES were created as disciplinary total and closed institutions (Goffman 1961; Foucault 1975) according to a uniform model. The schools were gendered (non-coed) and hierarchically structured—power was centralized in the hands of the director. A stated rationale for labor educational schools was that they provided for hooligans a means of reeducation to enable them to become good members of 7 Tn 1961 the Law was renamed in Zakon za borba sreshtu protovoobshtestvenite proyavi na maloletnite i nepalnoletnite (‘Law for Combating the Antisocial Acts of Minors and Adolescents’). 15 The LES were under the authority of the Ministry of Education, the administration of the schools was assigned to the Department of National Education—“Special Schools”. 445
