ABSTRACT: Extant literature lamenting the deepening relationship between race and penalty, in contemporary Britain, defines the race/penalty nexus as the empire coming home (Moore, 2014; Brown, 2002). Correspondingly, scholars of race have doubled down on calls to address race-blindness in British criminological histories (Choak, 2020; Phillips, et al, 2019). A vocabulary of erasure and amnesia indicate both active and passive processes of exclusion from criminological inquiry. Moore and Brown’s positioning of the amplified penalty being meted out to racialized peoples, in contemporary Britain, as the empire coming home reflects this race-blindness. The paper centres British interwar youth penal reform as a primary site for addressing this race-blindness. Drawing on historical records, including the Fletcher Report, the Liverpool University Settlement Records, and the Eugenics Review catalogue, the paper explores the role of interwar youth reform in shaping a historic politics of race in Britain. Consistent with the deviance invention logic which emphasized earlier modes of penalty for White, working-class youth, early modes of penalty similarly implicated racialized youth and their families, but this remains largely unknown in the criminological canon. In particular, racialization played an especially antithetical role excluding racialized young women from the logics and practice of care recognized as crucial, by the reform movement, for supporting the transformative potential of marginalized urban, working-class youth. Such exploration widens the lens to expose historic intersections between race, gender, and penality in Britain.