A Young Offender

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31653, 13 April 1968, Page 4

A Young Offender

Approved School Boy. By Steven Slater. William Kimber. 205 pp.

The author of this revealing account was sent to an approved school in Britain for an offence unwillingly committed to help out a friend. The first night he was savagely beaten by the leader of a gang of older boys—that was his introduction to the routine of a new boy: daily hidings, fagging for the seniors, extorsion, sadism and torture at night, with the staff either too indifferent or too intimidated to intervene.

Young Steven found that the school’s “comprehensive programme of corrective training” consisted of a souldestroying daily routine, heavily augmented by physical violence, taunts, insults and threats. But when the Home Office made its official inspection, window-dressing and warnings ensured that everything went off without a hitch. “Obviously it was not the done thing to talk to the inmates and find out their genuine thoughts on the school. Perhaps they preferred th? glossier, polished image painted by the headmaster . . . ,” he comments. Although from an unhappy home background and clearly ill-adjusted to life, the author did not himself have sadistic tendencies, but terrified sub-

mission to the attacks soon l changed to resistance and 1 later emulation. When the | tables were turned and it was; Steven’s turn to punish the new boys, there was no remorse, rather a sense of pride and achievement, a sad commentary on the effects of the so-called reformative training. Steven absconded, and whilst on the run, pathetic and desperate, he carried out a robbery and evaded arrest. A job as a barman presented him with the first chance in his short lifetime to settle down and live happily, but he gave himself up to the police in spite of dread of Borstal. The magistrate who heard his case provides the only vindication of the Juvenile Court system in the book, for after bearing all the evidence he announced: “I want nothing to stand in the way of this boy's future." This book poses some pertinent queries about contemporary treatment of young offenders. Steven Slater tells! his story frankly and without apparent malice and his descriptions of the brutality he witnessed and experienced have more than a ring of authenticity about them. One is forced to agree with one of his fellow inmates, that the line between a normal, healthy boy and a juvenile delinquent must be a very thin one.