“More and smaller” training centres

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32564, 25 March 1971, Page 10

“More and smaller” training centres

More and smaller rehabilitation training centres for youth were needed in New Zealand closer to the centres from which the girls or boys were drawn, said Professor J. Spencer, a British authority on criminology and urban sociology, in an interview yesterday.

Professor Spencer had visited Kingslea Centre, the training school for girls in Christchurch. He is in Christchurch this week lecturing at a national medical social workers’ seminar. “My criticisms are not of Kingslea, but of the system as a whole,” he said. Twenty or 30 girls or boys should be a maximum number at a training centre, and a staff ratio of 1:2 was desirable, he said.

"I am critical of the difficulties imposed on the staff by large numbers, and by the girls being so far away from their homes.” he said. “I think that the principle at Kingslea is a good one,” he said. “The girls are allowed their maximum amount of freedom at the end of the stay, when they are living in a hostel at the centre and working in the community.” He said that the term of stay at training centres should be shortened. “Children benefit from one year. If they stay much longer tea this the benefits start

|to disappear. They become institutionalised and forget how to live in open society.” The object of the training school was to phase its charges back into society, said Professor Spencer. He said that the girls in Kingslea had been through other parts of the child welfare system. “They are a residual group, failing when all the other successes have returned to the community,” he said.

It was important, then, to | have an “open” policy at training centres, such as at Kingslea.