COURTS AND YOUTH

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 25, 30 January 1943, Page 6

COURTS AND YOUTH

METHODS OF REFORM

(OC.) LONDON, November 1. Lord Simon, the Lord Chancellor, and Lord Caldecote, Lord Chief Justice, were speakers at the Magistrates? conference in London. Lord Simon, who presided, welcomed the fact that there were women Magistrates and described their appointment as a great and necessary improvement. He did not consider that past political services should be considered when Magistrates were appointed, but felt strongly the importance of securing people of propriety and good sense and local reputation who, as far as the public knew, had t.o politics at all. Speaking on probation, orders and young offenders, Lord Caldecote said i that in 1941, as compared with the I twelve months preceding the war, indictable offences found proved in courts of summary jurisdiction against children up to 14 had increased by 52 per cent, and against young persons up to 16 by 44 per cent. Larceny was much the commonest charge. While the number of offences committed by girls had doubled they were still rather less than one-tenth of those committed by boys. Indictable offences proved against young persons in the twelve months before the war numbered 29,000; and in 1941 43,000. He rather deprecated the use of punishment in cases where with the help of the offender reform might succeed. "Imprisonment marks the criminal." he said. "It is a blot which it is difficult for him or for other people to forget. I feel it a horrible thing to sentence a young person under 17 to imprisonment, but it is something which in some cases we must steel ourselves to do." Lord Caldecote acknowledged that when sitting in the Court of, Criminal Appeal he had found more often than he liked cases where the appellant had once been treated in some other court in a way that must have seemed to th^e offender as a let-off. He hoped that binding over without supervision had taken second place as a method of reform or correction. Quoting a case where a young person charged with minor offences had been ordered not to attend a cinema for two years and another where a lad charged with stealing about a shililng's worth of cigarettes had been ordered not to smoke for two months and to go to church at least once on Sundays, Lord Caldecote said the object in view was, of course, a failure. Penalties imposed must seem to the offender right and reasonable,