BIRCH NEEDED

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 45, 22 February 1945, Page 8

BIRCH NEEDED

JUDGE'S ATTITUDE TO YOUTH O.C. WANGANUI, February 21. "It is a very painful thing for any Court to experience, to sentence youths Li the way I have had to do this morning," said the Chi-f Justice (Sir Michael Myers) in the Supreme Court, Wanganui, today when dealing with nine youths concerned with breaking and entering and with theft of liquor. Their ages ranjed from 18 to 21. T wo were sentenced to reformative detention (ona for two years and the other for one year), three were each ordered a term of two years in the Borstal Institute, and the remainder were admitted to probation.

"It is very painful," added his Honour, "but there is no use playing with cases of this kind. These boys may have been lacking in parental control; I don't know what the cause has been, but they need discipline. Many of us have had to fend for ourselves, have had to take punishment. But nowadays it is different, ./eople do not want punishment. There is a sentimentality in the community which won't allow it, and this is the result If these boys had had what we used to call a good .hiding for their small misdeeds their greater ones would not have been committer1. If boys, as in the old days, could be taken into a police yard and birched by a policeman —nothing very serious—or, better still, birched by their schoolmaster or by their parents, we would not see so many of them before the Courts today."