U.S.A. PRISONS

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 July 1931, Page 5

U.S.A. PRISONS

HARD TREATMENT OF JUVENILES. (BY CABLE —PRESS ASSN. —COPYRIGHT.] WASHINGTON, July 7. President Hoover has received the Wickersham Law Enforcement Committee’s report on a detailed study of juvenile offenders in the United States. The report assorted that in the Federal institutions the juvenile offenders were placed, nearly wholly, in living quarters that were in “poor repair, were insanitary, and ’were not fireproof.” It. also stated: “Punishment in dark cells is given for trivial offences, and imprisonment in the guard liQuse, such as six days for the possession of a one or two cent postage stamp.” The report says that boys are shackled in various types of leg-irons, that the flogging system is widely misused, and that overcrowding is widely reported. The medical aid at one prison for juveniles is said to be “to slave off epidemics, rather than to treat those who obviously are seriously ill.” The food supplies are alleged to bo generally inadequate, ad “the hardest punishments are generally to be found in the institutions that are for the reform of the young.”

The report adds that tho six months ending December 31. 1930, saw 2,243 hoys and girls under eighteen years of age incarcerated, 990 of whom were put in on prohibition charges.