“BORSTAL”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23016, 20 October 1936, Page 4

“BORSTAL”

TO THE EDITOR.

Sir, —May I offer you some recent remarks by the Lord Chief Justice of England, where the Borstal system started? He says: “In earlier years the Borstal training was largely based on prison discipline and prison methods. Gradually, the basis has become educational. and the institutions are now schools of character-building, so framed that each individual character may be studied as a separate and distinct problem. It is a hard and industrious programme of training, each day containing 16 hours of effort and occupation. The system derives its success from the service rendered by the men and the women who devote the working years of their live§ . . . to the reclamation of difficult and way-

ward boys and girls. . . . Those who have the responsibility of dealing with them would do well to pool their experience, to be steadily open to new ideas, and to be ready to listen to and accept criticism, always believing that better ways may yet be found.” England has had Borstals now for 28 years; New Zealand only for 11. We are still, very largely, at the “mild prison” stage of their administration, our Borstals being manned by prison officers. We lack altogether, even for them, all the help that England gives, by special training for their task, by thorough psychological examination of each inmate, and by the presence of women matrons and women hospital nurses. Ought we to stay satisfied that “better ways” than ours “may not be found? ” —I am, etc., Akaroa. Oct. 17. B. E. Baughan.