‘No Solution ’ To Delinquency

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31112, 15 July 1966, Page 3

‘No Solution ’ To Delinquency

(N.Z. Press Association) WELLINGTON, July 14. No “radical solution” was in sight for the problem of dealing with delinquent or anti-social youths, the chairman of four borstal parole boards, Mr J. B. Thomson, S.M., said in his annual report today. Mr Thomson, reporting for the Walkeria, Arohata, Waipiata and Invercargill boards, said there was a fairly general impression among those who had not been much concerned with it that the problem should fairly readily be capable of solution. Four years ago, when appointed to the boards, he might have had some such notion, but he did not have it now. Mr Thomson said what was being done in borstal was certainly necessary. Young people sent to borstal had demonstrated they could not be handled in the community. “It should be remembered also that although we hear a

good deal of borstal failures there are borstal successes. “I presume to think that even with means and methods presently in sight and to some extent in use the proportion of successes can be increased.” Mr Thomson said the court sentence which sent an adolescent to a borstal institution was borstal training, not a sentence of detention. But built into the system was a “very substantial punitive element. “Punishment itself may be reformative and it may indeed in some cases be an essential element in the process of reforming a particular individual,” Mr Thomson said. “But granting all this, I feel that the process of reforming delinquent youth requires a distinction to be made between the two processes. Each or both should be applied as necessary, but not together.” Mr Thomson said that perhaps a basic problem with the borstal population was a refusal to accept authority and a rejection of the rules by which the community lived and which were essential to its existence. The task was to

promote the willing acceptance of authority. “There is no clear-cut disease of delinquency to which a clear-cut remedy can be applied, and no panacea for all the diseases which may manifest themselves in what we describe as delinquency,” Mr Thomson said. “The aim must be to find out what caused the trouble, to see what effects it has had, and to devise a remedy in the case of the particular individual, realising that what helps one may do nothing at all for another,” said Mr Thomson. The objectives he had in mind could be realised within the present framework. Examples were the open institution at Waipiata, pre-release,

post-release and probation hostels, and the opening up of forestry, track cutting, and other such projects. “I should like to think that what has been done is only a beginning and that we are moving towards a situation in the not too distant future ■when training will contain jmuch more of this sort of thing: when the institution will tend to become the base and the most important work be done elsewhere.”