JUVENILE REFORMATORIES FOR NEW ZEALAND.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1610, 18 April 1879, Page 4

JUVENILE REFORMATORIES FOR NEW ZEALAND.

The need of juvenile reformatories in this colony is (says the Auckland “Star") becoming the subject of almost daily remark by Resident Magistrates, and other persons whose business occasionally brings them into contact with the depravity existing among the rising generation in our cities. In Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington, and Auckland repeated representations have been made from the Bench as to the pressing necessity of establishing some institution intermediate between the comparatively mild discipline of the training school on the one hand and the gaol with its inevitable accompaniment of degrading and corrupting influences and loss of self-respect on the other. There are cases of almost daily occurrence in which the reformatory discipline of the training schools is proved to be insufficiently severe to irradicato the baneful influences of an hereditary predisposition to vice and an early domestication amidst scenes of drunkenness wad immorality. The fact is shown by the frequent desertions from the Industrial Home and Naval Training School, and the almost unquenchable predilection shown by precociously vicious children for a life of vagrancy and freedom from the irksome restraints of the schools. The feelings of magistrates must often suffer a severe wrench between duty and inclination, when long experience of the inner working of the gaols has produced a conviction that in sending children from the training schools to the gaols they are, to use a homely phrase, putting them “ out of the frying-pan into the fire.” Today Mr Barstow was again obliged to have recourse to this disagreeable alternative, and in doing so expressed his regret that there is no juvenile reformatory capable of dealing with such cases as that of the four boys who were punished for stealing Mr Coates’ boat. No one who has devoted any thought to the subject can doubt the urgent necessity that exists for the establishment of one or more juvenile reformatories in the colony, and yet though the evil has long been painfully recognised, successive Governments, while spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on objects of doubtful utility, have ignored a matter of so much vital importance to the future welfare of the colony. In England the principle has long been recognised that no child under the ago of sixteen shall be sent to prison, but to some place where, while efficient punitive restraints are provided, training may also be given in virtue and industry. As early as 1788 the germ of the existing reformatory schools may be traced in the operations of the Philanthropic Society,which established a sort of farmschool, on the family system, for the reformation of depraved and vagrant children. The movement developed on the foundation of the Victoria Asylum, the girl’s school at Chiswick, St. George’s Institution for boys convicted of crimes, the Redhill Reformatory, the greatest institution of the kind in England, and other establishments of the same character. At Horn, near Hamburg, a great juvenile reformatory has been established under the name of the “ Rauhes Haus,” which has grown almost into a colony. The Reformatory at Mettray was founded by M. Demetzy, a member of the bar at Paris, who was struck with the evils and hardships attending the committal to prison of young and scarcely responsible criminals. The percentage of relapses into crime in this reformatory has only amounted during a long period to 4 per cent. The great success of the English and Continental systems is attributed to careful classification, a judicious discrimination between punitive and conciliatory discipline, and a skilful direction and development into useful and virtuous channels of the propensities and dispositions of the pupils. The same qualities which are found in an ill-regulated and vicious form in the adventurous truant and daring spoiler of orchards have developed under judicious moral training the skilful and intrepid navigator and explorer, or the gallant defender of his country, while in other cases the seeds of vice have been irradicated, the defects of early associations remedied, and the child, who might have grown into a social pest and a public burden, has become a useful, industrious, and happy unit of that great human hive which produces wealth, prosperity, and national greatness. The first desideratum of a really efficient reformatory system is isolation from the taint of the lower human stratum of towns, and disassociation from early vicious companions and scenes. The proper place for this is the country. It is the most culpable of blunders to attempt to establish successful reformatories in proximity to cities, where opportunities for escapes, and renewals of the old contaminations must frequently present themselves. The Government should establish one or more of these schools in isolated up-country districts, where the children would breathe a pure and wholesome atmosphere, where they would enjoy a large measure of personal freedom, and where under the refining influences of industrial and moral training they would, as has been found in the English and Continental [institutions, gradually contract an attachment to the place, and a disposition for habits of regularity and industry. We trust some scheme for a juvenile reformatory system will be introduced by the Government next session.