Boys in Trouble
Boys In Trouble : a Study of Adolescent Crime and its Treatment. By Mrs. L. le Mesurier. (John Murray. 6s.)
WE hope this book will find its way to a large public. Few people know of tie progressive work now being accomplished in connexion with boy offenders of the sixteen-to-twenty-one age group, and this book, written by the leader of the volun- tary women workers at the London boys' prison, rightly gives the Prison Commissioners full credit for it.
In the depressing atmosphere of a prison the authorities in recent years have made available to the Courts an inves- tigation centre, under the direction of a medical Governor, where boys can be remanded for inquiry and observation, and where modern psychiatric methods are combined with careful investigation.
But this book is something more than an account of what is being done. It is a frank statement of what urgently needs doing, and the Prison Commissioners are again to be con- gratulated on allowing a voluntary worker to write so freely. Mrs. lc Mesurier shows how much this work is hampered by a penny wise Treasury. It should not be carried out in a prison at all, but at an Observation Centre where the autho- rities would be no longer hampered or the boys degraded by the " prison " atmosphere. Yet four years have been allowed to pass since the Departt mutal Committee on the Treatnient
of Young Offenders recommended the establishment of such centres.
When Judges send a boy to Borstal, do they know that he spends about three months in prison just because Borstal is overcrowded ? It costs about £5 a year to supervise a hey for a year on probation. It costs nearly £1,000 to support an habitual criminal for seven years' preventive detention. Yet our Probation officers, astonishingly successful as their work is, often fail because they are badly overworked. And does the reader realize that able and devoted men with a vocation for Probation work are being debarred from it because they are not communicants of the Church of England ?
These arc the problems which Mrs. le Mesurier discusses fearlessly and lucidly. They could all be solved if our legis- lators showed a little more imagination. The Labour Party claim to believe in the Social services ; why cannot they earn the gratitude of all penal reformers by tackling these
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