Shock Treatment

Can a juvenile delinquent be "cured" simply by hard work and discipline? Many social workers think not. The average delinquent, they argue, needs psychiatric care as well. Recently, Britain's penal authorities have been operating on the opposite theory: at "detention centers" at Kidlington, near Oxford, and Goudhurst in Kent, they have been putting delinquents through a rugged "basic training" course with surprising success. Last week, despite scattered criticism, the Prison Commission went ahead with plans to establish two new detention centers.

On the Double. Juvenile authorities opened the detention center at Kidlington in August 1952, in response to Britain's continuing postwar delinquency problem (current yearly figures are 14,500 offenses by boys and 2,500 by girls). The new center was designed for first offenders only, and was conceived less as a place of punishment than as a means of bringing delinquents into line by giving them the "short, sharp shock" of detention under rigid discipline. Moreover, it spared delinquents the stigma of a reformatory record.

The boys sent to the "shock centers" vary in age from 14 to 21; their terms are from one to three months. When a boy enters a center, he is stripped of personal possessions, gets a physical examination, and is assigned to a small (6 ft. by 10 ft.), freshly painted cubicle containing only a narrow cot and a washstand. From then on, his life is much like that of a military inductee. His day begins at 6:15 with 20 minutes of calisthenics, proceeds on a split-second schedule which keeps him constantly moving on the double. He is never left unsupervised. (At Kidlington there are eleven staff members watching over 55 boys.) After breakfast and inspection, the younger boys attend classes; the older ones work about the grounds (with brief cocoa break at 11) until 11:55, break for lunch, return to a work detail until 4:25, when they knock off for tea. Evenings are devoted to metalworking, basket weaving or woodwork, with dinner at 8:10, followed by chapel and lights out at 9:05.

Tough Effort. There is no corporal punishment at the centers. Failure to conform to the schedule or to meet inspection standards is punished by assignment to extra work details or remission of a rare privilege, e.g., leisure time on Sunday evenings. For serious offenses, e.g., attempted escape, boys are put in solitary-confinement rooms.

To some penal experts, the shock centers' spit-and-polish routine seems merely brutalizing. Says W. J. Bray, chief proba tion officer for Kent: "I say it is destructive . . . Why don't they pay more attention to boys' minds?" The London Daily Herald got into the fight by arguing that the shock centers leave their graduates more embittered than before.

In answer to such criticism, the Prison Commission points to the shock centers record: during 1952 and 1953, no fewer than 237 boys were discharged at Kidlington, but up to the end of 1954, only 74 of them had reappeared in court. Say; Kidlington Warden F. (for Frederick) Vernon Elvy: "We help some boys to find themselves. It is only by experiencing the satisfaction of a tough effort that these boys realize a sense of a job well done; it gives them the sense of achievement they need. I don't say we have the complete answer to the problem, but we are making a real contribution."

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