Last updated 19:49, Thursday, 21 August 2008

YOUNG criminals! What to do with them? It’s a problem which has been written about in the papers, both local and national.

Various pundits have offered their opinions – some arguing for a hard line “boot-camp” solution – others favouring a less harsh ap proach.

The hard-liners are often publicly scornful of these “soft” solutions and can often be heard harking back to the good old days – when juvenile crime wasn’t a problem – when everyone was agreed on how best to deal with young criminals. That’s what they would have you believe.

And they are wrong. People in the past, even in the so called golden age – whenever that was – were just as mixed up about this problem as we are today.

It’s useful to remember this when the “traditionalists” bleat on about going back to traditional Victorian values.

A lead article in the West Cumberland Times in 1891 destroys the notion that all Victorians were stereotypically stern and unbending.

Some of it could have been written today.

The writer wanted children kept out of court, and prison, wherever possible. He thought that people, before they made their minds up on the subject, should go and see what was happening in our local courts.

He claimed that those who did “must have been greatly distressed by the frequency with which young lads have been placed in the dock . . . It is dreadful to remember that prisoners so juvenile have made any appearance in the police court docks in this county.”

He claims that magistrates found “listening to charges against mere children . . . a painful experience.” He claimed that it didn’t matter how lenient the punishment was, the real harm done to the young individual was being brought to court in the first place. It was something which adversely affected him for the rest of his life.

He writes: “Prevention in such cases is a mercy; perfect cure, when the evil is done, is next to impossible.” He argued that a lot of support had to be given to convicted youngsters to help them through troubled times.

He knew who should tackle this job. Local religious bodies! I think he had an axe to grind here.

To quote: “It is all very well, no doubt, to rescue a Polynesian, or a Congo negro from heathendom, but would it not be infinitely better, if the thing is possible, to save our own kith and kin at home, at our very doors, from falling into temptations which may in the end ruin them for life, and in the life hereafter.”

He had a message for those who thought none of this concerned them, pointing out that sons, and daughters, of the “respectable classes” had also been in the dock.

He did concede that the law must be obeyed and that “if it is broken, he who suffers wrong can have his pound of flesh from the offender whether old or young, man or woman, youth or maiden, or the merest child, if he cares to appeal to the law.”

He felt that it wasn’t a neighbourly or Christian thing to do.

He was quite scathing about the latter, writing: “Were it not for ‘the rarity of Christian charity under the sun’ hundreds of prison cells would be today unoccupied in England.”

He recognised the value of religious education, but wondered what use it had been to someone who “instead of being ready to forgive . . . calls in the policeman to a silly girl who has been glamoured by a bit of ribbon, and sends her light-heartedly to prison, careless whether by and by, as a consequence of his act, she adds another spectral form of misery to the midnight streets of some great town . . . If that is all the fruit of religious education, for pity’s sake, let us have no more of it.”

He argued that there were other ways to deal with these young people, working with parents, or relatives, anything which didn’t involve imprisonment and coming into contact with hardened criminals – hardly appropriate punishment for trivial juvenile misdemeanours.

I very much doubt that our local journalist was a lone voice crying in the wilderness! Remember that when next you hear someone prattling on about traditional Victorian values.