The Sun.
London, England, 1856-12-18 00:00:00

THE REFORMATORY MOVEMENT.

On Tuesiay the Rev. Sydney Turner, a gentleman
known from his connection withlthe juvenile reformatory
movement and chaplain of the philanthropic establish-
ment at It edhill, delivered an address at the Tailors'
Labour Agency Literary Institute, Newington-causeway,
on "Boy Crime and its Remedies." The room was well
Mid, but not crowded. Mr. Dunn took the chair.
The Rev. S. TURNER, on rising, was received with
cheers. He said he had not come to give them a
methodised systenr, but merely to express his views inte'-
ligibly to them. He did not intend to plead for a par-
ticular nostrum or panacea for boy crime, but to set them
thinking and acting upon the subject. They would at
once sympathise with him when boy crime affected them
as the middle class much more than it did the higher
class. He had recently seen in the Economist that crime
only affected capitalists, or persons with fixed property.
He was astonished at such doctrines, which embodied
one of the strangest fallacies he had fever seen. The
question of boy crime was essentially one which affected
the working and middle classes. Whose property did
young thieves principally steal ? If he went to the
Westminster Bridewell, and got the young thieves out,
who would they live upon ? Would they live upon the
property of the Duke of Devonshire, or Lord Palmerston,
or even such large firms as Fortnum and Mason's? No,
it was the great class of working tradesmen that these
young hornets stung. And more than that, it was the
children of the poor man that they associated with, and
who were exposed to their corruption. It was a painful
thing to find that the more humble the station in life of
men, the more exposed they were to the temptations
thrown in their way by the younger portion of attest
thieves. Out of the 120,000 of all ages, and both sexes,
who annually passed through our prisons, from 12,000
to 13,000 consisted of boys and girls, and of that por-
tion about 1-10th were girls. In the police districts
I of London there were about 3,000 boys and girls impri-
soned. The great theory of our forefathers was to
punish only, and adopting Sir Peter Laurie's theory " to
put them down." He should be very glad to adopt that
if it answered. He was not one of those amiable phi'an-
thropists who were averse to all secondary punishment-%
lie considered that in proportion to the knowledge of the
offender be should be punished. They had a large num-
ber of boys at Redhill ; some of them had been in pri-on
sixteen times, many for ten times, and a great proportion
four or five times. The result was uniformly the same ;
he was not deterred by the punishment he had received,
and be thought the reason was clear. No person com-
mitted crime so much from the love of it, but because his
habits and his whole course of education bad been such
as to make petty crime almost a necessity to him. 'With-
in the last year—that was from the let January to the
present—they bad admitted 118 boys into the Redhill
Reformatory, and out of that number 31 had lost father
or mother, the surviving parent not re-marrying, 16 had
lost both parents, and 21 had lost one parent, the sur-
vivor re-warryipg, Thus, of the whole 118, there were