There are at any one time about three thousand boys and young men in the Borstals of this country. They vary in age from sixteen to twenty-three years of age (for though a youth must be under twenty-one when he is sentenced, lie can be nearly twenty-four when he leaves). They vary also considerably in the degree of their experience of crime. They are rarely first offenders: if a boy is sent to Borstal on his first appearance in Court, it signifies either that his offence was very grave, or that he had in fact been committing offences for some time before he was caught. Most have been on probation, often more than once; many have been to Home Office Approved Schools. They have almost certainly been in the habit of committing offences for not less than twelve or eighteen months, and may quite easily have been doing so for as much as ten or twelve years.

They come from all over England and Wales, and from all walks of life, though the vast proportion are from the big cities, and from the working-class homes of those cities. There are a small number from criminal homes, where father or mother are known to the police; but in most cases the families are sound enough, and no other member has been in trouble. The broken home produces its quota, the home, that is, where one parent is missing by reason of death, desertion, separation or divorce: but in view of the number of such homes nowadays this is not as significant as at first might appear. One would need to know the statistics of such homes as against normal homes, and the number of good, honest young men who had been brought up in them, before one could form a sound judgment.

Educationally they range from the boy not far removed from mental deficiency to the boy of superior intelligence, though the latter is only one or two per cent of the whole. Most fall under the head of ‘average’. Brains are not a distinguishing mark of the criminal classes.