For years now you have been concerned about people under 18 found guilty of some crime ending up in prison for lack of alternatives. Why has your concern risen over the past week?

Society received the earliest possible warning of the criminal career that was beckoning for the six-year-old child, but dismally failed to avert it- Fr Peter Serracino Inglott

A cocktail of four events did it. The first two were court reports in the local press. Magistrate Claire Stafrace Zammit reluctantly sentenced a 16-year-old lad to three years imprisonment after he pleaded guilty to having stolen on 12 occasions, mostly mobile phones from tourists in Paceville.

There are enough background details in the short story as it appeared in The Times for a Dostoyevsky novel. The teenager had been sent to Mount Carmel Hospital when only six years old. I am told hardly anybody can stay in the Young Persons’ Unit for long.

At any rate, last year he was sent back to his mother, who, however, abandoned him to follow her own affairs – “we did not get on together”.

The father had stopped providing maintenance some time before. Left to his own devices, the lonely lad learnt the art of pick-pocketing, apparently not too well, from a gang of Artful Dodgers that he des-cribed as the only friends whose companionship he still now sought.

The lesson that emerges most clearly from the misadventures of this latter-day Paceville Oliver Twist is that we (by which I mean society) received the earliest possible warning of the career that was beckoning for the six-year-old child, but we have dismally failed to avert it, although psychologists assure us that it is perfectly possible with proper action at that stage.

“I do not like priests”, the accused told the magistrate to explain why he was not willing to be placed in an institute. It was still not of great comfort to me when I read that the dislike of the species to which I belong was not visceral: the young man was somewhat like me allergic to being woken up at 6.30 a.m., and also to taking the pills that appear to have been an unwelcome inheritance from his Mount Carmel days.

Later on in the week, Magistrate Doreen Clarke handed a 17-year-old a one-year prison sentence suspended for two years, when he would be under supervision. He had mugged a 64-year-old lady in St Paul Street, Valletta, as it happens where my own family home is. The significance of this second incident for me was that it is even more urgent for the sake of the victims than for that of the juvenile delinquents to find a different solution for these cases.

In fact, the third ingredient of my cocktail was my memory of the British reporter who told Parliament that 80 per cent of the rioters had a criminal record, so that it was clear they had emerged from prison worse than when they were admitted.

The fourth ingredient was a report in the French magazine Philosophy of a seminar in Paris attended by many of the big names in philosophy and the human sciences on an American TV cartoon serial called Buffy Against the Vampires. Buffy, who looks a bit like a Barbie doll, spends her day like an average teenager, but at night displays a virulent virility. She actually knives and kills the prowling nocturnal monsters named Vampires.

Expectedly each philosopher gave a different interpretation of Buffy and her enormous popularity with adolescents. But all the ‘buf-fylosophers’ (as Buffy exegetes have come to be called) are agreed on two points.

First, Buffy is an excellent emblem of the typical adolescent torn between childhood and adulthood, the normal and the fantastic, the ordinary and the pathological, the banal and the philosophical. Secondly, her split personality is caused by her not finding any loving communication except only from the vampires.

How has the problem been tacked here over recent years?

In 2006, a book called A Fair Deal, for children and young people with very challenging behaviour, which means endangering their own physical safety and that of others was written by an expert team including members of the judiciary and several of my University colleagues from different disciplines, with comprehensive proposals. However, three years later Magistrate Anthony Vella wrote to the press questioning why the agreed proposals had not been implemented.

Other reports, notably a 10-year strategic plan launched by then Health and Social Policy Minister John Dalli, continued to be churned out with regularity. This plan included, among many other proposals, setting up a ‘secure unit’ for girls and boys between 14 and 17, that could take six of each and was estimated to cost €500,000.

Nothing seems to have happened, but in 2009 another report, extremely similar in content, was produced after an inquiry was held when two minors convicted of theft were sent to prison. I have been told that a taskforce has been set up for implementation, but that is as far as my knowledge goes.

Now the preference seems to be for a system of so-called ‘intensive fostering’ for six to nine months and ‘remand fostering’ while awaiting trial. The foster parents in these cases are to be professionally trained, paid for full-time duties, and assisted by a multi-disciplinary team, including social workers and clinical psychologists.

What do you think should be done and by whom?

The quickest fix would be to extend the applicability of the Care Order Act from 16 to 18 as the upper limit. The minister (as if she did not have enough on her plate) would be able to provide the teenagers needing it with help of the intensive fostering kind.

Had I been myself young as when I was involved in the sort of civil disobedience that the group then known as Tan-Numri practised, I would organise a group of commandoes to liberate any young people at present caged up in the Corradino Corrective Facility.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.

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