Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home Read Online Free Page B

school on the watch of the physically imposing chief educator, Dave Kelsey, one of three teachers employed at the little schoolhouse adjoining the main building.
    Finally there comes the man who brings this disparate group of individuals together. Maurie Howe is not only the institution’s principal, or chief executive, but also one of the pioneers of residential children’s care as it has come to be practised in New Zealand. Mr Howe is a YMCA man through and through — not, one hastens to add, in the louche sense of the song of the same title popularised a few years later by the Village People, but in the strictly New Zealand sense of the era. An impressively fit, undemonstrative man, quick of movement and speech, he is never emotional or anxious — or poorly dressed. This morning he emerges from his office (that’s the one located on the right-hand side of the main corridor near the front entrance) bedecked in a hat and tweed jacket and coordinated tie, in the fashion of John Steed from the adventure series The Avengers . For good measure, too, he is clutching an umbrella as Steed might a walking cane.
    A man in control. A sphinx without any secrets. The style never varies. He’s the rock that doesn’t move, isn’t moved, won’t be moved, can’t be moved: Maurie Howe casts his professional shadow throughout the buildings here as powerfully as the tune now being pumped out of the radio system, ‘If I Only Had Time’, the high and lonesome French standard that will eventually be covered by scores of Anglo-American acts. As sung today, in a smouldering voice, by a 21-year-old Kawerau kid, John Rowles,whose uncle is a Black Power member, but who has somehow made the song his own, taking it to the upper reaches of the UK hit parade seven years ago before rocketing to the summit of the pop charts on both sides of the Tasman Sea, and now casting its charms over this group of boys. The tempo is slow and quivery, the melody very lush, and the singer’s vocal delivery as straight as a bowling ball rumbling down the polished floors of any of the institution’s endlessly scrubbed wooden passageways.
    If they only had time. In fact, both the staff and the inmates of Epuni Boys’ Home have all the time in the world. Epuni is among the oldest of the country’s 16 processing centres for delinquents, an institution of short-term correctional training, the term used to refer to the Ministry of Works-designed structure spread out across 1.5 hectares of grounds. The residence is charged with assessing and classifying the estimated 350 children aged between seven and 16 who at this historical point are pushed through its doors each year before passing out again, usually to some other form of state-sponsored residence or foster situation.
    About half of the boys are state wards — which is to say, children who have been committed to the care of the Department of Social Welfare by a magistrate in the Children’s Court — while some of the others are among the 354 kids around New Zealand whose guardians have signed a voluntary agreement under which the department has custody of the children for a while. Most of the kids have been sent here by the courts from a wide area of the North Island and the upper South Island, a catchment area basically falling just short of the similar institutions in Hamilton and Christchurch, but often taking in kids from other areas that lack the facilities to provide residential care.
    Practically speaking, Epuni is as much a holding pen for an overloaded youth justice system as any lofty setting for therapeutically based observation of the wards who live here foranything up to eight months at a time. Of the 38 inmates held here just a half-dozen years ago, for example, 23 were state wards, eight were on adjournment in child welfare cases and just seven were on remand; now eight out of every 10 boys are remand cases from the children’s courts. A majority of these inmates will remain in an officially