Free Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home by David Cohen

offenders expressed any remorse for their crime. Never mind that this was a peculiar crime committed in faraway Christchurch. The moral menace already emanating out of Wellington’s satellite city was spreading, or so tabloid wisdom had it when holding forth on the ‘killer instinct’ — a term originally coined to describe the boxer Jack Dempsey in his prime — apparently taking hold of the young.
    Then along came Oswald Mazengarb. The residential movement existed well before the conservative barrister’s arrival on the scene, but his work hastened its progress. His Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents , better known as the Mazengarb Report, investigatedthe ‘conditions and influences that tend to undermine the sexual morality of children and adolescents’.
    Much the same general ground had been covered 10 years earlier in a similar inquiry hatched by the Wanganui Education Board, and indeed the Hutt Valley had already been the subject of a couple of smaller surveys looking at juvenile ‘immorality’ in 1951 and 1953. But the changing cultural times meant the last of these inquiries attracted greater funding and commanded far more national attention; certainly, it was constituted with greater urgency on the ultimate watch of Prime Minister Sid Holland, whose government appointed the seven-member committee on July 23, 1954. Holland, who believed that delinquency had become a grave national problem requiring immediate investigation, said he wanted action.
    The group got to work just four days later. In all, evidence was heard from 145 witnesses and 120 written submissions were received. The subsequent 69-page report, served up with rich sauces of indignation and very high in conservative political cholesterol, offered 27 conclusions and around 20 recommendations. So important was the offering deemed to be that copies of the 185-gram document were delivered to each of New Zealand’s 300,000 families. Posties grumbled about the physical weight. The country groaned under the document’s moral weight, a load made all the heavier by the daily stream of reports and pronouncements about juvenile delinquency that appeared during the hearings.
    Some of what Mazengarb had to say wasn’t so objectionable. His report despaired over the growth of materialism, the loss of moral absolutes, and what he saw as a faddish devotion to indulging children in notions of uninhibited self-expression. He was hardly the first person to suggest that this was a state of affairs that had ironically been made possible by the nation’s growing economic bounty. The report pointed out that suburbs in places such as theHutt Valley, which had been centrally planned and quickly settled, tended to lack anything of a community spirit (associations, church groups, sports clubs, parks) and this had been exacerbated by the exclusion of wealthy people from the socialist paradise. These were the kinds of citizens who might be benevolently inclined to help their neighbourhoods evolve. Young people in such places, he argued, were always going to be a bit more aimless than their counterparts in more organically established townships.
    But the Mazengarb Report was never intended as a sociological study. Yes, it acknowledged, getting to the main subject at hand, juvenile delinquency was a worldwide problem, and probably always had been. Yet what was ‘entirely new’ in New Zealand was a young generation collectively convinced that ‘they are not doing anything wrong’. So what was to be done?
    Here the committee joined some interesting dots. Among the trends it noted was that, during this recent period of moral decline, the number of children in residential state care had been falling. Were these two facts related? Mazengarb seemed to think so. Among his recommendations: a radical strengthening of child welfare work and the powers of the children’s court, especially in respect of finding new ways to protect other