In connection with the provision made for girls by this admirable convent at Henrietta Street, I want to ask the Minister a few questions. We are all familiar with the suggestion when girls are before the district justice from time to time, that they should retire to this convent for a period on condition of being given the benefit of the Probation of Offenders Act. But is there any obligation on these girls to stay in the convent? I think not. When girls give an undertaking to reform, the justices have reason to expect that some girls' fall from grace is due mainly to circumstances for which they are not primarily responsible, to bad company and to people who deliberately try to turn them from the ways of virtue. When they mean to turn over a new leaf, and give an undertaking to go to the convent, they are very often drawn out of the convent, and the nuns, anxious as they are to retain them, find that they are not able to require them to stay there.
Does the Minister intend to leave that situation as it is indefinitely, or does he think the time has come to consider a plan, where district justices deem it to be in the best interests of girls, that they should be vested with powers to commit them to an institution of this kind, as at present committals may be made to the Borstal? It seems to me that if the Minister, knowing the excellence of the work of the nuns, thinks it right to subsidise that work—with which I entirely agree —he might consider giving power compelling these girls to go to such institutions.
