Borstal Boys

A Borstal Training was intended to reform seriously delinquent young people in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. It was devised in1895. In India, Borstal was known as a Borstal School. The Gladstone Committee (1895) first proposed the concept of the Borstal, wishing to separate youths from older convicts in adult prisons. It was the task of Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, a prison commissioner, to introduce the system, and the first such institution was established at Borstal Prison in a village called Borstal, near Rochester, Kent, England in 1902. The system was developed on a national basis and formalised in the Prevention of Crime Act 1908. The regimen in these institutions was designed to be "educational rather than punitive", but it was highly regulated, with a focus on routine, discipline and authority during the early years, though one commentator has claimed that "more often than not they were breeding grounds for bullies and psychopaths."The Criminal Justice Act 1982 abolished the borstal system in the UKThis book Borstal Boys tells the true story of two brothers who were sent to Borstal in the mid 1960's and clearly these were not reformed as this story will tell. However on the 16th January, 1970 David, the younger brother had a sudden conversion to Christianity, after a bad trip on LSD and turned his back on his criminal past. It was some 30 years later his brother Michael too, after serving 5 years of a 16 year sentence in the Philippines, became a Christian and he too turned his back on his criminal past. This book tells the whole story.