Today China's juvenile correctional education system is in deep recession. Reform schools, the main institutions providing such programs for young offenders, have substantially decreased in numbers during the last thirty years. What's worse, over half of the surviving reform schools now find it very hard to recruit students.

More than 30 years ago, China witnessed a full flourishing of juvenile correctional education when approximately 150 reform schools were established. But from late 1980s onward, this kind of education began to suffer serious setbacks. Reform schools have reduced in number by 2 to 3 percent annually. A survey shows that up to May 2005, only 67 reform schools existed nationwide and four of them hadn't any students. Moreover, none of these schools could be found in 9 of China's 34 provinces and regions, including the populous Shandong and Hebei provinces.

Liu Guiming, the deputy secretary-general with Chinese Society of Juvenile Delinquency Research (CSJDR), argues that the reason reform schools are declining is not because the population of juvenile delinquents is declining but rather due to a societal bias.

In China, a reform school is officially defined as a part-work and part-study institution that provides special education to middle school students who have broken the law or committed minor crimes. It is formally viewed as an inseparable part of China's nine-year compulsory education campaign. But to ordinary people, attending such schools signifies punishment rather than an educational opportunity.

Before the 1990s, ordinary middle schools usually applied to the local education supervision department when they transferred uncontrollable delinquent students to reform schools. Upon approval, they, together with a police escort, would send the students to the chosen schools. Nowadays people have realized that such compulsory admission via police intervention is neither appropriate nor lawful. So some reform schools now require approval from both the youth in question and his parents before he can be recruited as a student. Urban parents in particular care so much about their child's future that they fear the consequences of a reform school diploma, believing that their child won't be treated fairly in contemporary society. Many refuse to send their problem children to reform school for this reason. Moreover, young offenders naturally have not the slightest intention of attending such a school. All these factors have led to great decline in school recruitments.

More significantly, reform schools cannot provide satisfactory education. Beijing Jinsong No. 6 Middle School, a reform school, conducted a survey among its former students, all of whom graduated in 2002. Of these 29 graduates, 38 percent of them had lapsed into criminal habits again and were arraigned for other misdemeanors. One graduate had even committed rape.

Zhou Long, a teacher at the Beijing Jinsong No. 6 Middle School, maintains that the two or three years of junior secondary education reform schools usually provide is far from enough. In his opinion, reform schools should provide the entire secondary education: a full six years. He believes that two or three years of disciplined middle school life in reform schools can indeed bring a problem student's negative behaviors under control but crime-prone delinquent youths need more time to totally reform. Thus, correctional education programs should follow them to official maturity; the age of 18, right before they qualify for college, Zhou argues.

Liu Guiming, CSJDR's deputy secretary-general, also points out that today China's governmental regulations on juvenile correctional education are too vague and they only specify two or three year programs. He feels that without a thorough analysis of each problem student or flexible standards that correctly determine the necessary length of a delinquent's education, it is hard to offer suitable education programs.

Fortunately, Beijing and Shanghai have taken corrective actions to improve their juvenile correctional education systems.

Shanghai has taken two approaches. First, some reform schools have begun to provide senior secondary education to middle school graduates. Second, they have also established interactive ties with senior secondary education institutions. The former offers short-term correctional education programs to delinquent students that the latter transfers to it. The latter also agrees on favorable terms of accepting reformed middle school graduates from the former. What's more, the graduates received by the latter will be under the supervision of teachers from the former.

Beijing has adopted a different approach. Reform schools have brought both correctional education and vocational education under their flag so that problem students may receive either of these two types of education.

To revitalize the juvenile correctional education system, responsible governmental departments and relevant organizations need to cooperate with each other. They must seek humane, lawful and scientific solutions for this pressing problem. Much work needs to be done.

(China.org.cn by Pang Li August 21, 2007)