Juvenile detention centres and juvenile shelters 4.3 Strengths In the opinion of the National Preventive Mechanism, juveniles placed in the visited establishment have very good living conditions. The bedrooms and classrooms are adequately equipped and adjusted to the needs of the boys. Moreover, the appropriately managed and maintained technical and educational base of the workshops should also be noted. All the visited rooms were neat and tidy. Their condition raised no reservations. 4.4 Areas requiring improvement 1.   Placing juveniles in transition rooms and separate living premises As a result of the implementation of the previous recommendations of the NPM representatives, the juveniles in the transition rooms and separate living premises of the visited establishment were no longer required to say a welcome command and the buckets that served the juveniles to fulfil their physiological needs were removed. However, the reasons for placing juveniles in transition rooms still raised reservations. The NPM representatives repeatedly emphasised that the practice of placing juveniles in transition rooms as a punishment or when, for example, the juvenile resigns from school or the group programme, demonstrates that the interpretation of the regulations on the use of transition rooms is too broad and lacks sufficient justification. Therefore, the recommendation concerning the elimination of placing juveniles in a transition room for reasons not specified in the existing legal regulations remains valid. Moreover, another alarming practice is that the director of the Detention Centre asks parents of the newly arrived juveniles placed in transition rooms to abstain from visiting their children since at this time the activities related to the admission of the juvenile should proceed uninterrupted. The practice was evidenced in the documents of the establishment. This means that the concept of the establishment is to discourage the family from contacting the juvenile during the initial period (of up to 14 days) of the juvenile’s stay in the establishment. In the opinion of the visiting team this practice is unacceptable since the juveniles placed in transition rooms should enjoy the right to contacts with their family to the same extent as other juveniles. Therefore, the NPM representatives recommended that the director of the Detention Centre should cease to ask parents of juveniles to abstain from visiting their children. 55