Young offenders should be given more training in occupational skills during time spent in re-education-through-labor camps, experts said.

The Beijing Youth Daily said daily manual labor by youths at the camp, also known as laojiao, has been cut from eight hours to three hours.

"I cannot see how cutting the enforced labor hours is a solution to tackling the system's flaws," Wang Gongyi, deputy director of the Institute of Justice Research affiliated to the Ministry of Justice, said yesterday.