Correctional Services Department Research Articles

Offender Rehabilitation System in Hong Kong: From Traditions to Innovations

Probation in Hong Kong is part of a broader concept – a system for the rehabilitation of offenders and the prevention of reoffending. In this approach, the focus of the probation service is not on the crime itself, but on the unresolved personal and social problems that underlie criminal behavior (lack of employment, housing, drug addiction, etc.). With regard to the rehabilitation of offenders in this administrative region, there are legal regulations that have undergone several stages of improvement, a well-developed organizational system of rehabilitation and a set of proven methods of working with offenders. All this makes the Hong Kong experience interesting from the point of view of the prospects of possible borrowing. The paper considers the legal regulation, the history of formation and development of the system of rehabilitation of offenders in Hong Kong, the influence of the English experience on its formation; highlights the features of the organization of the rehabilitation system, as well as its advantages that contribute to the optimization of work processes. Probation in Hong Kong started with juvenile offenders and later extended to adults. Probation in Hong Kong is now a criminal law institution accompanying alternative sentences to imprisonment. Based on academic research, official publications of the Social Welfare Department (SWD) and the Correctional Services Department (CSD) of Hong Kong, and statistical data, the author explores specific measures of support for ex-convicts, social rehabilitation, and the effectiveness of their application. The author identifies the key points of effectiveness of the Hong Kong system of rehabilitation of offenders: well-built hierarchical organizational structure (departmentalization of the service); division of functions between the agencies supervising social welfare and correctional institutions; emphasis on the use of social work methods in the creation of rehabilitation programs; a wide range of rehabilitation programs targeting different groups of offenders; comprehensive nature of rehabilitation, involvement of family and community. In conclusion, the author’s vision of the prospects of using the Hong Kong experience in the Russian realities, coupled with the analysis of the new legislation on probation, is stated.

Paul, the prisoner (Acts 23:34-35): An insight into 2018-2022 political prisoner’s rights in Zimbabwe

Undisputed letters of Paul and Acts of the Apostles are replete with details of the Gentile Missionary’s multiple imprisonments, so much as to qualify him a ‘jailbird’ description. Paul’s incarceration in Herod’s palace for 2 years (Ac 23:34–35), his arraignment before Governor Felix and subsequent detention for 5 days before plea (Acts 24) on charges of inciting public violence, being a ringleader of a cultic faction and causing disturbances in the Jerusalem Temple, resonate with the contentious arrests and imprisonment without bail and trial of members of opposition political parties in Zimbabwe. Consistent with New Testament passages that exhort caring for prisoners and the need to grant justice to those facing trial, this study seeks to understand how inmates in Zimbabwean prisons have been on the receiving end of relics of the ancient Roman Legal system in the country’s Human Rights history between 2018 and 2022. The article demonstrates how the New Testament can be deployed to grapple with distress calls emerging from Zimbabwe’s prison walls as part of advocacy for judicial reforms in the country’s quest for rule of Law. At the end, the article recommends ways in which Churches in Zimbabwe can tap from New Testament passages how to operate an effective prison ministry in liaison with the Prisons and Correctional Services Department of the Government of Zimbabwe. The article employs qualitative methods of Socio-Historical and Ethnographic Analyses to discuss how human rights pitfalls in Paul’s imprisonments present remedial lessons in Zimbabwe’s quest for judicial reforms.Contribution: Deployment of the Bible to redress Human Rights issues in Zimbabwe. Demonstration of how Early Christian Literature can dialogue with contemporary African Sitz im Leben for social transformation.

A Gender-Responsive Treatment Facility in Correctional Services: The Development of Psychological Gymnasium for Women Offenders.

With increasing evidence suggesting a disparity in female and male offenders in terms of rehabilitative needs, growing concern has been placed on the development of gender-specific services for female offenders. As such, a prison-based psychological gymnasium (PSY GYM), with distinctive features in integrating cognitive-behavioral and positive-psychology concepts to address female offenders' needs, was set up in 2011. The present study aims to introduce the concept as well as present findings to evaluate the overall effectiveness of PSY GYM. Nineteen Chinese female offenders participated in a 6- to 8-month intensive training program at the Lo Wu Correctional Institution (LWCI) of the Hong Kong Correctional Services Department in Hong Kong. Psychometric inventories were used to assess their psychological distress and positive growth following the program. Participants showed significant reduction in their depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms, and in their tendency to pay attention to negative information. Furthermore, their sense of hope, gratitude, and tendency to pay attention to positive information had remarkably increased. This indicated the effectiveness of PSY GYM in facilitating successful rehabilitation for female offenders.

Human Rights in African Prisons (review)

Reviewed by: Human Rights in African Prisons John Daniel (bio) Jeremy Sarkin (ed) (2008) Human Rights in African Prisons. Cape Town: HSRC Press Given the current South African public's obsession with crime and its thirst for harsh punishment in the form of a re-introduction of the death penalty, there is a surprising paucity of literature on prisons in South Africa. There is of course Jonny Steinberg's The Number, the riveting account of the hegemony of the 26 and 28 gangs in Pollsmoor prison in the 1990s, while the Jali Commission Report was an equally fascinating account of the deep-seated corruption which attends the administration of the wonderfully misnamed Correctional Services Department (the post-apartheid name for the old prisons department). Julia Sloth-Nielsen's state of the prisons chapter in the 2007 State of the Nation volume is the best summary description of the prison system in South Africa known to this reader. Happily she is a contributor to this volume whose focus – its title notwithstanding – is more South Africa than Africa. Her chapter on children in African prisons is one of the most compelling in the volume. The pain of incarcerated mothers having to part from their children at age three will tug at the heartstrings of any reader, as will the knowledge that often years pass before the mothers even see their children again, let alone care for them. To criminologists, judicial figures and others, the volume is a welcome addition to the prison literature on Africa. And it has been much praised by both judges and leading legal academics. Jeremy Sarkin's perhaps slightly overlong introductory survey of the African penal system is filled with useful statistical data and enough descriptive detail to make any sane person living on this continent to resolve never to stay even one night in an African prison. Like prisons everywhere, Africa's men's prisons are massively overcrowded while its women's prisons are surprisingly underpopulated. South Africa, for example, has one of the world's highest male [End Page 123] prison populations but one of lowest when it comes to female inmates. On average, females make up only between four to five percent of the total African prison population. Why that is so is not adequately explained but probably has much to do with the reluctance of magistrates to incarcerate African women given the devastating likely consequences for their children. Certainly in South Africa most female inmates imprisoned for crimes of property (theft, shoplifting etc) have at least one suspended sentence before they were put into custodial care. Beyond Sarkin and Sloth-Nielsen's chapters, those by Schonteich on pre-trial detention and human rights in African prisons, Muntungh on alternative sentencing in Africa and Lisa Vetten stand out. The latter's breaks new ground in its focus on issues of female health and hygiene and demonstrates, for example, how vulnerable to abuse and exploitation menstruating female prisoners are in Africa. The chapter on overcrowding in African prisons by a top former prison official, EVO Dankwa, makes for sobering reading. The perspective of the volume is not all doom and gloom, however. Sarkin, for example, argues that in the last decade or so various prison reform initiatives have been undertaken across Africa and some countries, notably Tunisia and Libya, have opened their gaols to human rights organisations like Amnesty International. This has been a huge step forward but against that one must recall the fact that prisons in countries like Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe are largely deathtraps. In South Africa, a small band of non-governmental organizations strive nobly to turn local prisons into places of rehabilitation rather than the incubators of more crime. One of these is the Phoenix Zululand organisation which strives to apply the principles of restorative justice in 13 prisons in the north of KwaZulu-Natal. Beyond victim-offender mediation, Phoenix has developed into a civil rights program for prisoners, the bulk of whom are poor, largely illiterate African men and some women. Most of these should not, in Phoenix's view, be in prison. That they are is a product of their poverty (most cannot post even modest bail amounts) and...