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SOCIAL WELFARE
During the year the department found employment for 106 disabled people.
PROBATION AND CORRECTION
The Probation Service has a staff of some 40 officers, including women. It functions at all levels of courts in the Colony. At the end of year there were 1,920 people being supervised on probation. A total of 6,132 social enquiries were carried out at the request of the courts, including cases referred for welfare assistance of some kind. The Institutional Service includes a combined remand and probation home (for 60 and 100 boys respectively), a similar home for 45 girls-both in Kowloon-and a reformatory (or 'approved") school for 150 boys at Castle Peak, in the New Terri- tories. There is a probation hostel, opened last year, for young men, normally between 16 and 21 years, who are ordered, as a condition of probation, to live there while going out daily to work. A second reformatory school for some 140 boys is in an advanced planning stage and should be opened towards the end of 1968. Valuable voluntary services are offered on the preventive and positive side by the Juvenile Care Centre and the Society of Boys' Centres, which give residential training to those who need help in finding a niche in society or in overcoming difficulties of behaviour and relationship.
PUBLIC ASSISTANCE AND EMERGENCY RELIEF
The aim of the relief section of the Social Welfare Department is to alleviate distress and hardship and assist individuals and families, who have fallen into financial difficulties, to re-establish themselves and to become economically independent. Until this year material assistance was only in the form of cooked meals or dry rations, but now there is limited provision for cash grants to those for whom rations are of little practical value. The criteria for relief assistance has also been overhauled. The total number of families receiving public assistance during the year was 4,648 com- pared with 2,635 in 1966. A number of voluntary agencies, including the Catholic Relief Services, Children's Meals Society, Co-operative for American Relief Everywhere, Council of Christian Services, Lutheran World Services, and the Seventh Day Adventist Welfare Service, operate supplementary feeding schemes.