failed to stop a descent into serious crime and the persistent student has graduated to one of the 'colleges'. This Society and its affiliated agencies, the Salvation Army and Caritas, visit the prisons regularly for interviews and through their case-workers help by counselling (and materially, where necessary) any prisoner who genuinely wants to make a fresh start; a Case-work Centre is also maintained at Shek Kip Mei. In the first three months of 1964 seven case-workers paid nearly eighty visits to prisons and saw over nineteen hundred prisoners; at the same time they were assisting nearly three hundred ex-prisoners. The Society also main- tains three hostels for those who are homeless or need special initial support; during this same period over a hundred and seventy ex-prisoners made use of these facilities. The Prisons Department and the Police Force also provide an abserver or adviser for this Society's Committee. Until the Society appoints its own officer, a senior probation officer is acting as a consultant on its casework studies.
CHAPTER V
THE PHYSICALLY AND MENTALLY HANDICAPPED
42. As in public assistance and other departmental duties, so in providing for the welfare of the handicapped (which is the realm of the Special Welfare Services Section of the Department), increasing emphasis is being placed on individual training and rehabilitation rather than on mass relief and institutional care. Now that a nucleus of basic rehabilita- tion services for handicapped persons has been established, there is a welcome movement forward towards closer integration of these services. As a practical illustration of this trend, a new Rehabilitation Centre has been completed at Aberdeen, with expanded and improved facilities for training, and the two hundred and fifty-three residents of the gloomy and derelict-looking old North Point Camp moved in on the last day of March, a fitting end to the year covered in the present report (see Appendix 8). Aberdeen, the largest of the Department's institutions, has a maximum capacity of six hundred. Its greatly expanded vocational training facilities, in bright, modern surroundings, will work in co- operation with the new Surgical Appliance centre of the Medical and Health Department, and will include instruction in practical modern trades like printing and light mechanics instead of traditional skills such as rattanwork which provide only a precarious livelihood with no pros- pects. The aim is to have a single continuous process of rehabilitation,
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