PROBATION
33. Probation work is regulated by the volume of crime, the detec- tion of crime, the prosecution of criminals and the sentencing policies of the courts.
34. The duties of probation officers are to carry out social inquiries for the courts; to make reports which may help judges and magistrates to decide how to deal with those who have been found guilty; and to supervise those who are entrusted to their charge by the courts. Inves- tigations of social background involve long interviews with the offenders and often mean home visits and calls upon school teachers. Probation Officers discuss their charges with employers, voluntary welfare agencies, fellow government officers in other social services, and friends and relatives of those on probation. In between they draft their reports, bring their case records up-to-date or appear in court. All this is prodigal of time; but the tendency to use probation officers increasingly for social inquiries to assist in sentencing, not necessarily with a probation order in prospect, is welcome. The subsequent work of supervision, arising out of a probation order, involves both visiting at home and regular interviewing in a probation office. A common misapprehension is that probation officers deal only with young males. This is not so. They also have to deal with women and girls (women officers are used for this work) and with adult males.
35. The number of posts provided for probation work (as distinct from work in correctional institutions) was 36 at the end of the year, but strength is always lower because of the demands of training, both in-service and overseas. The number of officers actually available and gazetted averaged 30, and those officers were responsible for the super- vision of an active caseload of 1,676 probationers and others during the period. Detailed figures are given in Appendix 7. Those figures represent a heavy individual caseload; nine years ago ten officers were supervising two hundred probationers. The technical 'success' rate, that is to say the number of those who completed their periods of probation without further offence, is now 71.7 per cent, compared with about two out of three in the early 1960s. Most of the failures were subsequently sentenced to a training centre or to prison.
36. The Probation Committees for Hong Kong Island and for Kowloon and the New Territories each met twice during the year to consider reports on selected cases prepared by probation officers and
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