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. More recently, the court has been making use of the probation service for purely social welfare inquiries-mostly into cases which have been discharged and which perhaps could be better handled by referrals to other sections of the Department and appropriate voluntary agencies. 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.
52. The number of posts provided for probation work (as distinct from work in correctional institutions) was 45 at the end of the year, but the unit was below establishment due to resignations (of which there were regrettably a significant number during the year), difficulty in recruitment, and the requirements of in-service and overseas training. The number of officers actually available and gazetted averaged 35 and those officers were responsible for the supervision of an active caseload of 1,677 probationers and others during the period. Detailed figures are given in Appendix 7. Those figures represent a heavy individual caseload. The technical 'success' rate, that is to say the number of those who completed their periods of probation without further offence, is now 68.9 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.
53. 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 to advise on matters referred to them by the Principal Probation Officer under rule 14 of the Probation of Offenders Rules, Cap. 298.
CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTIONS
54. The juvenile correctional institutions consist of a reformatory school (run on the lines of an approved school in Britain) at Castle Peak in the New Territories; a combined institution (remand home and probation home) at Yau Yat Chuen, Kowloon; the similarly multi- purpose Ma Tau Wai Girls' Home; and a hostel for the boys and young
20