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# CONCLUSION
41. It will be apparent to any person who reads this report with understanding that the penal system of the Colony is still far below the standard required to meet its growing needs. The establishment of an efficient prison system must depend largely on the provision of adequate funds to follow the methods which have been successful in England and in many parts of the Empire.
42. From a financial point of view alone, failure to check a steady increase in recidivism must, in the long run, become more expensive than the methods employed to combat it, provided of course that these methods prove successful.
43. To quote from a Report by Mr. Alexander Paterson, M.C., His Majesty's Commissioner of Prisons for England and Wales:
"Each country gets in the end the prison administration for which it is prepared to pay, and that administration is in turn decided by the degree to which the interest of the average citizen in the matter has been aroused.
There is commonly no attempt to think out the purpose served by a prison, and certainly no conscious desire to co-operate with the authorities in the re-habilitation of the prisoner.
Vaguely there is an underlying idea that prison is a place of punishment and a means of deterrence.
It is only the negative side of prison life that is understood.
"The prison officials refuse to stop short at a purely negative conception of a prison, and insist that it has in addition a positive function to perform. Their business, so they say, is to keep a man in prison during his sentence and out of it for the rest of his life. While recognising that a sentence of imprisonment is and always should be a punishment, they maintain that the serving of the sentence should provide, if it is long enough and the prisoner is co-operative, an opportunity to train the habits and character of the offender. This is the positive side of a prison administration. The prison becomes not merely a place of safe custody, which is an inexpensive matter, but a possible place of training."
44. Only in a very few cases and with a wide stretch of the imagination can the Hong Kong Prison at Stanley be considered at present to fulfil its proper function.
15th February, 1939.
J. L. WILLCOCKS,
Commissioner of Prisons.
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