4
—
"It is in society's interest that we have as much success (in aftercare) as possible, and society can do its part to help," he added.
The Commissioner said finding jobs for offenders about to be discharged is never easy: "I can understand why employers would hesitate to consider 'ex-cons', but I would ask people with job vacancies to keep an open mind."
Mr Lai said any programme was only as good as the result it achieved, and in today's concept of performance by objectives, the hard eye of value for money was often turned on aftercare.
"We find ourselves frequently having to justify expenditure on an area where performance measurement is difficult.
"We are proud of our success rates. Over 67 per cent of young inmates under 21, and 65 per cent of drug addicts complete the one-year supervision under the aftercare programme without relapse into drug-taking or crime; and over 90 per cent do so for detention centres," said the Commissioner.
However, fluctuations in those rates did not necessarily reflect oscillations in the programme performance, Mr Lai pointed out.
"We are only one element in a complex web of personal, social and societal factors, all of which act upon the individual and interact with each other.
"A decline in success rates could, therefore, be ascribed to any one of a number, or indeed, any several, different causes. There is no way of identifying the discrete elements and measuring their effect, because there are no discrete elements," he added.
"One thing which we can say with reasonable certainty is that the present difficulties facing the aftercare programme are not helping matters.
"In 1991, we had a caseload of 5,201, amounting to about 91 cases per team of two aftercare officers. Now we have 6,031 active cases, or almost 109 cases per team.
"Although the officers are putting in many extra hours, inevitably the strain shows. There are only 24 hours a day.
"Like almost all aspects of our work, overcrowding places a burden on the service we provide. In aftercare, which is both labour intensive and numbers intensive, this is even more so," said Mr Lai.