Social_Welfare_Annual_Report_1963-1964 — Page 20

PROBATION

32. The Probation Service is one main branch of the Probation Section, the other being the running of juvenile correctional institutions, approved schools and probation homes. The work of probation officers is not susceptible to spectacular presentation, and it is not very often that modern institutions are built as an outward and visible sign of development; when they are, as in this year, they do not appear so im- pressive as a resettlement block, a bank or a luxury hotel. Probationers themselves lead a normal life, scattered throughout all the populated areas of the Colony. Steady progress cannot be measured in twelve- monthly doses: a quinquennial period might provide a more significant basis for a review. Nevertheless from day to day probation officers appear in court and make their reports, visit prisons, remand and probation institutions, go round resettlement estates, climb hillsides to find un- numbered huts and thread their way through tenements in search of an unlit and airless cubicle. When their work brings them to discuss their charges with employers, voluntary welfare agencies, fellow government officers in other social services, or friends and relatives of the 'clients', the telephone is preferred to the faceless typewriter. In between personal confrontations they contrive to find the time to draft their reports at their desks and to bring their case records up-to-date.

33. Duties of a probation officer are, briefly, to carry out social inquiries for the courts; to make reports which may help judges and magistrates to decide how to deal with persons who have been found guilty; and to supervise those who are placed on probation and so en- trusted to their charge by the courts. Investigations of social background involve one or more long interviews with the offenders at court or at the place of remand, and often mean home visits and calls upon an employer or school teacher. All this is prodigal of time; but the tendency of the Hong Kong courts to-day, to use departmental officers increasingly for social inquiries to assist sentencing generally and not only with a possible probation order in prospect, imposes a welcome burden. Supervision means both visiting at home and regular interviewing in a probation office. Not only this, but probation officers (who have been called 'the social welfare agents of the courts') often have non-criminal cases referred to them, and this tests their knowledge of the welfare agencies which can best provide for the needs that an interview may reveal. In this they replace the old time British 'court missionaries', and are officers and

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