Social_Welfare_Annual_Report_1964-1965 — Page 23

had an immediate influence on the work of the North Kowloon Magistracy; a new full time court in Tsuen Wan, a new magistracy in the Western District of the Island and preparation for a new full time court in Kwun Tong, all had immediate and probably greater long term consequences on the postings, deployment and caseloads of the Probation Service.

37. Probationers themselves lead normal lives, scattered through all the populated areas. 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 unnumbered huts and thread their way through tenements in search of an unlit and airless cubicle. They 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 personal confrontations they draft their reports at their desks, bring their case records up-to-date or appear in Court.

38. The 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 those who have been found guilty; and to supervise those who are placed on probation and so entrusted 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 probation officers increasingly for social inquiries to assist in sentencing, not necessarily with a probation order in prospect, is welcome to the profession. Supervision means both visiting at home and regular interviewing in a probation office. Probation officers 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'. They are regularly reminded that they are officers and servants of the courts as well as members of the Social Welfare Department.

39. The establishment of the Probation Section is thirty-one officers, but the effective strength this year was lower because of the unavoidable demands of training, both in-service and overseas. Twenty-one worked in the Probation Service proper, which was responsible for the super- vision of nearly twenty-five hundred probationers and others during the year. Detailed figures are given in Appendix 8.

15