40. Probation officers still carry an abnormally heavy individual load of work. This is evident from the fact that while seven years ago ten officers supervised two hundred probationers, at the end of the present year the twenty-one mentioned in the last paragraph were supervising one thousand four hundred and eighty-seven. It remains a matter for some pride that the technical 'success' rate, that is to say the number of those who completed their periods of probation without perpetrating any further offence, is now seventy per cent, compared with about two out of three in the early 1960s. Most of the thirty per cent of 'failures' were sentenced after their fresh crimes to a training centre or to prison. It should not be forgotten that probation officers deal with women and girls and grown-up men, as well as the so-called 'juvenile delinquents', and that the offences of these latter include manslaughter, wounding, pocket-picking and the like. The turnover of staff makes it none the easier for the service to deal with its work: it is some months before a new officer can add sufficient practical experience to his theoretical knowledge to be able to take up a small caseload. During the present year two experienced probation officers resigned and another was granted two years' study leave without pay. Fortunately they have been replaced.
41. The Probation Committees for Hong Kong Island and for Kowloon and the New Territories each met four times during the year to consider reports on 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 1956.
CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTIONS
42. 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 proba- tion home under one roof and administration) designed to accommodate a hundred and sixty boys at Yau Yat Chuen; and the similarly multi- purpose Ma Tau Wai Girls' Home. Although there may be many fewer girls than boys whom the courts judge to be in need of residential training such girls often need a great deal of individual attention; the latter Home now provides a positive half-way alternative to the extremes of either a bare probation order, which may be ineffective if there are no conditions of residence and training attached, or the comparative rigours of im- prisonment. Working drawings have been completed for the probation hostel which is to be built at Kwun Tong, principally for young offenders aged between 16 and 21, and should be completed in the next financial
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