ENG-1961 — Page 252

LAW, ORDER AND RECORDS

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There are also two open training centres for boys, one at Stanley and one at Cape Collinson. The staff of the Department includes, besides 16 Gazetted Officers and 847 other ranks, 190 staff com- prising schoolmasters, school welfare officers, trade instructors, clerks and mechanics. There is a Staff Training School at Stanley.

Stanley Prison is the main industrial centre. The standard of instruction is high and every trade party is under a qualified instructor who has passed the standard of the Technical College. Victoria Prison, centrally placed and close to the Courts, is the reception and classification centre. Lai Chi Kok Prison for women is on the mainland in what was once pleasant countryside but is now a busy industrial area. Chi Ma Wan Prison was the testing ground for the practice of sending all short-sentence prisoners to open prisons. It has been completely successful; escapes are few and far between and an immense amount of work has been done on forestry and other projects.

Tai Lam Prison takes convicted prisoners who are drug addicts, regardless of their offence, age or state of health. Often their health on admission is appalling, as the result of some physical disease, such as TB, in addition to drug addiction. The programme of rehabilitation is vigorous and comprehensive and ends with the prisoner going as far as twenty miles to work every day, physically fit and with increased moral resistance to drugs. A team of after-care officers follow up cases to prevent discharged prisoners slipping back into the drug habit.

During the year four bungalows were built by prison labour in the Siu Lam Valley, a small wooded area in the Castle Peak district not far from the Prison, to accommodate cured drug addicts after their release. The bungalows form part of a pilot rehabilitation settlement for cured drug addicts sponsored by the Christian Welfare and Relief Council. The settlement will even- tually accommodate 20 cured persons and their families, who will be given food, clothing and farm tools, as well as pigs and poultry. Particular interest was shown during the year in the drug addicts' rehabilitation programme at Tai Lam. Dr A. G. Hess, an Assistant Director of the United States National Council on Crime and Delinquency, was given a grant by the Ford Foundation specifically to study the methods at Tai Lam, a considerable honour for an institution only three years old. A survey of all