Prison Administration Reform: What Should the Ministry of Justice Do?

According to the Prison Act, the three main areas of sentence execution are moral instruction, prison labor, and custody. In reality, however, the primary goal of Taiwan's correctional policy is isolation (deprivation of liberty) rather than moral instruction or rehabilitation. Overall, the management performance of correctional facilities appears acceptable on the surface, but judging by the resources and mindset the government is willing to invest, the state's correctional policy roughly aims to turn prisons into mere places for isolating offenders and depriving inmates of their liberty, without expecting them to effectively reform criminals or reduce recidivism. In other words, if Taiwan's correctional policy has always emphasized both custody and moral instruction equally, given current resource allocation and management practices, slogans far outweigh implementation.

The incident in which six inmates at the Kaohsiung Daliao Prison took the warden hostage before committing suicide highlighted major flaws in prison administration. In fact, the Kaohsiung Daliao Prison can be seen as a microcosm of Taiwanese prisons. Its administrative deficiencies include: 1. Insufficient manpower and funding, coupled with a severe overcrowding problem; 2. Excessively low inmate wages for labor, extremely low participation in vocational training, and moral instruction existing merely as decoration; and 3. Inmates being unclear about parole standards and the reasons for rejections. Not only has the Ministry of Justice failed to actively face and improve these issues, but the Executive Yuan is also an accomplice. Aside from failing to urge the Ministry of Justice to actively complete relevant legislative amendments such as the Prison Act, the Executive Yuan has never seriously considered improving the funding and manpower needs of prisons, often trapping itself in a predicament where it claims there is neither money nor personnel to spare. Even the issue of improving and utilizing military prisons following the amendment of the

Code of Court Martial Procedure remains stuck, revolving around the Ministry of Defense's failure to complete the transfer procedures and the Executive Yuan's inability to provide funding in advance.

What is even more serious is that current prisons are fraught with problems. First, the inmate population increases year by year (especially those convicted of public endangerment/driving under the influence, and drug offenses with prison terms of under six months, which reached around 3,000 by the end of 2013). This has caused 45 out of 49 prisons—excluding juvenile prisons—to be severely overcrowded. While the 49 prisons have a capacity of 54,539 people, their actual population stands at 63,185, resulting in an excess of 8,592 inmates. The Ministry of Justice's prison construction, planning, and relocation projects are too slow to meet urgent needs, and even the improvement plans for the Liuchia and Bade military prisons face the dilemma of having neither money nor personnel. Furthermore, prison budgets continue to decline year after year. Personnel budgets account for the major share of expenditures, while budgets related to moral instruction make up less than 1% of the total budget. The situations in open prisons and women's prisons are the most severe.

Second, the current establishment for custodial manpower across correctional facilities under the Ministry of Justice is 4,842 personnel, with an actual custodial workforce of 4,409. The ratio of custodial staff to inmates is 1 to 14, meaning only 7 custodial staff are deployed for every 100 inmates. This is much higher than the ratios in Hong Kong (1:2.4), the United States (1:4.8), Japan (1:4.6), and South Korea (1:3.5). In some prisons, the ratio of custodial staff to inmates even reaches as high as 1:20.

Regarding moral instruction manpower, the shortage is even more acute and severe. In general prisons, each moral instruction officer is responsible for the moral guidance of 352 inmates, and the proportion of inmates who have ever interacted with a moral instruction officer is less than one-half. In terms of moral instruction activities, the most common and widespread approach in prisons is religious instruction. Group-based religious instruction is, to put it bluntly, a form of proselytizing activity—a unilateral act of conveying goodwill that involves very little interactive relationship, falling far short of what psychology defines as symbolic interactive relationships. Efforts are being made to incorporate inmates' feedback by introducing various volunteers to conduct smaller-scale or even individual moral instruction sessions within the limits permitted by custodial manpower, thereby mitigating the adverse effects of an overly regimented imprisonment lifestyle.

Regarding management personnel, high staff turnover in prisons in northern and eastern Taiwan often necessitates the use of contract workers or the continuous training of new recruits, creating management blind spots. On the other hand, because turnover rates are low in central and southern prisons, administrative staff serve in the same facility for too long, forming cliques or subcultures that resist any changes or reforms, which also causes management difficulties.

However, how should these manpower shortages be resolved? When can the Ministry of Justice or the Executive Yuan find countermeasures?

Inmate Labor Wages Are Excessively Low, Vocational Training Participation Is Minimal, and Moral Instruction Is Merely a Decoration

Unlike most advanced countries (except Japan), prison sentences involving deprivation of liberty in Taiwan treat labor (i.e., work) as a compulsory component of sentence execution. Under the premise that this legal system cannot be easily changed, integrating prison labor into the national economy to revitalize prison activities seems to be the only choice. The types of work available to inmates in correctional facilities include: 1. self-managed operations, 2. commissioned processing, and 3. assimilated work.

However, the state of prison labor in Taiwan may be even worse than moral instruction work. Although work instructors are assigned to labor departments, not only are they insufficient in number—with one work instructor having to supervise 60 to 70, or even up to 120 inmates—but the degree of their professional skills is also questionable. As of the end of December 2014, the total average number of inmates participating in work across all correctional facilities was 47,977, operating across 444 workshops. Meanwhile, 13,371 inmates did not participate in work due to factors such as new-admission evaluations, disciplinary actions, isolation, old age, frailty, illness or disability, vocational/artistic training, special sentence or case circumstances rendering them unsuited for work, refusal to work, being students in attached remedial schools, awaiting release, being under strict isolation, proxy custody, undergoing observation and rehabilitation, compulsory treatment, hospitalization, being students at correctional schools, juvenile reformatories, detained juveniles, or other reasons. Because they did not participate in work, they received no labor remuneration. In 2014, revenue from commissioned processing amounted to NT$522,540,444, involving 36,526 workers, accounting for approximately 76.13% of the total working population. In 2014, revenue from self-managed operations amounted to NT$500,975,695, involving 4,395 workers, accounting for approximately 9.16% of the total working population.

Under such circumstances, regarding self-managed operations—aside from a few operations with a long history (such as soy sauce making and tailoring)—most consist of small-scale production efforts hastily conjured up under the slogan of "one prison, one specialty," typically focusing on arts and crafts, food products, or agriculture. Not only do these make up a small proportion, but the skill level required is also low. As for commissioned processing, out of all prisons, only one has a hardware factory set up inside the facility where inmates can earn the basic minimum wage; all other operations involve electrical sockets, paper bags, joss paper, and the like, which are not only monotonous and tedious but also yield very low profit margins. If work is supposed to help people experience life and feel human dignity, then looking at the actual conditions of prison work in Taiwan, one can only describe it as a pure, dehumanizing adversity. According to Article 33 of the Prison Act, after deducting operational expenditures from work revenues, inmates receive only 37.5% of the surplus. Consequently, an inmate earns an average of only NT$200 to NT$1,000 per month from labor. This can hardly be called work and should instead be regarded as punishment. The scale of self-managed operations should be restricted, sales should be outsourced to private enterprises as much as possible, or an official procurement system should be adopted to sell products directly to government units. Finally, the distribution of work earnings should be re-examined; under the premise of self-sufficiency, increasing inmates' income can not only prevent institutionalization effects but also stimulate their motivation to actively engage in work.

Of course, prisons also engage in vocational training unrelated to profit-making. Although this is not directly related to prison labor and leans more toward moral instruction, precisely because it lacks a direct connection to work, it can only target inmates who are about to be released so that their acquired skills do not go to waste immediately after training. However, vocational training resources are also severely insufficient, with fewer than 15% of inmates having participated in vocational training courses. Should the Ministry of Justice combine forces with the Council of Labor Affairs' Bureau of Vocational Training or seek assistance from non-profit organizations to resolve this?

Inmates Are Unclear About Parole Standards and Reasons for Rejection

According to Article 77 of the Criminal Code and Article 81 of the Prison Act, parole cases must be resolved by the Parole Review Committee and submitted to the Ministry of Justice for approval before an inmate can be released on parole. Typically, the Ministry of Justice does not approve applications on the first or second attempts, and high-profile cases are even less likely to be easily approved. This results in a parole rejection rate exceeding 50% for inmates currently serving sentences, and most inmates whose parole is rejected do not know the reasons why. Even if they know the reasons, they are dissatisfied. The majority of both domestic and foreign inmates are deeply unsatisfied with the parole system. Foreign inmates feel even more strongly that parole is harder for them to obtain than for Taiwanese citizens.

Because advancement in prison treatment levels relies on the accumulation of points, the system is named the progressive treatment system, with the final stage of progressive treatment being parole, supplemented by a certain degree of supervision and offender rehabilitation. From this, it is clear that the parole system was originally conceived as a grace bestowed by the state authorities to control prison stability. Although whether parole is granted still depends partly on the inmate's own efforts, they have no legal right to apply for it, and the approving authority remains the administrative branch holding absolute power over sentence execution.

The good-time system is inherently a mechanism whereby sentences are automatically shortened provided no rule violations occur; upon reaching the expiration date, the inmate is released upon completion of the term, which has no direct connection to the parole system. However, parole is also a system for controlling prison stability through the manipulation of freedom versus the deprivation of freedom, and in essence, it does not conflict much with the good-time system. Thus, the combination of these two has given rise to the latest execution system, the so-called stage system. The stage system means that as long as inmates obey prison rules, they can progressively gain opportunities to contact free society. In other words, correctional facilities are divided into various types, such as total deprivation of liberty, semi-open, and open facilities. As long as inmates follow the rules, they can not only shorten their sentences but also transfer through prison relocation to facilities that allow greater contact with free society. As the degree of deprivation of liberty is reduced, execution authorities appropriately arrange for inmates to receive the treatment necessary for reintegrating into society based on the level of freedom they have attained. The final stage of this stage system is societal reintegration under certain conditions, where inmates may, when necessary, be housed in rehabilitation facilities with access controls or other special treatments that restrict freedom. This is undoubtedly a deformed version of parole—a statutory parole system—which is already adopted by advanced countries. Has the Ministry of Justice ever considered this?

Therefore, current prison reform and management issues are urgent. One must ask: how many more prisons need to experience incidents before the Ministry of Justice and the Executive Yuan are willing to reflect profoundly and face the situation with courage?