Progressive Treatment Point-Deduction Case
Wu O-lin is an inmate. Because the summer heat was unbearable, he did not wear his prison uniform as required (wearing only an undershirt), and was therefore sent to a violation cell for evaluation. He later discovered that beyond the violation-cell punishment, his progressive treatment scores had also been affected. He therefore filed a grievance with the Judicial Reform Foundation over the improper deduction of his progressive treatment scores.
Progressive treatment scores affect every aspect of an inmate's life in prison — correspondence and visits, the types of items one may possess, and more are all determined by these scores. Whether the progressive treatment system should be abolished, or its current practices adjusted, has been debated in practice and academia for many years. In November of last year, the JRF also held the "Symposium on Reforming the Progressive Treatment and Minimum-Security Prison Systems," inviting stakeholders to exchange views.
The Control Yuan's recent investigation report 109-Si-Diao-0028 likewise pointed out: "Article 21, Subparagraph 1 of the Enforcement Rules of the Statute of Progressive Execution of Penalty, without clear authorization from the parent act, imposes procedural restrictions on matters involving personal liberty, resulting in prisons under the Agency of Corrections separately setting score ceilings that clearly diverge from those expressly provided in the parent act — this is hard to reconcile with the principle of legal reservation. Furthermore, the current practice of each individual prison setting its own directions for implementing progressive treatment scoring means that inmates are passively subjected to scoring standards of varying strictness depending on which prison they are assigned to, which can hardly be called fair." It is evident that the current score-deduction mechanism of progressive treatment in Taiwan has completely departed from the framework and spirit of the parent act, and such a mechanism cannot fulfill the corrective function it was meant to serve.
After more than four years of litigation, the Taichung High Administrative Court, in judgment 112-Jian-Shang-Zi No. 2, held that "'scoring' is a core element of the progressive treatment system and must strive for fairness in evaluation — especially where the calculation of scores bears on an inmate's advancement in grade, differences in treatment across grades, sentence reduction, and parole, particular care must be taken to ensure that 'inmates are not treated differently merely because of the circumstances of the prison they are in,' which would create unreasonable differential treatment among inmates nationwide," and that "since scoring is a core element of the progressive treatment system, the relevant scoring mechanism should be established by the Agency of Corrections of the Ministry of Justice, which should issue scoring discretion guidelines to its correctional institutions in consideration of their particular needs, rather than each correctional institution setting its own rules or discretionary standards and acting as it pleases." The court ruled that the "Changhua Prison Score Directions," an administrative rule set by Changhua Prison itself, contravened Articles 1 and 2 of the Organization Act of the Agency of Corrections, lacked any basis of authorization, and violated the principle of legal reservation, and it revoked the improper score-deduction dispositions imposed on Wu O-lin.
The new Prison Act came into force in July 2020. Under the broad direction of bringing prison governance under the rule of law, thirty-two authorized regulations, including the enforcement rules, have been enacted one after another. The JRF will continue to study systemic reforms related to progressive treatment.
Progress
- 2019-11-09 Held the "Symposium on Reforming the Progressive Treatment and Minimum-Security Prison Systems"
- 2020-11-13 Changhua District Court administrative litigation judgment 109-Jian-Zi No. 4: the grievance decision and the management measures deducting the plaintiff's scores and assigning low scores were all revoked.
- 2021-04-15 Taichung High Administrative Court judgment 110-Jian-Shang-Zi No. 1: the original judgment was reversed.
- 2023-04-27 Changhua District Court judgment 110-Jian-Jian-Geng-Yi-Zi No. 1: the score-deduction portion was revoked — Chiayi Prison was the agency that made the disposition, the plaintiff's addition of Chiayi Prison was lawful, the grievance was lawfully filed, and the score-deduction disposition exceeded the full scope of the Statute of Progressive Execution of Penalty; the score-assignment portion and the remainder were dismissed — the "Changhua Prison Score Directions" were rules on detailed and technical matters needed by Changhua Prison to implement the Statute and did not exceed the scope of statutory authorization.
- 2023-11-27 Taichung High Administrative Court judgment 112-Jian-Shang-Zi No. 2: the management measures assigning appellant Wu Jung-lin's education and conduct scores starting from 0.1 points for September 2019 through February 2020 and assigning 0.2 points for both his education and conduct scores for March 2020, together with the grievance review resolutions and grievance decisions concerning those two measures, were all revoked.