The 2016 Tea Party of the Agency of Corrections, Ministry of Justice with Legal Journalists 2016/9/8

• Publication Date ： 2016-09-08
• Last updated：2019-03-20
• View count：1540

The Agency of Corrections, Ministry of Justice held a tea party with journalists on the afternoon of July 20 in the Reading Room on the second floor of the Ministry of Justice. Minister Tai-San Chiu, Vice Minister Ming-Tang Chen, Permanent Secretary Dou-Hui Chang and Chief Secretary Liang-Bo Shi were present to give their support. Minister Chiu and Agency Director Wu expressed appreciation to attending journalists for their enthusiastic participation, and urged the community to provide support and encouragement to workers and inmates of correctional institutions.

Minister Chiu stressed in his speech that "human rights" is an important factor in determining a country’s level of advancement. The world in recent years has paid more attention to prisoners’ rights, and improving human rights compliance could help promote our country’s positive image and strengthen the judicial communication and cooperation with allies. To solve the problem of prison overcrowding, the Agency of Corrections is actively carrying out various expansion and reconstruction projects. However, it could only solve a basic problem. After the new government took office, it has made plans to increase the number of beds to achieve the goal of "one bed, one person" in correctional facilities in the future, thus improving the inmates’ quality of life and reducing the risk of accidents. Furthermore, to enhance skill training and job matching, correctional institutions offer different traditional handicraft training and self-employed product training to help inmates to reenter the society successfully and assume correctional as well as educational functions.

Various food and snacks prepared by inmates under the skills training program in correctional facilities were presented to journalists during the tea party. The Agency also introduced its important policies and activities such as "plan for improvement of inmate living quality (additional beds)", "island-wide tour of the Inspiration Percussion Group from Changhua prison" and the "2016 annual national correctional institution inmates (prisoners) joint exhibition (sale) of calligraphies, paintings and handicrafts" in the second half of the year. Journalists were asked to help in the promotion in order to increase the publicity of correctional institution policies. The Agency welcomes the support and suggestions of the community with regard to prison policies and reform.