New prison and development projects to ease over-crowding

Overcrowding in prisons remains a serious problem. Overcrowding not only creates difficulties for prison management in maintaining good order and discipline within the institutions, it also creates tension among inmates, making it difficult for prison staff to administer effectively rehabilitation programmes to prepare inmates for reintegration into society.

To meet the growing demand for prison accommodation, there is a need to increase the supply of penal places by building new prisons. The Government is at present actively looking for suitable sites for penal use.

Minor redevelopment and upgrading works had also been carried out in various penal institutions to increase their capacity as far as possible. But because of various constraints, mainly space limitations, it has been neither possible nor cost-effective to carry out large-scale redevelopment works in the existing institutions.

As a whole, the penal capacity has increased by about 1 000 penal places in the last five years.

Long-term Prison Development Plan at Hei Ling Chau

To address the current problems of archaic facilities and inadequate penal places, and to meet the forecast growth in penal population, we need to develop a long-term prison development plan. This is one of the initiatives in the Security Bureau's Policy Objectives of the Chief Executive's 2000 Policy Address. Our Department has proposed to build a prison complex at Hei Ling Chau with a capacity of 7220 penal places. Under the proposal, all penal institutions on Hong Kong Island and in Kowloon, as well as all the remand facilities in the territory, will be re-located to the proposed prison complex. The prison complex will also provide 2600 additional penal places.

Given the scale of the proposed project, the Government has appointed a consultant to conduct a two-stage feasibility study and preliminary site investigation, which is now underway.

The estimated cost for the whole project is about HK$12 billion. The estimated date of completion is in 2013/2014.

Reprovisioning of Victoria Prison (VP) at Lai Chi Kok (LCK) Old Staff Married Quarters Site

The VP is currently located in the Central, Hong Kong Island. It is planned to reprovision the prison at LCK old staff married quarters site in order to release the VP site for tourism development. The reprovisioning facility will provide 650 penal places which has included the reprovisioning of 438 places for VP and an additional 212 places in order to relieve the severe overcrowding problem in female prisons.

The construction of the project has commenced in March 2004. The estimated date of completion is by the end of 2005. The capital cost of the project is about HK$230 million.