On The Improvement Of Community Correction System

With the progress of global economy and civilization, penalty theory and practice have been evolving through ages.After the second World War, social pattern changed profoundly. Traditional prison sentence revealed its shortcomings and somehow fell out of step with the after-war financial goal and humanitarianism spirit. Governments have been financially and materially exhausted by the ultra-high detention rate, while the overall effect of the reform work has been greatly reduced by the negative impacts between prisoners. People, at some point, realized the ridiculousness in counting on prisons-self-twisted and abnormal mini communities, to rehabilitate people and pull out the perfect resocialization work. People realized that it is important to always bear a sense of mercy and help the lost to find their way home and the stumbled to get back on their feet. Instead of simple punishments, it is forgiveness and correction work that truly heal the social order.Therefore, propelled by the current trend of penalty economization and penalty socialization and its practice that carried out by the supporters, community correction, which in the modern sense is a penal system mainly based on the community and mutual effects between people, became increasingly mature and effective.As a new penalty system, community correction marked its first appearance in China in the late Qing Dynasty. As a century pass by, the depth and width of the system has been unveiled and depicted precisely through the capable hands of all the scholars. However, the practice path, refrained by the unsteady political situations and social environment, did not share the same fate. Various efforts by various people did not jointly and deeply root it in the Chinese legal soil.After new China was founded, owing to the stabilization of economic and politic situation and the enforcement of the criminal policy of combining punishment with leniency, the pilot work of community correction was officially carried out from 2003 to 2011. The pilot work was at first arranged within Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shandong, by the first official file--Notice on community corrections pilot work, which was jointly issued by China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate, China’s Supreme Peoples Court, Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of Justice. Twelve provinces and regions such as Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Anhui, and Hubei, came as the second batch of pilot. As the pilot work has further developed, more provinces and regions got involved, thus making the samples more comprehensive, from the political center, economic center of China to the less developed western provinces in China, the sample provinces and regions have individuality of their own. Some even came out with their own distinctive regional models.The’community correction’was adopted in Criminal Law through the’Criminal Law Amendment (8)’which was approved and implemented in 2011, by the 19th standing committee meeting of The 11th National People’s Congress. It is a milestone of the history of China’s community corrections that the practice of community corrections turned into the text of the law. However, looking back on the pilot work of the community correction, problems exist, especially concerning the establishment of execution organs, the personnel placement and the education and placement for the community correction offenders. The problems are attributed to variable reasons and mainly due to the complex theory and operational issues. It is of great importance to analyze and solve the problems, so as to firmly root and steadily develop the system in China.In the first part of the article, the author mainly illustrates the concept of community correction, the history of the community correction, and the development of community correction in China.In the second part, the author introduces the theoretical basis of community correction, so as to demonstrate the significance of establishing community correction system in China.In the third part, the author revealed the pilot work results and compared two best models in the pilot work, namely’Shanghai model’ and ’Beijing model’, in the field of agencies of community correction, the recruiting and training for community correction staffs, the social awareness of community correction and the correction planning work, in the aim of analyzing and concluding shared problems in the overall practice of community correction.Based on her own knowledge and analytical ability, the author proposes her own suggestions and solutions for those existed theoretical and practical problems, as well as her perspective long-term plan for the whole system to build and develop.