Taiwan’s prisons are overcrowded, with some facilities operating beyond capacity due to a rise in the number of inmates, particularly for fraud-related offenses, Agency of Corrections Director Chou Hui-huang (周輝煌) said yesterday.
Asked at a legislative committee meeting about prison overcrowding, Chou said that fraud has become the leading offense among inmates.
As of Sunday, the nation’s authorized inmate capacity was 60,552, while the number of people imprisoned was 60,945 — an excess of more than 300 inmates. The most overcrowded facility is the Taoyuan Women’s Prison.
Photo: Taipei Times
The number of inmates at the Taoyuan facility has in the past few years consistently exceeded its capacity of 1,027 inmates, reaching 1,499 on Thursday last week, agency data showed.
Chou said the government is implementing prison expansion and reconstruction plans.
Projects at the Bade Minimum-Security Prison in Taoyuan and the Changhua Detention Center in Changhua County are expected to increase capacity to accommodate 3,459 more inmates, he said.
Expansion plans for the Taoyuan Women’s Prison, the Taipei Detention Center and the Taipei Women’s Detention Center are also under way.
The agency is relocating inmates based on early warning indicators of overcrowding to ensure balanced capacity and to reduce custodial burdens, Chou said.
During the legislative committee session, Taiwan People’s Party Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said that while the Agency of Corrections is advocating a “smart prison” initiative, the Bade Minimum-Security Prison project failed preliminary inspections between January and March 2023, with 2,279 problems identified, a report released on June 2 by the National Audit Office showed.
The issues ranged from system connectivity failures to uneven walls and other electrical or architectural defects, Huang said, adding that as of the end of March, 30 remained unresolved.
He asked the agency to report back to the committee within six weeks on improvements being made.
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