China's top prosecutor will launch a three-month-long campaign to fight the evasion of punishment by convicts that should be serving sentences in community correction systems.
Many criminals have been found to be avoiding their community-based punishment and are even committing other offenses while they are meant to be paying for their crimes, said Xiao Wei, spokeswoman of the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP), while announcing the start of the campaign at a press conference Thursday.
Yuan Qiguo, a senior prosecutor with the SPP, said that the ignorance of proper procedures displayed by some local courts, prisons, justice departments as well as local prosecutors has left room for this evasion and recidivism, which has weakened the effectiveness of correctional system and poses a risk to public security.
Criminals are sometimes able to slip through the bureaucratic cracks when they are transferred from courts, prisons or local public security authorities to community justice departments, he said. "Such obliviousness [of proper procedures] will be supervised and rectification will be used urged by procuratorates at all levels."
Under the community correction system, which was formally introduced in 2012, some offenders don't have to stay behind bars during their sentence and instead receive education and assistance from local justice departments and relevant social, civil and volunteer organizations. The kind of education and assistance offered varies from region to region.
Offenders need to report their activities to the justice department and get permission before moving to another region.
According to the Criminal Law, those who are given parole, probation or any sentence outside of jail will be supervised by community-based correction systems.
It is not known how many offenders have managed to avoid serving their community-based sentences and a prime task of the three-month-long inspection is to discover the scale of the problem, Yuan told the Global Times.
Yuan added that the situation in the countryside is worse due to the shortage of personnel and facilities faced by grass-roots justice departments.
In November 2014 more than 730,000 people were serving sentences supervised by community-based correction systems in China, Vice Minister of Justice Zhang Sujun revealed at the time. Zhang added that the total number of people who have served their sentences with community-based systems since 2003 is around 2.1 million.
