Prison for foreigners to open in July

In a global society, many services are offered to suit the needs of the local foreign population. In Korea, that will soon extend to prisons.

The Justice Ministry will open a prison exclusively for foreigners in consideration of the increasing number of foreign convicts, officials said yesterday.

The prison will be available as early as next month and the Cheonan Juvenile Correctional Service is presently being refurbished to serve that purpose, said officials.

Though some local prisons, such as the Daejeon Correctional Service and the Cheongju Women`s Correctional Service, have so far accommodated foreign inmates, a prison exclusively for foreigners is to be the first of its kind in Korea.

The ministry will allocate a maximum of 400 well-behaved convicts to this new prison, which will be equipped with some 24 professional staff members who are fluent in foreign languages including English, Chinese and Russian, said officials.



Over the 10 years since 1999, the number of foreign criminal convicts has risen more than five-fold - from 350 to 1,800, according to the ministry data.

"Most of these foreign convicts experience conflict with their Korean inmates, due to their cultural and linguistic differences," said a ministry official. "Local prisons, however, lack the space and staff required to manage such groups."

The fact that most members of the prison staff have little or no foreign language ability, is also a major obstacle in the management of foreign convicts, said the official.

"The exclusive prison system will especially be of help to speakers of minority languages who find it difficult to assert their rights in Korean or in English," said a ministry official. "It will also promote an effective management over the local correctional services."

A foreigners` prison system has few precedents, not only in Korea but around the world, explained the official.

(tellme@heraldm.com)



By Bae Hyun-jung