Ex-Inmate Takes to Hong Kong’s Airwaves, and Prisoners Tune In
Mr. Aitken said a typical drug-trafficking sentence in Hong Kong was 20 years, reduced to 13 years with a guilty plea.
9, 2017
HONG KONG — In the tiled corridors of Stanley Prison, a maximum-security complex on a rocky edge of Hong Kong’s main
island, the chatter among the foreign inmates on Monday mornings tends to revolve around a single question.
As of late July, there were 1,679 foreign inmates in Hong Kong, representing about 20 percent of the city’s
overall prison population, said Laura Chan, a spokeswoman for Hong Kong’s Correctional Services Department.
Then a prison chaplain told Mr. Aitken that the show also had a following inside Hong Kong’s prisons.
Mr. Aitken, 72, said that he regarded "Hour of Love" as both a service for the inmates
and a means of encouraging the authorities to consider granting more early releases for long-term prisoners in general.
After completing unsupervised parole in Hong Kong, Mr. Aitken said, he immersed himself
in the city’s Roman Catholic community as a way of feeding a spiritual hunger.
