The prison at Corradino has historically been something of a black hole. It has tended to suck inmates into a downward spiral of stigma, lack of hope and relapse. Very little useful information gets out, such as on substance misuse or rehabilitation success rates. The latter is essential in gauging whether prison is fulfilling its restorative function, an issue that has been the subject of intense debate from time to time over the years.

There really need not be any debate over whether there should emerge, out of Corradino Correctional Facility, former inmates who are less likely to commit another crime.

In 2012, the Restorative Justice Act finally came into force, introducing provisions such as victim support and parole. And, before it was elected, the Labour Party pledged it would implement measures to help prison inmates undergo “serious reform”.

There have been some promising developments. A wider range of “learning opportunities”, both formal and informal, are now being offered to inmates and a third of prisoners took part last year, as Home Affairs Minister Carmelo Abela recently noted with a sense of optimism. Small classes are also being held in literacy and numeracy and a handful of inmates are even following courses offered in collaboration with the University, Mcast or the Institute for Tourism Studies.

Progress appears to be far slower, however, in the area of sentence planning. This is linked to opportunities for parole as laid down in the statute book and is a crucial instrument in any attempt to lever inmates into a position to avoid a return to prison after serving time.

Sentence plans are aimed at fulfilling each inmate’s individual needs for rehabilitation and helping them navigate safely around their particular risks without ending up on the rocks again. Such risks range from the pull of drugs, lack of job skills and bad money management to family problems and a hostile society.

Both the organisation Mid-Dlam għad-Dawl, which helps former inmates and their families, and prison chaplain Fr Franco Fenech have highlighted the fact that not all inmates are being provided with their own customised care plans, which affects their chances of parole with all the opportunities this provides.

The problem seems to lie in the lack of professional staff, such as psychologists, social workers and care-plan coordinators, recruitment of which, according to the Home Affairs Ministry, is still underway. It is not known whether there are difficulties in finding enough qualified people to fill the vacant posts or whether the process has been bogged down by some other factor.

Whatever the cause, it would be a great shame if attempts to turn the prison from a place purely of punishment into a true correctional facility should flounder again, as has happened in the past. With a relapse rate that by some estimates runs into well over half the inmate population, society needs prison to be rehabilitative as badly as inmates do.

The prison needs to be viewed as a half-way house, a necessary process on the way to something better, a winter that will turn to spring. Inmates need support to manage their stay in preparation for life on the outside, for a life away from crime as peaceful, productive members of society.

That is the ideal. But there is no doubt it is something that can be achieved by more prisoners if they had the benefits of sentence planning conducted by professionals. This is an urgent matter that should not be unnecessarily delayed.