Mission

The Primary and Junior High School Act specified that citizens between 6 and 15 years of age (hereafter referred to as “school-age citizens”) shall receive primary and junior high school education. Citizens older than school age who have not received primary and junior high school education shall receive supplementary education. However, juveniles who have committed a crime and served their time have lost their chance to receive formal education. The Ministry of Justice aims to carry through the correctional education and gives juvenile offenders a chance to continue with their studies. According to the Private School Law and Supplementary Education Act, Hsinchu Juvenile Prison (restructured as Hsinchu Prison, Agency of Corrections, and Ministry of Justice on January 1, 2011), Taoyuan Reform School, Changhua Reform School and Kaohsiung Reform School established subsidiary schools in 1973 and 1978. The implementation was ineffective due to objective environment, legal basis, budget and the number of teachers available. The Executive Yuan ordered that the juvenile prison and reform school shall be schooled and sufficient number of teachers and equipment shall be available. In 1990, the Ministry of Education separated the subsidiary schools founded by the juvenile prisons and reform schools from these prison and schools and combined these subsidiary schools with the junior high and elementary schools and senior continuation schools. These subsidiary schools have officially become regular subsidiary schools of regular schools.
 
Some problems have occurred since the implementation of subsidiary school. Mostly the formal, supply and substitute teachers of the junior high and elementary schools and senior continuation schools mentioned above are in charge of the operation of subsidiary schools. The teaching performance is impacted, the operation supervision is inconsistent, and salary and welfare issues cannot be resolved thoroughly. All these problems are caused by a lack of full-time teachers. After further research, the Ministry of Justice decided to restructure the juvenile prisons and reform schools into regular schools. After the third reading of the Act of the Establishment of Juvenile Reformatory Schools and Enforcement of Education (hereinafter referred to as the Act of the Establishment) by the Legislative Council on May 6, 1997, the legal basis for reformatory has been established. After the Act of Establishment was announced and put into practice, the Ministry of Justice must restructure the current reform schools and juvenile prisons in six years by stages. Ming Yang High School and Chengjheng High School, the first two reformatories in Taiwan, were founded on July 1, 1999.
Ming Yang High School accepted the juvenile inmates of Hsinchu Juvenile Prison. Chengjheng High School accepted the people subjected to educational discipline from Kaohsiung Reform School.