In a bid for transparency, Chinese province will post prison inmate information online

Prison inmates in Guangdong, China – the province adjacent to Hong Kong – will each get their own online profiles where their relatives can see how they are doing, how much money they are spending, and their health conditions, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.

A pilot program is already up and running at a prison in Jieyang City since April, which Xinhua says is the first of its kind in the country. The provincial prison administration bureau says it plans to “publish information related to commuting sentences and parole for more than 130,000 prison inmates online by the year end.”

Guangdong province has over two dozen prisons in total.

The upcoming website is being built in an attempt to make prison management more transparent. China’s criminal justice system is notoriously opaque, and has garnered criticism from international human rights advocates. The country launched a campaign to eliminate “unnatural deaths” of prison inmates back in 2009. The UN has reported evidence of widespread and routine ill-treatment of Chinese prisoners in prisons and at labor camps.

See: Flip a coin: half of China’s government websites have security flaws

(Source: Xinhua; top image via Flickr user Neil Conway)