The United States delegation visited several juvenile and adult prisons in six major cities in China and found that China's recidivism rate is 4.7 percent and that prisons are not crowded. Prison escapes are rare. The Chinese interpret rehabilitation as reform, which includes education, labor, and ideological instruction. The goal of prisoner reform is self-improvement, and a rigorous post-prison follow-up program exists to ensure that the prisoner's self-improvement is permanent. The article includes a partial transcript of a meeting between the United States delegation and officials of the Beijing Municipal Prison as well as a report on China's juvenile correction system. The relative effectiveness of the Chinese and American rehabilitative systems is discussed and the article concludes that China has the most effective correctional system in the modern world. 4 references.