RR25 Reducing Re-offending - Year Two
Our Vision
Creating lasting change by breaking the cycle of re-offending.
Our Goal
To reduce re-offending by 25% by 2017.
Public safety is our bottom line.
20 Years of Creating Lasting Change
In 1995 the Department of Corrections started out with a goal to reduce re-offending. Twenty years on, this goal remains at our core.
Five years ago we launched our first strategic plan based on one team working together with a shared goal. We called it Creating Lasting Change, and these words resonate just as strongly today. We have created lasting changes in both the way we work and with the people in our care.
More and more people complete their sentence and remain crime free. The far-reaching impact of this on society cannot be underestimated. Nor should the part you play in this. We are not just creating lasting change in one life, but in the lives of family members and potential victims too.
Our journey over the last two decades has not been easy. The people in our services pose a risk to public safety and it takes constant vigilance to balance that risk against their rehabilitation needs.
Achieving great goals is never a simple task; we will always have to be prepared to learn from mistakes, listen to feedback and take actions that keep us on track. The many changes we put in place in 2015 give us a strong platform for a challenging 2016.
Community Support
We share a vital connection with our local communities. All of us want to both protect the public and help offenders remain crime free. To achieve this, for each offender we must weigh up their rehabilitation needs against the risk they pose.
What you will help achieve:
Department of Conservation and Corrections partnerships
We will work with the Department of Conservation to deliver Community Work projects. This includes local site and track maintenance, weed control and prison-based plant nursery and seed supplies.
Work and Income employment services for offenders
The point of release is when ex-prisoners are most vulnerable, and large numbers of community-sentenced offenders are also without work. Work and Income staff will partner with their Corrections’ colleagues in prison and probation to substantially lift offenders’ participation in employment.
Employer partnerships that open up job opportunities
We will partner with employers and industry to ensure more offenders get a fair go. The search for a job will begin before people are released. Our training and pre-employment effort will look to match what employers need and will support offenders into education, training and employment.
RR25% Boost
RR25% Boost is a key initiative to lift participation rates in programmes and interventions that we know can turn an offender away from crime. Focus areas are:
- Road safety – the expansion of driver education and driver licensing programmes; more brief drink driving programmes and a subsidy for driver alcohol interlocks.
- Domestic violence – increased access to our new family violence prevention programme in the community and in prison.
- Alcohol and Drug – introduction of the brief alcohol and drug programme into activities undertaken by thousands of participants on community work sentences.
- Probation follow up – outbound calling to offenders who have completed their sentence offering further support and encouragement to stay crime free.
- Out of Gate – increasing the number of offenders who undertake a rehabilitative programme before receiving the Out of Gate service.
- Work and Living Skills – using our Work and Living Skills programme to provide multiple opportunities for offenders and create a clearer pathway onto programmes.
Electronic Monitoring gains
We will keep developing Community Corrections’ monitoring capability through the use of the most modern technology and by introducing new initiatives like our GPS Immediate Response Team (GIRT) to maximise public safety.
Working Prisons
You have a job. You get up and come to work each day. You have responsibilities and challenges that go with that job. Working prisons give people in prison a taste of what it is like to have a job and a reason to get up each day. All prisons are working towards 100% engagement by 2017.
What you will help achieve:
Industry, Treatment and Learning (ITL) Action Plans
Each prison’s Industry, Treatment and Learning (ITL) Action Plans will outline how they will manage their transition to working prisons and meet the challenge of improving participation, sequencing programmes and aligning the support available to each offender.
Enhanced pre-release efforts
An investment in case management capability will lift the planning, participation and safety levels of our temporary release reintegration programme. Case managers will play an active role alongside sponsors and probation officers in supporting and overseeing day release activities approved by our new multi- disciplinary decision-making panels.
RR25% Boost for short serving prisoners
We will lift participation rates for prisoners on remand or serving short sentences through early access to drug and alcohol treatment and brief interventions that support rehabilitation, like our short rehabilitative, family violence prevention and short motivational programmes.
Site Emergency Response [SERT] Teams
As well as the SERT teams at Spring Hill Corrections Facility, there will be three further teams at Rimutaka, Auckland and Christchurch Men’s Prisons. SERT teams will receive specialist training and the tactical operations group will ensure a nationally consistent approach.
Prisoner kiosks
Self service prisoner kiosks will roll out in 2016, lifting access to information and increasing independence. The kiosks use biometrics to access services such as ordering canteen items, checking account balances and requesting appointments.
Modern Infrastructure
Modernising our service is an important foundation if we are to achieve our RR25% go We will continue our substantial investment programme in technologies and building design that generate better safety and rehabilitative outcomes.
What you will help achieve:
New look offender management system (IOMS)
IOMS is being transformed into a faster, more usable tool. A single portal will give a broader picture of an offender’s journey through Corrections. Frontline staff will be involved in testing the new IOMS before it goes live in 2016.
Auckland Prison
The new maximum security facility at Auckland Prison has been designed and is being built and maintained as a public private partnership. It will continue to be operated by Corrections staff. The new facility will provide a secure environment that enhances rehabilitation. It will be ready to open in early 2018, marking the 50th anniversary of the opening of the current Auckland East site.
Prison redevelopment
Corrections is investing $105 million to enhance security and safety at Waikeria, Tongariro/Rangipo, Whanganui, Rolleston and Invercargill Prisons (to be completed in 2017). Significant security enhancements will be carried out at six other custodial facilities. We will also identify short and longer range options to optimise prison capacity over the next five years in response to a rising prisoner population.
Public Protection Orders facility in Christchurch
Public Protection Orders (PPOs) are a new form of detention for those prisoners who must be released from prison but remain at risk of imminent and serious sexual or violent offending. Offenders under PPOs will be housed at a new secure residence on the grounds of Christchurch Men’s Prison. They will live in individual, self care units and cannot leave the residence unescorted. The PPO residence will be constructed in 2016.
Corrections apps on smartphones
Around 3,000 staff have smartphones for work purposes. The phones have a staff safety app that sends alerts if you are in trouble. The new smartphones allow access to work emails, calendar, and the internet.
The Offender Contacts application will allow frontline staff to securely access offender information when they are out of the office and text the offender directly from the application. Full deployment will follow rigorous privacy and security testing.
13 upgraded Community Corrections sites
13 more Community Corrections sites will be upgraded or built in 2016 as part of a five year $80 million upgrade to more than half of our Community Corrections sites. The new look sites reflect the demands of a modern corrections system, balancing the need for a safe environment with positive meeting spaces.
Visible Leadership
Visible leadership isn’t just about walking the floors, it’s about fronting up when things go wrong, it’s about having the courage to challenge the status quo and the skills to motivate others. Above all, it’s about integrity and leading by example.
What you will help achieve:
Health and safety
Health and safety isn’t just about investment in protective equipment, buildings, technology and better processes. It is also about attitude, so this year we will be working on cementing in a culture of safety leadership with every employee.
Reducing re-offending by Maori
Almost half of all offenders are Maori. Reducing re-offending by Maori will take time, innovation and input from across the sector and within local communities. Iwi representatives will form a Maori Advisory Board to provide advice to the Executive Leadership Team and we will work with others to help turn these rates around.
Capability building in the Pacific
We will train corrections officers in Samoa and provide support to develop HR processes, policies and prison health plans. Probation and parole advice will also be provided. We will continue to assist Vanuatu with the development and implementation of their corrections’ policies and procedures.
Leading perpetrator services on family violence
Corrections is part of a whole of government initiative to address the problem of family violence. We will lead the area of perpetrator services, which will ensure offenders have access to new family violence programmes that are co-ordinated across justice and social sector agencies.
Financial stability
While there are many investments to be made, we will need to make efficiency gains and savings to offset rising cost pressures. Our expenditure review programme will continue to focus on achieving financial sustainability through 2016.
Development of our National Learning Centre
The new National Learning Centre at Rimutaka will provide a modernised residential learning environment for frontline staff and a simulated prison environment for specialist training such as advanced control and restraint, prison negotiation teams, emergency operations centres and detector dog training.
Integrity
People judge us on how we act and behave, and when you work at Corrections you exercise significant power over offenders’ lives. Doing the right thing every time will be a focus of our nationwide training effort aimed at lifting integrity in our workplace.
A safer system
Each year that passes presents new challenges that our Corrections system must respond to as we seek to lift our efforts in keeping New Zealanders safe.
Every time you identify a risk, every time you teach someone a new skill, every time you treat someone with respect and act with integrity, you make a difference that can change a life.
We all contribute our particular skills toward a safer system and, ultimately, a safer place to live.
This year the Government will introduce legislative change to ensure we have a fit for purpose regime to manage offenders deported from foreign countries. Alongside that, consideration will be given to new laws that go further in preventing international travel by offenders serving a sentence.
Currently the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Register) Bill, Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill and the Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill are all before parliament. The completion of this legislative programme will significantly strengthen our options for the management of offenders.