Leadership

Leading across the public service and within the community using our unique insights into offending behaviour

We will work with government and community agencies, targeting those that can help us make significant headway in reducing re-offending. Our job is to open up Corrections to our partners, clearly outline our goals, understand theirs and work with them
to find new and better ways of working with offenders.

To create lasting c hange we will ensure we have a professional and engaged workforce focused on Corrections’ outcomes. We will provide a modern and sustainable Department of Corrections, contributing to an effective justice sector.

Our people

We will strengthen our performance culture to create an environment where everyone strives to achieve the highest level of success in their work with offenders. Our performance management systems will focus on identifying, encouraging and rewarding those behaviours that will most contribute to creating lasting change in offenders’ lives.

We will alter the public perception of our workplaces as “dangerous.” This will allow us to attract larger numbers of skilled applicants with more diverse backgrounds, enhancing our ability to select the best qualified individuals to join our Department.

We will continue to develop a culture of innovation and collaboration and build the correct structures to support this by:

• continuing to develop tools and guidelines to support our staff to use their professional judgement to make the right decisions
• developing the skills of our leaders to ensure effective management of change processes that are clear, well understood and well led
• aligning our structure to strengthen regional management and provide more support to frontline staff
• taking new approaches to the recruitment of frontline roles, highlighting integrity and the key skills and behaviours that drive improved outcomes
• building on the work we have done to ensure that our performance framework contains appropriate, robust and comprehensive measures to facilitate effective management.

Partnerships

Strengthening partnerships is essential for Corrections and the wider justice sector to deliver our shared objectives. We must bring toget her our partners, work with them to set mutual goals, learn from each other’s strengths, share capability and deliver results.
In particular, working more closely than ever before with our justice sector partners will be crucial in enabling us to create lasting change.

We will take the lead in strengthening key partnerships by:

• developing relationships with local providers to better harness existing resources that can help turn offenders’ lives around
• supporting a seamless and integrated justice sector, developing initiatives to ensure the sector is sustainable over the long term
• supporting Child, Youth and Family in preventing young people who are likely to offend from becoming adult offenders
• working alongside Work and Income to better support recently released prisoners to find work
• working with large community sector organisations to identify ways they can better support offenders
• proactively engaging with iwi and Maori to identify meaningful solutions for Maori offenders, particularly in smaller communities.