Visible leadership

 
We will work with Government agencies and community organisations to make significant headway in reducing re-offending. We will clearly outline our goals, take time to understand their work, and collaborate with them to find new and better ways to do things.

To create lasting change we need a professional workforce, focused on Corrections’ outcomes. We will ensure that staff are engaged and supported to reduce re-offending and ensure sentence compliance. We will improve the way we work with offenders, and we will improve the systems and processes that support this work. We will provide a modern and sustainable Corrections, contributing to an effective justice system.

We will share our story about our work to clearly demonstrate our progress towards reducing re-offending and improving public safety.

Supporting and encouraging our people

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

We will improve the public perception of our workplace by proactively engaging the community and sharing our story. 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 promote innovation and collaboration by:

• developing tools and guidelines to support our staff to use their professional judgement to make the right decisions
• developing our leaders’ skills through a leadership plan and emerging leaders’ group
• strengthening regional management by implementing district plans
• ensuring performance measures are appropriate, robust, and comprehensive
• developing safer work practices, training, and equipment.

Strengthening our partnerships to deliver our shared objectives

We must bring together our partners, work with them to set mutual goals, learn from each other’s strengths, share capability, and deliver results. In particular, working closely with our justice sector partners is critical in enabling us to create lasting change.

We will take the lead in strengthening key partnerships by:

• supporting Child, Youth and Family in preventing young people who are likely to offend from becoming adult offenders through the development of a Youth Strategy
• working alongside Work and Income to help recently released prisoners to find work
• supporting offenders to turn their lives around through our work with community organisations and local providers
• engaging with iwi and Maori to improve outcomes for Maori offenders, particularly in smaller communities, supported through our Maori Focus Units
• supporting an integrated justice sector, developing initiatives to reduce re-offending, and supporting legislative changes
• working closely with New Zealand Police to safely manage high-risk offenders in the
  community through the Joining Forces programme.