Our new financial year began on 1 July, and as well as a new budget round, this means our new Statement of Intent is available.
The Statement of Intent sets out Corrections’ role in achieving the wider Justice Sector outcome of a safe and just society. Our main concerns are protecting the public and reducing re-offending, and the Minister of Corrections, Hon Damien O’Connor, outlines his priorities for how we are to address these concerns in his Foreword to the Statement.
The Statement describes what we aim to achieve over the next three years, the challenges we face and the capability we have to do our work. It also explains how much our work costs, and how we will measure our performance to ensure we’re doing our job well.
We expect to take responsibility for growing numbers of offenders and new community-based sentences, such as home detention as a stand-alone sentence. To meet these responsibilities we will continue to recruit new staff and expand where necessary.
The Statement is available on our website – I encourage you to read it to gain a greater understanding of our plans for the future.
The new financial year has also coincided with the implementation of the changes to our structure recommended by the head office review and as a result many staff are now reporting to different general managers or now belong to groups and services with different names and emphases.
Staff participation in the review process has been thoughtful and useful and I am proud of the commitment shown by staff who clearly care deeply about the work of Corrections. I thank you for your patience as we settle into our new structure and I am confident that we have an organisational make-up that is ready for the challenges of the future.
Increasingly, we are integrating our services, to ensure offenders get the best support possible to serve their sentence and go on to live a crime-free life. A good example of integration in action is the new Service Centre on Auckland’s North Shore which I visited for the opening on July 4 (see story on page 12). The new centre accommodates around 40 staff from different services and will facilitate communication between groups and mean that offenders sentenced to both community work and supervision need only report to the one place.
We focus on another of our successes in the article on Te Piriti – one of our units for the treatment of child sex offenders (see article on pages 6 and 7). The staff at Te Piriti are doing a wonderful job, especially with respect to the way they have made tikanga Māori an integral part of the treatment programme, and prison psychologists the world over are learning lessons from us in this area.
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ISSN 1178-8453