The OVR will be published annually around July and made available on the Department’s public website.
No, at this point we are only expecting to provide electronic material via the internet.
The OVR looks at trends right across the Department including the prison sentenced and community sentenced populations since 1980, remand prisoner population since 1998 and offender timelines. This information gives the Department and other interested parties an indication of critical trends in the offender population, and how successive policies may have influenced these long term trends.
There is a great deal of information summarised in the OVR. Some of the trends include:· The prison population has been steadily growing for most of the last 30 years · Long-term prison sentences (2 years or more) have increased markedly since 1980 with very rapid growth since 2004· The number of remanded prisoners has increased markedly since 1998.· Maori are overrepresented in prison: 3.2% of all Maori males aged 23 were in prison as at 30 June 2007.
The Prison Census was was discontinued in 2003 in response to the logistics of a census-type process, and opportunities to improve the breadth and quality of offender data reported using operationally collected and available data sources. The trends and information in the OVR will be far more useful in showing where Corrections’ efforts are affecting offenders and highlighting areas where further policy development is required.
The OVR only provides analysis around top quality Corrections’ operational data and does not include such trends. The department is exploring with Statistics NZ the development of a new publication based largely on information collected in their national census which, when released, will have the advantage of allowing comparison of such traits with the same questions asked on the same day as the rest of the population.
The OVR is very much a Corrections’ view of the Justice sector and is based on the data available to Corrections. Bail, convictions and fines information are not areas that Corrections manage. Information on these subjects can be found on the Ministry of Justice website.
The OVR is offender centric, this means that the OVR counts an offender only once on a single day but in other reports the offender may be counted multiple times due to being managed under multiple orders and sentences with multiple convictions and offences. The OVR uses a one-day-one-status approach to counting offenders which is not used in other Justice sector reports.
There are a number of reasons for this, including growth in national population, growth in serious crime, and policy changes (For example, the 2002 Parole Act and Sentencing Act). The latter changes to legislation has meant, for example, that the Parole Board has greater discretion to keep offenders in prison. As a result, violent offenders are staying in prison longer. Further, it is apparent that more offenders are being placed in custodial remand than ever before. Corrections is working with the other Justice sector agencies on ways to limit unnecessary growth, but there are no quick fixes to these issues.
As far as the Department is aware, no other national corrections or justice service has ever produced a report such as this one. This is a unique report produced by Corrections.
The most unique aspect is the ability to consider the current annual cohort of offenders in the comparative context of all offenders who have been managed by the Department at one or more times in recent decades. This enables the Department to understand issues such as:· What proportion of all known offenders are currently managed by the Department· Have more or fewer new offenders entered the offender pool this year than in previous years?· Are more or fewer offenders ceasing criminal careers?