7.1 Overview

This section presents analysis on offenders serving community sentences, firstly by showing trends from 1980 to June 2007, and then in the following section, over the course of the 2006/07 12 month period. This area has changed considerably over the past few decades, as several community sentence types have been discontinued and new sentences put in their place. For example, periodic detention and community service were discontinued in 2002, and "community work" was introduced. Further new community sentence types were also introduced from October 1 2007, which will show up in future editions of this report.

It is important to note that many offenders serving sentences of supervision also have a concurrent community work sentence (at the snapshot date of 2007-06-30, this applied to 54% of those on supervision, an increase from the 49% four years earlier). As this report has a one-day/one-status approach to counting offenders, the number of offenders on community work may appear lower than reported elsewhere by Corrections. Graph 7.7 Supervision snapshot trend by combination sentence shows the scale of combined sentence management regimes.