9.1 Overview

This section provides the offender inventory analysis for the 2006 -2007 financial year. The earlier pages give balances, inflow and outflow data for each of the main classes of offenders managed: prison sentenced, remanded in custody, release ordered, community sentenced and recently managed offender pool. The later pages give the overall balance sheet and summary of inflow and outflow transitions followed by analysis of the overall offender pool growth and circulation of offenders.

To enable this form of analysis, each offender’s history has been simplified to a single timeline made up of the major management periods experienced, with enforcement of a one-day/one-status approach. In this system, and in order that analysis of transitions from one status to another can be usefully made, offenders subject to overlapping or concurrent forms of management are counted only once on any given date. As a consequence an individual offender described as transitioning from "Remand" status to "Community Work" status could result from either the remanded person being sentenced to start a new period of community work, or it might be that an individual already on community work was remanded in custody and then reverted to the original community work sentence (identifying the reason for the transition is not part of this report). The offender inventory and consequently the whole Offender Volumes Report therefore describes "episodes" of management, rather than sentences. This means that the numbers in the current report may differ from those reported elsewhere by Corrections.

As noted earlier the offender inventory is analogous to a financial accounting or inventory management report. In financial accounting both cash flow and balance sheets are provided, while inventory management reports both stock on hand and stock turn over. In the current report, offender flows and balances in the various management pools are detailed, such that the opening balance plus inflows less outflows equals the closing balance. In keeping with this inventory approach, offenders’ status at year’s commencement is carried forward from the previous year.

The number of transitions from one management group to another gives an indication of the amount of work relating to the annual throughput. Given the variable amount of work associated with different forms of transition (for example, a new reception into prison vs. a transition from remand status to sentenced status), knowing the volumes associated with the different transitions is useful management information.