Annual Report 2007/08

Download the full Annual Report 2007/08 (PDF 4.7MB)

Chief Executive's overview

This year’s Annual Report describes what we did in 2007/08 to improve public safety by ensuring sentence compliance and reducing re-offending, through capable staff and effective partnerships.

Through improving public safety, we reduce the number of people who are victims of crime in the community.

During the year, we developed our next Strategic Business Plan. This plan reaffirmed our commitment to improving public safety, through our priority outcomes of ensuring sentence compliance and reducing re-offending. It also identified that to succeed overall, it is critical for us to succeed for Mäori offenders. Over the next five years, we will work to ensure what we do, and how we work, delivers on our vision.

I am always proud of the commitment that our staff and our partners in the community demonstrate in their work with offenders. Our work helping offenders turn their lives around plays an important part in improving public safety, both today and into the future. Our role in improving public safety is immensely satisfying.

Given the challenges of our work, we have sometimes made mistakes. It is important to learn from these mistakes. The lessons we have learned have resulted in changes which will minimise the chances of them reoccurring.

Over 2007/08 we improved the way we transport and escort prisoners. This included the introduction of waist restraints, the development of better vehicle standards, and important process changes that will make the transportation and escort of prisoners safer.

We also strengthened the way we work with our justice sector partners to share information on offenders in the interests of public safety.

This year has seen us achieve in a wide range of areas.

We managed the most significant change to communitybased sentences and orders ever seen in New Zealand. These changes resulted in an increase in the number of community-based offenders we manage, over a more complex and wider range of sentences and orders.

We offered more places on rehabilitation programmes, and expanded the rehabilitation programmes we offer to community-based offenders and prisoners. These programmes help offenders to ‘face up’ to their offending behaviours and learn new skills to lead offence-free lives in the future.

We increased the proportion of prisoners involved in employment-related activity. Over half of all prisoners were involved in employment-related activity as at 30 June 2008, up from 43 per cent in 2007 and 38 per cent in 2006. This is providing more prisoners with skills that will increase their chances of finding employment on release – a key determinant of whether they re-offend or not. We not only increased the numbers involved in employmentrelated activity, but we also worked to increase employment opportunities for Mäori and young prisoners.

A target of an average of 160 prisoners on Release to Work was achieved at the end of November 2007 and was maintained for the remainder of the year. Up to 185 prisoners at any one time were participating in Release to Work.

We have introduced new ways of preventing crimes being committed or organised from within prisons. We are introducing cell phone detection and jamming equipment across all prisons. We implemented telephone monitoring of prisoners’ calls and improved our capability to collect intelligence within prisons on criminal activity.

Drug use in prison continued to decrease in 2007/08 with only 13 per cent of all general random drug tests returning a positive result, significantly down from 34 per cent in 1997/98. This was due to our efforts fighting the importation of contraband into prisons and the expansion of programmes offered to offenders to address drug addiction.

These are just some of the achievements that are outlined in this report. Overall, we made good progress in 2007/08, strengthening the contribution we make to ensuring sentence compliance and reducing re-offending.

We are succeeding in our vision of improving public safety for New Zealand.

Barry Matthews
Chief Executive