Strategic overview

In three to five years, we will have reduced both the frequency and severity of re-offending and New Zealand will be a safer place. The Department of Corrections will be a world leader in taking innovative approaches that effectively reduce re-offending.

Offenders will be receiving the right interventions, at the right time, to reduce their risk of re-offending. Stronger community and family/whanau involvement with offenders will better support offenders to turn their lives onto a positive path.

More offenders will leave the Corrections system having overcome their drug and alcohol problems, addressed their offending behaviours, and improved their literacy, numeracy and employment.

Offenders will have benefited from Corrections’ rehabilitation and reintegration programmes, successfully overcoming the problems that led them to commit crime.

Fewer Maori offenders will re-offend. The proportion of offenders who are Maori will become
more consistent with the proportion of the general population who are Maori. Maori success in rehabilitation and education and employment programmes will be comparable with non-Maori offenders and pro-social members of Maori communities will support more Maori offenders.

A higher proportion of community-based offenders will have completed their sentences. We will hold those who do not comply with the conditions of their sentences and orders to account. Escapes, suicides, positive drug tests and contraband finds in prisons will remain at very low levels. The public will have confidence in our ability to manage offenders. Probation staff and Corrections Officers will be more skilled in assisting offenders to turn their lives around.

We will have reduced the influence of gang members in prison and reduced their re-offending after release.

We will have approaches that address the particular offending of those under 25 years old.

We will have more effective partnerships with other agencies and will work together with a strong collaborative spirit. We will have strengthened relationships with stakeholders and will be working with them to achieve mutual benefits for New Zealand.

We will be working more effectively, having introduced innovations identified through doing things differently ourselves, and from lessons learned from the contract-managed Mount Eden Corrections Facility and the public-private partnership to develop a new prison at Wiri in South Auckland.

The following pages describe our plans to achieve these ends.