Mike Williams says the most exciting aspect of his digging uncovered the fact that the high number of offenders who, having got their licenses, went on to get jobs. Photo / File
Mike Williams says the most exciting aspect of his digging uncovered the fact that the high number of offenders who, having got their licenses, went on to get jobs. Photo / File
Two Fridays ago, the Howard League marked the first year of its much-expanded Driving Offenders' programme with a gathering in Northland attended by Minister Shane Jones.
This initiative which was developed in Hawke's Bay in 2014, attracted a Provincial Growth Fund contract in 2018 and has easily hit its first-yeartargets in terms of licenses achieved. There was therefore much to celebrate.
To remind readers of this column, one of the Howard League's major programmes involves assisting offenders who are referred to our local tutors by Probation Officers, to get their drivers licenses.
These people are predominantly young and identify as Maori. With a combination of driving transgressions and other offending, they are on a path that very often leads to a jail sentence.
A piece of research spotted by a Howard League member showed that 65 per cent of the Maori prisoners, who make up over half of our prison population, have a driving offence as an element in their first prison sentence.
In preparation for the meeting, I had a close look at what this Northland programme had achieved in the June to June years and though I knew its targets had been exceeded, I was pleasantly surprised on several fronts.
Although we were established in Northland, with our instructor having operated a League-funded programme in the year before the PGF contract arrived, we'd hit the ground running in the year to June.
For much of that year we'd deployed two instructors and their results were extremely encouraging with 562 licenses achieved at the three levels of learner, restricted and full licenses.
As many of the "clients" achieved more than one level of license, the overall total of offenders handled by the Northland programme was 338.
This was encouraging as it showed that a significant proportion of these young people valued the programme and were coming back for more.
By far the most exciting aspect of what my digging uncovered was the number of offenders who, having got their licenses, went on to get jobs.
Mike Williams
The local contract manager for Corrections matched the successes in the licensing programme with those who'd got jobs with the assistance of the Corrections Offender Recruitment Consultants (known as ORCs).
He managed a match over nine months of the programme and found that 120 had got jobs after getting their driver's license.
This means that over the full 12 months of the programme, its likely that the ORCs managed to get work for around 160 offenders.
Given that another group found work without ORC assistance, it's fair to claim that more than half of the offenders referred to the Howard League programme will have found employment.
This, of courses is exactly what Jones and the government are aiming to achieve through the Provincial Growth Fund.
The entrants into this programme are almost entirely on some kind of benefit or another (mostly the dole).
This success in placing these now ex-offenders into employment, obviously means that people who were formerly a burden on the taxpayer, are now contributing taxpayers themselves.
I should not have been even a little surprised at this outcome in Northland.
Some years ago, I asked the then Corrections Minister, Judith Collins about the relationship between having a drivers' license and getting a job and her researcher was able to find that 85 per cent of the entry level jobs that these young people can realistically aspire to specify at least a restricted license.
Ngamaru (name changed) was one of the Northland successes and his story is instructive.
He left school the minute he was legally permitted to do so and went straight on to the dole - "about $150 per week".
His family, based in a small and remote rural community, was into its third generation of unemployment and got by on benefits, some legal and illegal trading and the bounty of nature – especially the sea.
The lure of dealing in methamphetamine – a plague in Northland - was strong, but I think he was telling me the truth when he said he and his family resisted this temptation.
With no public transport in the Far North, Ngamaru's repeated unlicensed driving drew the attention of the local police and his fines built up into a debt he would have never had the slightest chance of discharging.
His salvation came from a Judge who suggested the Howard League programme.
He flew through his license and our tutor found him work as a hammer hand on a large building site. A fit and willing worker, he was asked to do overtime at the end of his first week.
He'd never seen money like the $800 in his first ever pay packet and the Judge rewarded him by wiping his fines.
Multiply this story a few thousand times and one of New Zealand's most durable problems gets solved.
* Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is CEO of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.
