Basic skills reward Wairarapa offenders

Basic skills training more than doubled from 2013 to 2014, while this year's figure surpassed last year's. Photo / File

Offenders in Wairarapa are spending more time learning basic skills as part of their sentences, new figures show.

Wairarapa and Manawatu offenders have completed more than 500,000 community work hours since July 2012, with the total number of hours decreasing each year.

Community work included activities such as painting, gardening, building, graffiti cleaning, restoration, recycling and the maintenance of public land.

The offenders completed a further 8000 hours of "basic work and living skills" training as part of their sentences.

Basic skills training more than doubled from 2013 to 2014, while this year's figure surpassed last year's, three months before the end of the financial year.

If an offender is sentenced to 80 or more hours, the court can authorise up to 20 per cent of the hours be spent learning basic work and living skills.

Corrections national commissioner Jeremy Lightfoot said the skills were intended to return offenders to their community, lead them to live offence-free lives, and help them find and keep jobs.

Wairarapa Prisoners Aid field officer George Groombridge considered community work an effective sentence. "It teaches them useful skills and gives back to the community."

The increased teaching of basic work and living skills was a good thing, he said.

"Anything that can get offenders off the criminal pathway is good, because going back to prison is not the answer.

"A lot of [the offenders] have slipped through the cracks at primary school and secondary school, and they don't make it to varsity.

"When I worked with young [offenders] back in the day, I was surprised how many of them weren't able to read."

Howard League for Penal Reform chief executive Mike Williams believed community work and training were generally effective.

"When you send someone to prison, you detach someone from their family and their community, and they learn really bad things," he said.

"If someone can be yanked back on to the track with a community sentence, the Howard League would definitely support that."

Teaching offenders basic skills was "another step in the right direction", he said.

"A lot of offenders come from tough backgrounds, where they don't have any opportunity to learn those things. If you teach offenders, particularly young offenders, the likes of basic literacy skills, you improve their chance of getting out of that environment."

Mr Williams did not agree with criticisms of community sentences as being "too soft".

"It would be very unusual for offenders of violent and serious crimes to not be sent to prison. For first-time offenders and second-time offenders of the likes of driving offences, it's the way to go."

Nationally, offenders have completed more than seven million community work hours since July 2012.

Offenders completed a further 75,000 hours of basic work and living skills training.