Corrections chief agrees with Elias on probation

Barry Matthews. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Corrections Department chief Barry Matthews agrees with the Chief Justice that greater community involvement would help the under-staffed probation service as it struggles to cope with a rising number of convicts.

Mr Matthews said yesterday that Community Probation & Psychological Services was under increased pressure following a rise in demand for its services in the past few years.

He welcomed Dame Sian Elias's call, in a speech she accepted would be controversial, for increased funding and resourcing.

The Chief Justice's impression of the service was of one "overwhelmed by its case-load, under-resourced to do the job and insufficiently supported and appreciated in the hard work it does by the public".

Dame Sian called for greater community involvement.

Mr Matthews concurred and said staff were working hard to make that happen.

"For example, we have an active programme of community speaking engagements," he said.

The service already worked with a number of volunteer organisations who assisted prisoners both inside and outside jail, he said.

"However, there is always room for more people to be involved in helping, advising, assisting and befriending offenders and their families."

In her speech, Dame Sian pointed to a report by the Auditor-General that criticised management of prisoners on parole.

It said that an increase in offenders on community-based sentences had exacerbated an existing staffing crisis.

Mr Matthews said that was addressed with additional funding in the Government's 2009 Budget and "temporary measures" were in place to cope with demand.

Dame Sian said that while policing and risk assessment should be left to the professionals, advising, assisting and befriending inmates could be reinstated as a community responsibility.

"Such greater community responsibility," she said, "fits within the wider theme that we are all directly implicated in the offending we rightly recoil from."