Furnished flats plan aims to give ex-prisoners fresh starts

Released prisoners are being placed in one-bedroom Auckland apartments for up to three months under a new scheme to help long-term inmates become productive citizens.

The Prisoners' Aid and Rehabilitation Society is renting the apartments from Housing New Zealand and helps tenants to find work and meet their parole conditions, such as attending drug and alcohol programmes.

The society has furnished the flats but the ex-prisoners pay rent. Three flats have been occupied so far but the Government is paying the society to provide eight units in Auckland this year as a pilot project.

If it works, the scheme will be expanded to 50 apartments nationally, accommodating 200 short-stay prisoners a year at an annual cost of $596,250, or $2981.25 for each offender.

The scheme is one several initiatives to help released prisoners find homes and jobs and to reconnect with their families, rather than reoffending.

At present 86 per cent of released prisoners reoffend within five years.

The general manager of the Public Prisons Service for the past 10 years, Phil McCarthy, has moved to a new position as "general manager, integration" to shift the justice system's focus on to reintegrating offenders into the law-abiding community. The service is appointing 13 local and regional reintegration co-ordinators to work with other agencies such as Prisoners' Aid, Housing NZ, Work and Income and employers.

Work and Income has posted 40 case managers and work brokers into the country's 19 prisons to help prisoners find work before release.

Auckland Prisoners' Aid director Graeme Page said the short-term apartment scheme was designed for long-term prisoners who needed somewhere to live when they first got out of jail, because they had either become estranged from their families or did not have relatives in New Zealand.

"They are not likely to be young people. The risk is too high. They might be in their thirties," he said.

"We are giving them a three-month maximum and we'll move them out, otherwise they become too dependent. We have run accommodation before and they didn't want to move." Mr Page said it deliberately chose city apartments to remove offenders from their former associates.