High risk offenders likely to be Maori and start crime early

1.00pm

A study of high risk offenders has found they are likely to be Maori, have started offending early and have had family members involved in crime, National Radio reported today.

Under the Official Information Act it has obtained research by the Corrections Department on repeat high risk offenders.

It said about 150 inmates classified as being at high risk of offending were interviewed by the Corrections Department's psychologist Nick Wilson.

He said more than 80 per cent of the offenders were Maori and most had family members who were involved in crime, the radio station reported.

Nearly two-thirds were involved in gangs.

The "vast majority" started their offending at an early age, Dr Wilson said.

"Sixty-six per cent of them had a chronic pattern of anti-social behaviour by the age of 12 so this is a group that offending was not a new part of their life. This had been part of their life for upwards of 20 years," he said.

The average sentence for the offenders was just under three years, National Radio said.

Dr Wilson said many of the inmates needed intensive treatment programmes.

"Any behaviour that someone's been doing for such a long time is difficult to change and therefore you need intensive treatment.

"You can't rely on short-term, lightweight interventions. You have to have interventions that are challenging and allow sufficient time for what is quite difficult change to occur."

He was developing a pilot programme to treat recidivist offenders which should be running in two years time.

Corrections policy manager Jared Mullen told National Radio that having more information, particularly ethnic and demographic information about offenders, helped the department build programmes that would have a higher chance of influencing the behaviour of the offenders.

"Particularly with a high proportion of Maori we need to be conscious of the need to develop programmes that will actually work for Maori."

No other country had developed a comprehensive and tested approach for dealing with this group of high-risk offenders.

"So, I think they've tended to receive, perhaps, interventions which aren't that well suited for them and aren't effective for them, all the more reason for doing this research and the follow up work that we're planning to do working towards a pilot programme for this group."

Mr Mullen said the consequences of not doing anything were "dire" and the public would not accept anything less.

Canterbury University associate professor of sociology Greg Newbold, himself a reformed offender, said the thrust of Dr Wilson's paper was that behavioural problems could be remedied by therapeutic programmes "and I dispute that really".

"I think a lot of the time lifestyle criminals are lifestyle criminals because they want to be, because it's the way they've always been and they don't want to change and therefore it's going to be almost impossible to make them change," he said.

- NZPA