KEY POINTS:
New Zealand's formerly overflowing prisons have suddenly found themselves with vacant beds, as judges seem to be heeding a Government effort to keep minor offenders out of jail.
Prison rolls have plummeted from 8500 last September to 7600 this month.
The liberal lobby group Rethinking.org.nz says this means the country's jails now have 1600 spare beds.
Corrections Minister Phil Goff cautioned last night that the prison muster usually peaked in September each year so the decline had been partly seasonal. But he said numbers were now running 300 below the same time last year.
"That means that at the moment we have plenty of room in the prisons.
"The good news is that we are exactly on track with the 2006 Ministry of Justice forecast for prison numbers, having had a larger-than-expected increase last year."
Mr Goff said judges were heeding the "Effective Interventions" policy which aimed to keep "lesser offenders" out of jail unless they had to be locked up for public safety.
"Judges are taking advantage of much tougher community-based sentences such as community work and intensive supervision.
"We have a range of new penalties including electronic monitoring which can enable the generally safe containment of lesser-risk offenders in the community, rather than using the much greater expense of jail, where they are likely to come out as reoffenders.
"For many people, putting a person in prison puts them in with 40 per cent of all gang members in New Zealand and means there is a risk that they will be recruited into a gang."
The reduced prison rolls did not, however, remove the need to rebuild Auckland's historic Mt Eden Prison at an estimated cost of $222 million.
