Page 1179 - Week 04 - Thursday, 26 March 2015
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This joint community-government agency approach was considered best practice by the government and funding of $1.1million was approved for the 2012-13 and 2013-14 financial years. The first clients commenced with the extended through-care program in June 2013. It is open to sentenced male detainees and all women detainees, be it remand or sentenced, exiting the AMC.
Sentenced detainees who are not under a post-release supervision order are actively encouraged to access the program but are under no obligation to do so. Extended through-care clients receive support to reintegrate back into the community in core areas of accommodation, health, basic needs, income and community connections. Beyond extending the through-care model of service delivery, the key feature of extended through-care is that it provides a single point of service coordination for case management and engages services that are responsive to an offender’s individual needs.
By the end of 2013 the program had been dealing directly with clients for just six months but there were good signs that it would deliver on expectations. The government agreed, as part of the 2014-15 budget, to provide $2.2 million in funding over two years to continue the program, building on a growing evidence base. This recognised that additional dollars were required to properly fund the program and that in order to provide effective detainee reintegration, an appropriately resourced evaluation was required.
The evaluation will be important to informing the future of extended through-care. But after more than 18 months of service delivery, it is a good time to update the Assembly on how extended through-care is going and, without pre-empting what the evaluation may find, what we have learned so far. For the calendar year 2014 there were 225 releases to the extended through-care initiative. This comprised 197 men and 28 women. Of the 225, 36 or 16 per cent identified as being Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.
What we have found is that the overwhelming majority of eligible detainees are accessing extended through-care, regardless of whether they are on formal supervision with ACT Corrective Services or not. This means that former detainees are seeing this as a program they want to be part of, not something they are forced into. It is a very positive sign when offenders seek help from Corrective Services.
Of these 225 releases, there have been 55 returns to custody; 24 for breach of parole or good behaviour orders and the remainder as the result of new offences. This means that there has been some initial success with keeping this cohort from returning to custody due to the intensive case management. We are reluctant, however, to start comparing this cohort with jurisdictional recidivism rates such as those reported each year in the report on government services. The counting rules mean we will need to wait for a longer period to pass before a true comparison can be made.
We found that assisting detainees upon release needed much more than just good service coordination. Many detainees needed a much greater level of intense assistance upon release than previously realised and this resulted in the addition of the basics package to the suite of extended through-care services. Other packages are health, housing, connections and jobs.
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