This concluding Briefing Paper on criminal justice reform draws together the findings of the previous two papers published since August. In the previous papers, a holistic account of a range of crime drivers integrating personal, societal, and procedural components was provided. In this paper, the author shows how these components indicate certain optimistic lines of policy development.

Recommendations:

1. Improving court processes
   • Increase holistic criminology knowledge among court officers through a series of seminars with a professional accreditation process.
   • Research and explore more creative sentencing options including supplementing punishment with desistance-oriented programmes, resulting in guidebooks for sentencing agencies.
   • Better legal representation for dependants by reviewing legal aid and funding for community law centres (Ideally, more and better quality legal representation is required).
2. Refining reintegration programmes
   • Develop and implement a casework approach to offender management, including the production of guide books and a training programme.
   • Bring together relevant stakeholders to produce and review culturally-specific programmes.
   • Draw together regional- and iwi-specific contribution in programme design and delivery in a national corrections forum
   • Develop and implement programmes that address correlational dimensions of crime
   • Improve and fund holistic post-sentence programmes
3. Community development
   • Rapid expansion of victim support services, expansion of funding for research into victimology, and public education campaigns to promote better understandings of victims’ needs and how these should be delivered.
   • Cross-government strategy to address poverty and economic stagnation at the regional and community levels rather than only at the demographic level (ie. community poverty reduction rather than child poverty reduction).
   • The development of economic proposals to regenerate the regions that have experienced economic stagnation over many decades.