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What We Did
The Navigate unit (Navigate Initiative) is housed in the Leimon Villas inside Christchurch Men’s Prison, which are designed as a transitional space for prisoners who are preparing for release.
At its core, the programme is aimed at being a conduit between prison and the community, providing a mix of rehabilitation and reintegration. On release these men are then put into the Pathway Total Reintegration Strategy, an individualised and multi-faceted programme that works to reduce reoffending by released prisoners in Canterbury by assisting with their reintegration into society. These programmes, run by Pathway Charitable Trust, seek to reduce reoffending and therefore make the community safer. This research was led by Dr Jarrod Gilbert in collaboration with UC PhD student Ben Elley, and involved two separate evaluations of the efficacy of the Navigate Unit and Pathway Tool Reintegration Strategy.
The Navigate evaluation provided a preliminary indication of the Initiative’s effectiveness by gathering qualitative data from in-depth interviews with Navigate residential clients. Participants were interviewed once during the week prior to their release, and once more at least three months after their release. Overall, participants were satisfied with every major aspect of the Navigate Initiative, and reported that it had been a considerable help to them in terms of easing their reintegration into society. While no hard data are yet available to show the programme’s efficacy, it is clear from this preliminary evaluation that the Navigate Initiative is providing significant value for its clients and succeeding at the goals that it has set for itself.
The Pathway evaluation revealed that the Total Reintegration Strategy evinces early but significant success in reducing both offending rates and severity of the offenses that are committed by those who do reoffend. Using a model devised by the Department of Corrections (RoC *RoI scores) and an ‘actual versus expected’ method of analysis, prisoners who engage with the Pathway programme were found to be 33.3 percent less likely to be reconvicted and 42.8 percent less likely to re-imprisoned within 12 months of release.
Who Was Involved
Pathway Charitable Trust and the Department of Corrections
Why It Matters
It is clear that Navigate and Pathway are filling an important gap in the imprisonment process. The absence of hands-on reintegration support has been widely identified as an important weakness in New Zealand’s criminal justice system, and this was confirmed by the experiences of our participants. While we cannot speculate about the longer-term effect that these programmes will have on recidivism among the clients, the programmes appear to be succeeding in building the elements that are understood to be required for successful desistance in clients’ lives. Ultimately, desistance is key to improving the safety of the community.
Learn More
Gilbert J. and Elley B. (2019) Evaluating the Pathway: a quantitative evaluation of Pathway Total Reintegration Strategy.Commissioned by Commissioned by Pathway Trust.
