Twenty-six years is a long time in any line of work. Our work may be tough, but it’s also inspiring. Through the good times and the bad, we’re always there when people have the desire to create powerful change and afresh start.
We've seen a lot in the 25 years we've been around. We've seen people at their best, their worst and everything in between. The work we do is tough, but through times of hope and despair one thing has remained the same - Pathway's unwavering commitment to helping people make a fresh start.
Navigate is a unique programme that engages the community in a role traditionally left to Corrections. It represents a significant change in approach, and is something that has required considerable vision and open-mindedness to achieve; something that both Pathway and the Department of Corrections should be congratulated for. In very real ways, it is bringing the community into Christchurch Men’s Prison in an effort to solve community concerns.
This Outcome Harvest finds that for some men the Pathway Navigate Initiative programme fills the space between who they are and who they can become. Offenders with few skills or relationships to re-enter society with become Tū Ora with houses, jobs and sustainable connections in the community. For some staff in the Christchurch Men’s Prison, a parallel journey takes them from well-trained professionals managing and trying to rehabilitate complex offenders to re-forming men into people who stand well in our community. Those parallel, intertwined stories are the centre of this evaluation.
This report records the evaluation of the Pathway Total Reintegration Strategy, a programme that works with released prisoners in Canterbury to assist their reintegration into society. The quantitative analysis, undertaken by the Department of Corrections, compares the actual versus the expected recidivism rates of Pathway clients and the overall rates across New Zealand. This is supported by a qualitative analysis based on interviews conducted with people who have gone through the programme, including those who successfully avoided reoffending and those who did not.
