Another 13 new beds and alcohol-detecting anklets are underwhelming when the national drug and alcohol centre can only help half of the estimated 90,000 people who need it, its manager says.
Corrections Minister Louise Upston Photo: RNZ / Mei Heron
Corrections Minister Louise Upston has announced changes to help her department tackle drug and alcohol addiction.
Thirteen new beds would be made available for offenders with significant alcohol and drug needs and 16 new alcohol and drug aftercare workers would be recruited.
A 24-hour support phone line and alcohol-detecting ankle bracelets were also set to be introduced.
Ms Upston said employers would be able to recruit former offenders in the certainty they have not drunk alcohol.
"A large number of them have drug and alcohol issues - 60 percent of the offenders in the community - so we need to absolutely focus on them," she said.
"We know in terms of community safety there is a higher risk around this group committing crimes."
However, Vanessa Caldwell - the manager of Matua Raḵi, the national centre for addiction workforce development - said the proposed new powers for dealing with offenders' drug and alcohol problems were underwhelming.
Ms Caldwell said the ankle bracelets did have a positive impact while they were in use but needed to be accompanied by additional support.
"Unless somebody receives treatment and support to continue to modify their behaviour beyond that, once those ankle bracelets or interlocks are removed, research suggests their behaviour does revert quite quickly."
She said more staff were needed.
"We have capacity for about 45,000 people that are treated in the system each year," she said.
"But we know that we're not reaching demand that's in the community for people that would benefit from an intervention - so we would estimate a doubling of that capacity."
She said that meant a total of 90,000 people needed to be helped by the centre, including people under community corrections.
Ms Caldwell also said the 24/7 phone support line was a duplicate of one that already existed.
She said
