October 21, 2020
Truck ticket to job after prison
Howard League head Mike Willliams says a truck licence is proving a ticket to a job for former prisoners.
The prison reform league has been running driver's licence programmes in provincial prisons with funding from the Provincial Growth fund, and it has now expanded into city prisons with funding from NZ Land Transport, Waka Kotahi.
Mr Williams launched the scheme after spotting how driving licence offences were part of how inmates had gotten caught in a cycle of offending.
Having a licence means they were more likely to get jobs and therefore less likely to reoffend.
"If an offender, a probationer gets a driver's licence, they have a 50 percent chance of getting a job. If they get a truck licence, they always get a job," he says.
Mr Williams says the whole driver training scheme costs about as much as keeping one inmate in prison for a year.
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