Mr. Michael Donnellan:

The best example is our example, the community return scheme. Many delegations from European countries have come to visit us. Where a prisoner has finished half his or her six year sentence, during which time he or she has been involved in education, work training, and he or she is drug free is really helping to reduce his or her recidivism. They can then be risk assessed by the probation service to serve the remaining period of their prison sentence in the community. We call it "community return". That has been really successful. More than 1,600 people have been released through community return with a compliance rate of about 89%. This initiative is settling people from prison back into the community. That is the major emphasis. There is no doubt that the European countries that we look towards are the Nordic countries, Norway and Sweden. We look particularly to Finland, a country very similar to ours, where they have made dramatic changes in their prison system in the past 15 years. They have much more low security and open type prisons. That is something we need to look at. Do we need everybody in medium to high security prisons? There are lots of lesson we can learn from our colleagues in Europe. Equally they learn from us because we are all learning together.