Ms Caron McCaffrey:

Prisoners can swap prison time for time spent in the community, under probation and supervision, doing very important community service work. The levels of engagement and adherence to the terms continue to be very high so we still see a 90% success rate in completion. Where somebody does not complete the programme he or she can be recalled to custody.

We did make one change. We found that in 2018 and 2019 our prisoner numbers were growing. The way the scheme works at the moment is that if one is serving between one and eight years one becomes eligible at half of the full sentence. We changed that for prisoners serving between one and three years so that they can become eligible at half of their remitted sentence thus potentially avail of an earlier release and engage at community level because we know where people go out, particularly under probation supervision and where they have support, they are less likely to reoffend and we are less likely to see them return to custody.