However, Central West Law Society president Dannielle Ford from Cheney Suthers Lawyers in Orange said it was encouraging to see that sentencing reforms showed there was no adverse impact on the rates of offenders returning to custody.

Ms Ford was commenting on an evaluation undertaken by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research into sentencing reforms introduced in September 2018 that gave judges and magistrates access to new, more flexible community sentencing options.

She said the BOCSAR report was interesting but noted that it did not separate regional and urban figures and was just a moment in time for matters finalised in the 13 weeks before and the 13 weeks after the start of the sentencing reforms.

"It would be great to see further research in relation to the impact of the sentencing reforms, as it is likely it will evolve over time," Ms Ford said.

The new sentencing options allowed judicial officers to customise community-based orders to include supervision, home detention, electronic monitoring, community service, place restrictions and curfews as conditions of an order.

Although past research showed the reforms were successful in reducing short-term prison sentences and increasing supervised community sentences.

For the latest evaluation, BOCSAR found the reforms significantly increased the proportion of individuals sentenced to supervision in the community, but found no change in the rate of reoffending, the time to first new offence or the likelihood that an offender would enter custody within 12 months of being sentenced.

BOCSAR executive director Jackie Fitzgerald said a guiding principle behind the reform was considerable evidence showing that actively supervising offenders in the community can reduce reoffending.

"A possible reason why we did not find a reoffending benefit is that, at least initially, the reforms had only a small impact on the actual rate at which offenders were supervised in the community," she said.

"The Community Corrections practice of prioritising supervision for higher-risk offenders means that additional supervised orders issued to lower-risk offenders would not have resulted in active supervision by Corrections' officers."

A Corrective Services NSW spokeswoman welcomed the finding and said supervised community sentences are just as effective as prison sentences in reducing reoffending.

"They achieve this same result at a much cheaper cost to the taxpayer, and with much less disruption to the lives of offenders and their families," she said.

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