The Berejiklian government announced a package of proposed changes on Tuesday aimed at reducing chronic delays in the District Court and increasing supervision of offenders outside the prison system.

The sweeping changes include encouraging early guilty pleas and allowing non-violent offenders to serve the last six months of their prison sentence in home detention before they are released on parole.

Corrections Minister David Elliott said he expected changes to the prison system would "slow the increase in the incarceration rate" in NSW, which is at record highs.

Associate professor Julia Quilter from the University of Wollongong Law School said measures to improve the reintegration of offenders into the community "may well be a very good thing" but cautioned against other "populist" changes to the parole system.

This included new powers for the State Parole Authority to refuse parole to an offender with "terrorism links" or a convicted killer who refused to reveal the location of a victim's body. Dr Quilter said "terrorism connections" would need to be defined carefully.

The centrepiece of the plan to tackle court delays is a new system of fixed sentence discounts for early guilty pleas for serious criminal offences, ranging from a 25 per cent discount for the earliest plea to 5 per cent if the plea is made on the day of trial or later.

Attorney-General Mark Speakman said 73 per cent of criminal cases in the District Court were resolved with a guilty plea but 22 per cent of those were entered "as late as the day of trial or even later", causing "incredible inefficiencies" and stress to victims.

The NSW Law Reform Commission recommended in 2013 that the discounts be introduced to tackle delays in the District Court, which is labouring under a backlog of thousands of criminal cases.

Mr Speakman said "a number of exceptions" would apply including for "heinous" crimes, such as murder.

The new regime would also require senior prosecutors and defenders to be involved in criminal cases in the preliminary stages to get charges right at a much earlier stage.

Former Supreme Court judge Anthony Whealy, QC, the lead law reform commissioner behind the report on early guilty pleas, welcomed the proposed changes and said the District Court was "overwhelmed with work" and "appointing four or five judges is not really the answer".

"It's like trying to stem a tsunami," Mr Whealy said. "Unless you have systemic change these delays are going to get worse and worse. These changes are systemic."

But NSW Bar Association senior vice-president Arthur Moses, SC, raised concerns fixed discounts could create injustice if "judges cannot take into account reasons for a guilty plea being entered into at some later stage" and said the plan would require "significant funding increases for legal aid" to ensure an accused was properly advised.

Mr Speakman told Fairfax Media: "As part of these reforms, the government will provide additional resources to Legal Aid to ensure accused persons obtain appropriate advice about entering an earlier guilty plea."

NSW Law Society president Pauline Wright welcomed changes to encourage early guilty pleas but cautioned against moves to scrap committal hearings, a type of preliminary hearing to determine if an accused should stand trial.

The vast majority of committal hearings lead to a trial but Ms Wright said their abolition would remove "independent oversight" of the strength of a prosecution case by a judge.

Ms Wright also opposed limiting judges' "sentencing options" by scrapping suspended sentences, where a person is convicted of a crime warranting a prison sentence but released subject to a good behaviour bond.

Mr Speakman said suspended sentences, which were reintroduced in 2000 after being scrapped in 1974, would be replaced with new intensive correction orders including supervision by community corrections officers.

The government will consult on the changes before introducing legislation in the latter half of the year.