Sentencing (Community Sentencing to Fit the Crime) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Sentencing (Community Sentencing to Fit the Crime) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. This member’s bill restores community sentence discretion and power back to judges for the sentencing of criminal offenders. This is a very important change because the Labour Government’s sentencing laws introduced in 2002 essentially took the power over the judge’s ability to define the sentence of an offender away from the court, and took that power from the judge to officials of the probation service and essentially the Parole Board. The important thing about that is that those people are anonymous officials and they are not publicly accountable, so all the power for what happens in the sentencing of offenders has now gone from the court and a judge, who are accountable to the public, to officials. That is where a prime concern now lies.

The Sentencing Act 2002 was Labour’s response to the 1999 referendum on law and order, where 92 percent of New Zealanders wanted a Government to get tough on violent offenders and to get tough on crime. The sad thing was that the Government’s response was exactly the opposite. The sentencing laws were an outrage to most New Zealanders who understood what was going on, because the laws slashed sentences and perpetrated a legal lie.

💬 Hon Phil Goff: I did no such thing.

The Minister of Justice can complain here, but the point is that if somebody is sentenced to 9 years in jail and is released automatically after 3 years, that is a legal lie. Sentences were brought down to offenders serving one-third of their sentence, except for a very small group of offenders who are a danger to society, and short sentences are cut in half. As well as that, the Labour Government has introduced home detention on a grand scale, which many New Zealanders believe is a taxpayer-funded holiday for offenders to stay at home.

The requirements of the Sentencing Act are that sentences are designed to fit offenders’ needs, and the needs of victims are now largely ignored. Sentences must not be disproportionately severe—in other words, rehabilitation, not punishment, should be the prime requirement of sentencing. Sentences are now meant to be made so that they are the least restrictive on the offender. These sentences, according to the Labour Government, have to take into account the family, the background, and the culture of the offender and the community they live in, and evidence can be provided on the previous good character of the offender when the sentencing is being worked out. There is a strong desirability for offenders to be kept in the community as far as is practicable, and imprisonment must not be imposed unless effectively it is a last resort.

The problem with all of those intentions of the Labour Government is that sentencing has effectively been turned into a laughing stock. To the public, many people think that sentences now are a doddle, that they are just a slap over the hand with a wet bus ticket. It is not what the public called for. It is not what the public want. This bill is a common-sense mechanism to turn that situation around.

The bill has one prime purpose—that is, to return the discretion and power over sentences back to judges. If members go out on to the streets and ask members of the community where they think the power over sentencing should lie, they will tell them that it should lie with judges. The judges are the people who hear the case. They know more about the offender than anyone else ever does. It should be up to them to decide the sentence that best suits the offender, that best provides punishment for the particular crime the offender has taken part in, and that also recognises the rights of victims. The rights of victims are extremely important and they have been sidelined by the Labour Government’s sentencing laws.

This bill restores to judges and to the court powers that should rightfully be theirs. In particular, it restores the use of supervision for punishment purposes, as well as supervision being in the interests of the offender. Suddenly punishment is an important role in sentencing. Next, the bill enables the imposition of supervision against the causes of crime. It allows the judge to bring directives about non-association. In other words, an offender may not associate with gang members or with known criminals, and there are penalties for doing so. It also brings in the ability of judges to order random alcohol and drug testing to ensure that in some cases temptation is taken out of the way of the offender. It allows the judge to order that at the end of a prison sentence there can be extended periods of supervision. I know there are many people who look back in our history and remember that hostels were available for prisoners coming out of jail when they had nowhere to go. They were put in supervised accommodation for a period of time until they could get themselves rehabilitated back into society. It allows the judge to be able to order supervision at the end of a prison sentence.

As well as that, this bill restores to judges the ability to make sentences cumulative instead of this modern way of making them all concurrent. Again we have a legal lie. For example, if offenders have committed three different crimes they get 2 years for each. Right now, instead of offenders having to serve 6 years of their sentence, it is all concurrent, so it is simply 2 years. That is wrong. It seems to me that we need to bring back cumulative sentences so that the public has a clear idea of what happens. Sentences are there to act as a real disincentive to people who are thinking about committing a crime, to serve as a way of stopping them from doing so. They think to themselves: “Goodness me, if I get caught it’s not going to be worth my while.”

This bill gives back to judges the powers that allow them to be creative in the way in which they order sentences. For example, if an offender has committed an offence for which the sentence is a fine, the judge should be able to order that that money is paid to a charity. Judges should be able to order a whole range of things that at the moment they are excluded from doing. There are cases in America where, for example, if an offender has stolen mail that person has to stand outside a postshop with a sign saying: “I stole mail. I am an offender.”, and let the victims of the crime have a say.

Debate interrupted.