Estimates Debate — Vote Corrections

Talofa lava malo le soifua. In the 2012-13 Budget for corrections, the National Government declared that it would invest $1.5 billion in corrections. This time around, the 2013-14 Budget spending on law and order is a deal-breaker for a majority of voters, and the Department of Corrections and the Minister in charge are trying to give false assurances to the voting public that criminals will not get just a simple slap on the wrist.

Remember the 43 criminal offenders who managed to destroy monitoring services and escape security surveillance by the Department of Corrections in the span of 1 year? I hope members do. These offenders make our security system seem like a joke, with reports nearly every week of someone escaping from custody or destroying a monitoring device. We need to send a clear message to these offenders that our prison security devices and surveillance systems are not a joke, nor should they be compromised. More important, when it becomes potentially dangerous for our local communities, the department needs to be made accountable for ensuring public safety. We need to enhance security so that offenders do not escape prison or community service sentences. We should enforce tougher penalties, where any offender found to have destroyed a security device is sentenced to a minimum prison sentence and is denied the softer option of home detention.

Let us reflect on the recent case of a man who was sentenced to 9 months’ home detention and made to serve 300 community hours for importing class B drugs through our ports. How is this sending out a message that we are going to get tough on criminal behaviour? How are we going to deter criminal behaviour if we are sentencing men like Manuel Sadler to 9 months’ home detention instead of imposing the maximum penalty of 14 years’ imprisonment? Let me also mention that this man is a repeat offender. More needs to be done to ensure that criminals like this are caught and serve jail time. We cannot afford to give these criminals a slap on the wrist and send them home. What kind of a message is that sending to our community? This sort of behaviour has the potential to destroy lives and encourage further criminal activity.

In order to combat criminal activity, the Government needs to ensure that it sticks to its promises and makes our police more visible. I find it unacceptable that police numbers have fallen from 8,940 in June 2012 to 8,721 in February 2013. I wonder what is going on here. Has the Government been cutting back on spending in order to balance its books, and put a halt on recruiting new cops? I know that this is about corrections, but the people whom the police actually deal with end up in our corrections system. In 2008 the Government committed $18.5 million to recruiting, training, and employing extra police staff. As police numbers have been falling, where has this money been diverted to or hidden?

I actually have some grave concerns about the way our corrections system has been managed. I believe that it needs more resources and better funding, and we also need to know which areas of corrections the funding is going to be spent in. If the Minister of Corrections wants to ensure that serious domestic violence offenders are monitored 24/7, then we cannot afford to have lower police numbers and to diminish their visibility in our community, nor ignore the need for our corrections staff to get better training and sufficient resources. If this is going to work, we need to strengthen front-line staff and police numbers instead of weakening their visibility and effectiveness.

Crime rates may have fallen, but that does not mean that all crimes have been reported or recorded. Criminal activity is not a seasonal thing. It is constant and can occur at any time. In fact, the number of sexual assaults has risen. Moreover, no one can truly give an exact estimate of the number of domestic violence disputes that occur nationwide. Unreported domestic violence is estimated to be very high, which indicates a need to monitor serious domestic violence offenders 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in order to save more lives, especially for battered women—and for some men—who are not reporting these assaults. We need to be firm but fair.

Vote agreed to.

Vote Police