Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill

I move, That the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill be now read a third time. This bill makes substantive and technical changes to the Bail Act 2000, the Sentencing Act 2002, and the Parole Act 2002 in order to remove barriers to the effective and efficient management of offenders serving sentences and orders in the community. It has been before Parliament since October 2011. The Law and Order Committee considered it last year and reported it back to the House with several improvements. I would like once again to thank the Law and Order Committee for the sensible changes it has made.

Although this bill is generally concerned with matters of a technical or administrative nature, I believe that the cumulative effect of its amendments will be a considerable improvement in the overall management of these sentences and orders. For instance, the bill will contribute to the goal of improving public safety by other things: better aligning electronic monitoring conditions with the electronic boundaries of monitoring equipment, making it easier to hold offenders to account if they fail to comply with a community-based sentence, and addressing some technical problems with extended supervision order provisions. The bill also reduces the administrative burden probation officers face and empowers them in other ways to focus more on the rehabilitative opportunities available to offenders and the safety of the public. For example, they will be able to approve basic work and living skills courses for offenders on community work without having to apply to the court.

Other amendments are required to clarify procedures where provisions are ambiguous or have had unintended consequences. During the Committee of the whole House, I tabled amendments that were necessary to resolve a few commencement and minor drafting issues. I wish to thank members for their cooperation in seeing that Parliament’s intention is appropriately reflected in the drafting of provisions in this bill.

This bill significantly improves the effective administration of sentences and orders in the community. In doing so, it improves the safety of the public, contributes to the Government’s goal of reducing reoffending by 25 percent, and delivers better public value. I commend this bill to the House.

It is a pleasure to be able to take a call in the third reading of the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill. It is a bill that Labour continues to support. As the Minister of Corrections did in her contribution to this debate, I would also like to thank other members of the Law and Order Committee for the way in which we worked together. Unfortunately, I am no longer a member of the Law and Order Committee, but this is definitely one of the pieces of legislation and one of the times where we worked very constructively together from across the Parliament to make sure that this bill was a good bill and was improved at the select committee stage.

It was a bill that we did make some changes to, and I agree with the Minister that we made some very sensible changes to the bill. I would also like to thank those officials and members of the Department of Corrections who came along and gave us some very good, constructive, and practical submissions to the bill so we, as members of Parliament, could understand some of the technical realities of what the changes in the bill contained.

As the Minister said, this piece of legislation aims to make changes to the barriers to effective management of home detention and community-based sentences, electronic monitoring, and parole and extended supervision orders. On this side of the House, we certainly think, in terms of fiscal and rehabilitative purposes, that we should be looking at the use of more home detention, when it is suitable. Let me be clear: there certainly will be occasions when someone is not suitable to be given a community-based sentence. They would have committed some of the worst crimes, and those people should, as they are now, be put into protective custody to make sure that they are not at large and to make sure that the public is safe from any dangers that they may pose. But we believe that we should look at more use of community-based sentences in the future to make sure that we can also fiscally afford to make sure that we punish people and rehabilitate them, but also—to use that word “rehabilitate”—to make sure that it is effective.

Can I just draw on one submission made by the Salvation Army to the Law and Order Committee where it quoted some Ministry of Justice figures. The submission said that “23 per cent of those on home detention in 2009 were reconvicted in the following 12 months. Conversely, 52.6 per cent of those who served a custodial sentence in 2009 were reconvicted in the following 12 months.” It went on to say that over that period recidivism rates in New Zealand have remained largely the same. We have the Salvation Army coming to us and telling us that the figures from the Ministry of Justice have shown that for those given community sentences, those who are given home detention, their recidivism rate is at least half that of those who are given a custodial sentence. There is hard evidence that community-based sentences are very effective at making sure that those who have been given a sentence do not go out and reoffend. I think all parliamentarians would agree that that is certainly one of the things that we wanted to get out of sentencing and the Department of Corrections—to make sure that there are fewer victims and that there is less reoffending.

The Deputy Prime Minister, Bill English, himself has said that prisons are a moral and fiscal failure, and I think it is important that the department takes an evidence-based approach to what works when it comes to the rehabilitation of prisoners. I have already mentioned those figures that the Salvation Army dug out for us at the select committee hearing. I would like to commend the Deputy Prime Minister for making that comment, because he knows that we cannot continue to spend at the rate we do with corrections, but also we cannot keep locking people up and, as those figures have shown, have them come back and reoffend at a rate of 52.6 percent, which the Ministry of Justice figures show for 2009. We have to find a way to make sure that those people to whom we are giving sentences reoffend less, and also we have to make sure that we can find a way to make the corrections system much more efficient in terms of the money that we are putting into it.

I do want to—as the Minister said—talk about some specifics in the bill that we on the select committee thought were good improvements. They are around being able to convert a proportion of a community sentence into training. I think it is something that we on this side of the House want to make sure there is an option to do, for those people who are either serving a community sentence or in prison themselves. This bill provides that a probation officer may direct that up to 20 percent of the community work sentence of at least 80 hours be spent training in basic work and living skills.

I do not think anyone on this side of the House would argue with that—that you can convert some of that time that you are spending on a community-based sentence into training, to be able to prepare those people who are on that sentence, for the time when they are not forced to stay in their residence because of the sentence that they have been given. I think that is certainly one good thing within this bill that will help those who are serving community sentences to get back on the straight and narrow. As I have said, and I am quoting this repeatedly, those Ministry of Justice figures show there is less reoffending by those who are on community-based sentences, and hopefully some of that training that is made available to them, by being able to convert that time, will help augment that and make the rehabilitation rate much better and the reoffending rate much better as well.

I just wanted to finish off on this by saying that we on this side of the House want to make sure there is an evidence-based corrections system. We do believe that there should be much more of a move towards community-based sentences. We believe that those community-based sentences for the appropriate people who are given those sentences will lead to less reoffending. Those Ministry of Justice figures have stated that, and I think everyone in New Zealand will want to make sure that while we manage the risk of community-based sentences, if we can get less reoffending and fewer victims, that is what everybody wants.

Once again, thanks to those officials who came and gave submissions to the Law and Order Committee. I think one of the more interesting submissions to the select committee was around some geometry, and the difference between a circle and a square, in terms of the technology that monitors those people who are on electronic monitoring and who can technically be outside the residence where they are meant to be, but still inside the digital or electronic monitoring that is there. This Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill aims to make sure that those technicalities are looked after, and we certainly hope that those who are supposed to be where they are will continue to be where they are, with the technical changes in this piece of legislation. So, once again, thanks to those officials. We are very happy to continue to support this bill.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on the third reading of the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill. I am really pleased that we have now reached the third reading stage of this most excellent bill, which makes some substantive but also technical changes to the Bail Act, the Sentencing Act, and the Parole Act. What this bill will do is remove barriers to the effective and efficient management of offenders serving sentences and orders in the community. The reason why this is a pretty significant bill is that it is part of a suite of work being done in the justice sector with a very strong focus on rehabilitation and “reintregation”—I still have not got that right; you know what I mean—reintegration, that is it, of offenders into the community. I know I jest, but actually it is not a laughing matter. It is actually incredibly important that the good work done by the Hon Judith Collins and the Hon Anne Tolley in this field is given effect to in this legislation—

💬 Hon Maryan Street: Not tonight. No contribution tonight.

—because what is really important—no, not tonight; we will not finish it tonight. The member is quite correct. We probably will have to finish off the third reading another night, but we are making a very good start. The point that is really to be made around this is what do we want out of our criminal justice system? We want offenders to be brought to trial in a timely manner, and, yes, we are doing a lot of work around courts reform and judicial reform. While prisoners are in custody we want to give them every opportunity to gain those life skills and those literacy and numeracy skills that they may be lacking. We want to return them to the community in as good a shape as we possibly can.

This bill forms a great part of the “reintre”—oh, again that word; why do I use that word—the reintegration of offenders back into the community. As Kris Faafoi mentioned in his contribution, it is as simple as things such as realigning the boundaries for electronic monitoring. Formerly, the technology meant that a boundary was always going to be like this, and so on an offender’s property, if the boundary is like this, but actually the letterbox is out here, he is always going to breach his bail conditions by going outside that area. So this bill is about improving the efficiencies around that, and I commend it to the House.

It is a pleasure to take a call on the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill. I think, as the last speaker, Jacqui Dean, said—or if she did not say it, she meant it—how we administer sentencing and our criminal justice system is very important. Much work has been done over many years, actually starting, I think, under the last Labour Government, and with Phil Goff, who was a very energetic, very enthusiastic, and very accomplished Minister of Justice. There has been a transformation in sentencing and the approaches we take to sentencing, but, of course, these things are always subject to refinement in the light of experience. Prior to this bill coming to the House, we have seen that there are areas of the community sentencing approach that can do with improvement, amendment, and refinement. This bill seeks to do that, which is largely why we support it, but we also do that in the context of although wanting a criminal justice system and the sentencing approaches that we take that reflect a community opprobrium and the need for penalty, ultimately what we want is a corrections system and a justice system that effectively do what the corrections system says it is going to do. It changes behaviour and it changes approaches and people’s behaviour, so that those who have offended against the criminal statutes, and, with it, society’s expectations, have the benefit not only of reflecting on their actions but of changing their approaches and their behaviour too.

There is no question that recidivism remains a very difficult issue and a common outcome to our criminal justice system, so more has to be done. The more that we can have a criminal justice system that takes the vast bulk of offenders—who are not inherently bad people but are people who have a time in their lives, often when they are younger, because these are often younger men who just do the wrong thing and make bad choices, and who sometimes do things that are very harmful to others—and provides them with the means to transform themselves, transform their lives, and make better choices, then that would be better for all of us. It would be better for them, it would be better for the community, and, ultimately, it would be better for the taxpayer and their back pocket. So anything that we can do to promote and enhance our community sentences, such as leaving people in the community with appropriate support but paying their dues to society, is a good thing. It is having the ability to amend community sentences. When a person who has been sentenced to one then finds himself or herself sentenced to another, amending the original sentence so that we can draw those two together is, of course, a very good thing, and that is what this bill does.

This bill has, at least, had the benefit of going through and achieving agreement between those of us across the House, and I think that is reflective of the very value and the very principle that we want to support and annunciate in a coherent and modern criminal justice system—a system that takes people who, for whatever reason, have offended and gives them the chance to understand the community’s expectations of them as citizens and to make them good and worthy citizens as well. The more we can do that and the less we resort to the barbaric and, frankly, continually failing approach of throwing people in the old clink, leaving them there, and expecting that after 3, 4, or 5 years somehow they are going to be a transformed citizen—we know that that approach is increasingly failing. Community sentences play a very important role in our criminal justice system and in our suite of sentences that are available to judges. The more we can do to make them work and make them effective, then the better it is for the justice system and for every New Zealand citizen. The more we can have a system that ensures that people can fulfil or at least reach their potential, even after having offended against the community, then that is good for all of us.

So on that basis we support this bill. It is a very good bill. I acknowledge the work that the Law and Order Committee has done on achieving consensus and bringing the bill back and, hopefully, making yet another refinement and taking another step that gives us something closer to the type of model of criminal justice system that we want and that we aspire to.

Bill read a third time.