Parole Amendment Bill

I move, That the Parole Amendment Bill be now read a second time. This bill demonstrates the Government’s ongoing commitment to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the justice system. It also underlines our commitment to protecting victims and putting them at the heart of our justice system.

Can I firstly thank the Law and Order Committee for its consideration of the bill. The committee received 29 submissions and has recommended that the bill proceed with some amendments. Three-quarters of the submissions received expressed clear support for the intent of the bill. The committee has recommended several largely minor and technical changes to the bill, and the changes recommended will help ensure that the bill achieves its intended purpose.

The bill makes changes to the Parole Act to implement the Government’s policy to reduce the number of unnecessary parole hearings where the offender has little prospect of release. The reduction in hearings will reduce unnecessary stress for victims of crime while also providing incentives for offenders to address their offending behaviours. The bill also improves the efficiency of the parole system by simplifying pre-hearing processes and clarifying issues around attendance at hearings conducted by the New Zealand Parole Board.

The board currently holds around 6,000 parole hearings each year. Release is approved at about 25 percent of those hearings. On average, each offender has three hearings before release is approved. In a third of cases, there are four or more hearings. Currently, the Act provides that offenders must be considered for parole at least once in every 12 months after they become eligible for parole.

This bill gives the Parole Board greater flexibility in scheduling future hearings. It does this by increasing from 12 months to 2 years the maximum interval between parole hearings where a postponement order has not been made. The change is intended to reduce the number of unnecessary parole hearings, but not to increase the length of time offenders serve in prison. The bill also gives the board the power to identify any relevant activities relating to the risk the offender poses to the safety of the community that it expects to be achieved before the next hearing. Offenders, as well as the Department of Corrections, can notify the board where there has been a significant change in the offender’s circumstances relating to release on parole. There will be provision for a scheduled hearing to be brought forward when all of the relevant activities that the board has identified as necessary to make the offender suitable for parole have been completed earlier than expected.

The bill also makes significant changes to the provisions relating to postponement orders. The board can make one of these orders to set a longer interval between hearings where it decides that no significant change in the offender’s circumstances is likely to occur in that time. The increase in the maximum interval between hearings to 2 years means that postponement orders are unnecessary for offenders serving sentences of less than 10 years. The bill therefore restricts the imposition of a postponement order to offenders serving indeterminate sentences or determinate sentences of 10 years or more. The maximum term of a postponement order will be increased to 5 years for all eligible offenders. As with other parole cases, the bill gives the board the power to identify relevant activities for offenders to complete for their hearing to be brought forward when imposing a postponement order.

The bill also makes amendments to procedural steps for hearings when the offender is not present, and clarifies that an offender or other authorised person can attend any type of hearing other than in person—for instance, by telephone or video link. This can, of course, be a more efficient way to conduct some of the hearings. In addition, the bill amends the Parole Act to ensure that standard release conditions automatically apply to all offenders released on parole. A default period of 6 months for those conditions is provided for offenders on determinate sentences.

These amendments are all aimed at streamlining and simplifying processes. It is intended that there will be savings made as a result of fewer hearings being held each year, and, importantly, that reducing the number of hearings will benefit the victims of imprisoned offenders in many cases. There is little sense in holding hearings when the offender has not addressed the reasons for their offending and remains a risk to the community. Furthermore, we need to keep in mind that these hearings do cause unnecessary stress and anxiety for victims as they are forced to relive the offence over and over. This bill is another step in our commitment to putting victims at the heart of our justice system. I commend it to the House.

The Labour Party supported the first reading of the Parole Amendment Bill when it was introduced to the House, and we followed the submissions through the Law and Order Committee very closely. They were interesting submitters, because they ranged, on one side, from the Sensible Sentencing Trust—and the Sensible Sentencing Trust basically does not believe there should be any parole at all; everybody should serve the full sentence to the last day of the sentence, and then be let out—to other groups like Rethinking Crime and Punishment, with Kim Workman, a former deputy head of the Department of Corrections. It is fair to say that they wanted probably a much more liberal approach of allowing people to be released as quickly as possible.

Among the submissions, I think the most important submission was from the Parole Board itself. The Parole Board provided a private submission. I want to thank Justice Gendall and Marion Frater for appearing before the select committee. But I want to thank them for something beyond that. They issued an invitation to us to sit in on parole hearings at prisons around the country. In 6 years as the Minister of Justice, I had never done that, and I have to say that for those of us on the committee who sat in, it was a fascinating experience. I was at the Auckland women’s prison, and there were people there who were sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. It was interesting to see the way in which the Parole Board operated, and I have to say that it gave me some confidence in the Parole Board. I have to say that everybody who appeared before the select committee congratulated the Parole Board on the way that it conducted its hearings and the way it did its job.

So I want to put this on record in the House. It is not an easy job being on the Parole Board. If you get it wrong—and inevitably, when you hear thousands of cases, from time to time you will get it wrong—you cop a lot of flak. But I believe, from what I saw, it did its job very professionally and in a humane way—but it was not a soft touch, having said that. As a result of those hearings, the select committee was in support of the thrust of this bill, with some changes that are significant, but not major, and also, Minister Adams, with a recommendation to you. I hope, as the new Minister of Justice, that you will look at that.

The recommendation related to a particular area that the Parole Board brought to our attention: that it often did not get information from civil courts on civil protection orders that were relevant to their hearings. That was a real worry to us, because the Parole Board is only as good as the information that it gets before it. We have thrown the ball back into your court, Minister. We have not held this bill up, but I would urge you to consider very seriously the recommendations of the select committee—which were bipartisan recommendations—so that there is an automatic provision to the Parole Board of civil protection orders, where that is relevant to the cases that the Parole Board is hearing. I think that would help them, and it provides, as you mentioned, additional protection to the victims, and we should always be doing that.

It is a controversial area, parole, and it is controversial because there are people who, when given parole, will reoffend. Occasionally, they reoffend seriously, and whenever this happens, the natural reaction of all of us is to say: “How the hell did that happen?”, and to ask whether the parole system is working. We have to make the system as good as possible, and minimise the risks that are posed. It is not an alternative simply to say that there should be no parole. Why is it not an alternative? Well, it would be an alternative if the Government wanted to spend hundreds of millions, or maybe billions, of dollars forcing everybody to serve their full sentence. And that would mean this: it would mean the majority of people who are released on parole who do not reoffend would be required to serve their full sentence, and that seems to me to be reasonably futile.

But there is an even stronger argument than that. All of the international studies that have been done on parole demonstrate quite clearly that if a person serves their prison sentence to the last day and is then released, they are much more likely to reoffend. The best way to minimise reoffending is to release early, and to release on conditions. So people have to turn up to their probation office, they have to meet conditions about where they live, who they work with, and who they associate with, and they know that when they are released, if they do something wrong, there is that power of recall. It is almost automatic if you offend seriously.

So the parole system, by and large, does work. But I have to say that when I looked at the parole system as Minister of Justice in the early part of the last Labour Government, I was really unhappy about the level of reoffending on parole, and we made major reforms. The Parole Act 2002 really did turn the system round. I was very pleased to pick up the regulatory impact statement for this bill to see what it said about a piece of legislation that was my baby more than 10 years ago, and, actually, I was really pleased because it said that it had been particularly effective as a piece of legislation. It acknowledged that what we did was to make the safety of the community the paramount consideration for the Parole Board—and that should always be the case. We said: “Don’t keep people locked up who do not need to be locked up, but your paramount consideration is the safety of the community.” We put in a particular clause—I remember debating it with the Ministry of Justice at the time—that the release of a prisoner must not pose an undue risk to the public. That is the principle that the Parole Board works on.

As a result of those changes, yes, there have been a greater number of individuals serving a greater proportion of their sentences. That put a bit of pressure on our prison system—as some of my Cabinet colleagues from those days will remember—but what did it achieve? This is where the regulatory impact statement on this bill is particularly interesting. It said that “the number of offences committed by prisoners in the period between release on parole and sentence end date has halved.”—the number of the people who offended halved—and, on a different measure, it said that the harm done by that offending also more than halved. So I can stand up in the House today and say with a great deal of pride that a piece of legislation that I sweated blood over at the time has been effective and, by and large, it has stood the test of time.

However, over a 12-year period, of course you learn something from the experience of the Act. I think it is sensible to review any piece of legislation, and the Government has done that. The recommendations of the Department of Corrections were to change one aspect of the Act that says that when you come up for your parole date, if you are not given parole on that occasion, then you have to be seen again within 12 months. There were problems with that, and the first problem was that most people have to do three parole hearings before they are released and, actually, often the first one or two of those parole hearings are just formulaic. Everybody knows that the inmate is not going to be released.

Let me give you one other statistic. A third of the inmates have at least four or more parole hearings before they are released. What does that do? Well, first of all, it takes up a lot of time from the Parole Board and adds to the cost, but to me that is not the major element. The second thing it does is that if it is a serious offence, for the person who is the victim of that offender—who is notified, as they should be, which was part of my legislation—it causes, in some cases, concern and, in other cases, major trauma. So if you are not going to release an inmate, and everybody knows it, why put the victim through that process?

For the offender, himself or herself, it means false hope, because you are not going to get parole, and that just leads to frustration. It is estimated that this legislation will cut parole hearings, which reached about 8,000 a year last year, by about 800. The important thing is that the Department of Corrections has said that this will not increase the length of time people spend in prison. Minister Adams might be interested in what the Parole Board said, because it ventured the opinion that this change will actually cut the amount of time people spend in prison, because often you go up to the Parole Board, but it is simply just an interruption in your programmes for rehabilitation that you have not completed. Until you have completed them, you cannot do parole, and that means you are turned down and you have to wait a further full year. Under this legislation, when you have completed your programmes to the satisfaction of the department, the Parole Board has the power to bring the Parole Board hearings forward, and you can be released earlier.

I think that is a really sensible idea, and I think that this will make the legislation work well. The report back to the House sets out the changes that we have recommended. They have been agreed by everybody, I think they should go through, and the Labour Party will be supporting the second and subsequent readings of this piece of legislation.

I will just acknowledge the contribution of the Hon Phil Goff, who is obviously someone very experienced in this place. But I will also just acknowledge some of the comments that he made, which do give a very good insight, I think, into some of the complexities we are dealing with, particularly with the nature of reoffending.

The reality is that most people—the very vast majority—who go to prison will come out again. Really, the challenge for parliamentarians, authorities, and the wider community is, I guess, to ensure that when they do come out of prison they do not go back in. So much of where we have failed, not only in New Zealand but around the world, I think, is in the fact that prison in itself is not the answer; it is what goes on inside there, and what goes on in terms of rehabilitating the individual. Obviously, there is a degree of punishment involved in it, but it is actually the opportunity to have, essentially, a captive audience—literally—in order to try and remediate and address the issues that have seen those people enter into the prison environment.

There are a multitude of reasons why people will find themselves in prison. Fundamental to the ability to prevent reoffending is the role that parole has in that, by setting the appropriate incentives, if you like, and by also ensuring that the message can be sent about what expectations there are on an individual to actually engage in rehabilitative behaviour and programmes that are going to ensure that there is a high probability that they will continue a lawful life thereafter and not end up back in the facility.

I was not on the Law and Order Committee when this bill was going through the submission process, being new to the committee, but I have been impressed by the work that has been done to look at this very, very important nexus. In terms of where this bill actually goes, there needs to be a degree of flexibility that reflects not only that it is important that victims are not continually revictimised by arbitrary time lines and parole hearings where it is very unlikely that an offender will actually be released—and that is obviously a very, very important consideration—but that it is just as important that it sends a message to the individual.

I am reminded of the film The Shawshank Redemption, and I am sure most members in this House will know of that movie, which is one of the greatest movies about hope that has ever been put together. On the one occasion when the subject of that movie said “Well, don’t waste your time with me. You put your rubber stamp there and away you go.”, he was granted parole. There is some sort of truth in that—and Mr Goff mentioned something about it—because to some extent the Parole Board has to get a sense of where the individual is before it can make a confirmed judgment that it thinks the risk-reward ratio is in the right balance. So there is an element of that. But by having a degree of flexibility, so that when you can see that someone is actually engaged in a rehabilitative process, and is genuine and motivated to get themselves out of that environment, the Parole Board can actually bring forward their next parole hearing as a result of that. Or, conversely, the board can extend that period if it can see that it clearly has not reached that point with an individual, so it does not waste its time and its money, and, more important, it does not cause feelings and emotions of revictimising in the victim by putting them through that process.

There is to some extent, I guess, a carrot-and-stick component to that. I think that is going to be very, very important, because the crux of what this whole parole system is about is ensuring that it is fit for purpose to ensure that there is the very best opportunity for re-engaging that individual, either in rehabilitation programmes that will ultimately resolve their propensity to offend, or by ensuring that their engagement in the community is going to support them to not reoffend. In introducing an element of flexibility—and I pick up on the point that Mr Goff made—this will not extend the amount of time that people are spending in prison. It could very well actually reduce the amount of time, by getting those settings right.

I think this is a very important piece of work. I think it is reflective of a justice system that understands that there is not one shoe that fits all feet here—[Interruption] Ha, ha. These shoes are made for walking, walking right out of prison, hopefully, in most cases. That is what this bill is really doing. It is making the parole system far more fit for purpose, far more efficient, and far more user-friendly for the victims of crime. Thank you.

I was not on the Law and Order Committee for the Parole Amendment Bill, but I may be at some point—who knows? I am interested in the bill. Labour is supporting this bill. It is always good when we have agreement across the House that something is worthwhile supporting. We do feel that victims of crime can often feel unnecessarily stressed, dealing with the prospect each year that their offender may be released when, in reality, there is little prospect of that. So, extending that period of time between parole hearings—from 12 months to 2 years—is a good idea. The justice system must work to support and protect the victims of crime. Maybe this is not entirely the answer to doing it, but this is one way in which we can do that.

Our vision is of a New Zealand that guarantees civil and human rights, provides equal and full access to justice, and achieves real public safety, rather than delivering just immediate punitive measures. Currently, the parole board is required to consider at least once every 12 months every offender who is eligible for parole. As I said, where there is little chance that an offender might be released, this causes unnecessary harm to victims and slows down the hearing process. We must have a fair parole system for offenders who have accepted their actions and who are ready to be rehabilitated; however, where they are not accepting of their actions or able to be rehabilitated, the parole hearings really are a waste of time.

This bill builds on previous work done by Labour, and I do want to acknowledge the former Labour speaker, the Hon Phil Goff—the Parole Board as we know it today actually comes from the work of Phil Goff. There do need to be assurances that suitable candidates for parole are not being detained for longer than necessary, although changes at the select committee, with the insertion of new section 21A by clause 10, address this. The select committee also said that in its consideration of the bill it became clear that information on civil protection orders was not automatically available to the Parole Board. The select committee said it “saw value in the Board having access to information on civil protection orders, which may be relevant to their decision making.” and “raised this issue with the Minister of Justice for her consideration.” It is hoping the Minister will look at this.

So there were changes made at the select committee by a majority of the Law and Order Committee. The majority recommended that the bill pass with the following amendments. The first is to replace the term “risk milestone” with “relevant activity”, as it was deemed “more neutral, and does not imply a measure of potential risk.” Another change was inserting clause 5A “so that standard release conditions applied automatically would be treated as if they were imposed by the Board.” The third change was “changing references to the Department of Corrections in clauses 10, 11, and 12 to ‘the manager of the prison in which the offender is detained’.” We support this bill. We support the changes that have been made at the select committee. I look forward to hearing more speeches in the House on this particular bill.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 6 p.m.