Parole Amendment Bill

I was not on the select committee considering this bill, the Law and Order Committee, but I can see why Labour supports this particular bill. This bill amends the Parole Act 2002 to increase the maximum time between parole hearings from 12 months to 2 years. For offenders serving indeterminate sentences or sentences of 10 or more years, the maximum time between parole hearings increases from 3 to 5 years. Hearings will also be aligned with the completion of core milestones in an inmate’s offender plan, and this is estimated to reduce the number of parole hearings by 800 per year. We support this bill.

The one thing we are very aware of is that victims of crime can often feel unnecessary stress when dealing with the prospect that their offender may be released each year, when in reality there is little prospect of that. I think that each and every one of us in this House and members of the general public have seen on a number of occasions, particularly with high-profile cases, that there have been victims who have been traumatised by the fact that on an annual basis they and their families have had to go through these quite excruciating parole hearings. The justice system must work to support and protect the victims of crime. We do agree that putting them through this stress and trauma when there is very little hope of the perpetrator actually being released is unnecessary.

Labour’s 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 just delivering 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 before, where there is little chance an offender might be released, this does cause unnecessary harm. Although we must have a fair parole system for offenders who have accepted their actions and are ready to be rehabilitated, when they have not, parole hearings are a waste of time. This bill builds on previous work done by Labour. The Parole Board, as we know it today, comes from the work of Phil Goff. Actually, I think this particular bill has been sitting on the Order Paper for quite some time and could have actually been addressed a lot earlier than what it has been.

There does need to be some assurances that suitable candidates for parole are not being detained longer than necessary. Changes made at the select committee, with the insertion of new clauses 21A and 21B, address this, though. The select committee also said: “In our consideration of the Bill, it became clear that information on civil protection orders was not automatically available to the Parole Board. We see value in the Board having access to information on civil protection orders, which may be relevant to their decision making. We have raised this issue with the Minister of Justice for her consideration.” That was directly from the select committee, and we on this side of the House are hoping that the Minister will look at that.

So there have been changes to the bill made at the select committee. By majority, the Law and Order Committee recommended that the bill pass with the following amendments: that we replace the term “risk milestone” with “relevant activity”, as it “is more neutral and does not imply a measure of potential risk”; that we insert “clause 5A so that standard release conditions applied automatically would be treated as if they were imposed by the Board”; and that references to the Department of Corrections in clauses 10, 11, and 12 be changed to “the manager of the prison in which the offender is detained” because it is unclear currently who would be responsible for judging whether an offender has completed the relevant activities. There are two additional changes: “Clause 10 would insert new section 21A, which would require the Board to set a date for the next parole hearing when declining parole. It would also allow the next hearing to be brought forward if the offender completed specified relevant activities.” The final change recommended by the select committee was amending section 21A(b) “so that when declining parole the Board could specify completion of a relevant activity as a factor in bringing a parole hearing forward only when the next parole hearing was more than 12 months away.”

So we do support this bill, and I look forward to hearing the other speeches from the House. Thank you.

The—sorry, Jonathan Young. I was about to promote the member.

I look forward to that—especially from you! Can I just say congratulations to my colleague the Hon Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga on his work and his promotion to the corrections role and also to Carmel Sepuloni on her re-election back into the House. I am very pleased to stand in support of this bill, the Parole Amendment Bill. The bill proposes a number of amendments to the Parole Act 2002. The explanatory note states that they are “to reduce the number of unnecessary parole hearings but not to increase the length of time offenders spend in prison.” and improve efficiency by simplifying pre-hearing processes and clarifying when an offender’s attendance at a parole hearing is required. The proposed changes do not affect the earliest date at which an offender would become eligible for parole nor the actual length of an offender’s sentence.

What the bill does is provide for increases in the maximum interval between parole reviews and the maximum duration of a postponement order. The bill provides that if the Parole Board declines to release an offender on parole, it must ordinarily specify a date within the following 2 years for the offender’s next parole review instead of every year, as is currently the case. There is also a provision for the board to identify relevant activities—which, as the member Carmel Sepuloni stated, has been changed from that former term “milestones”—relating to the risk the offender poses to community safety for the offender to achieve before the next hearing. If the offender achieves these early, the case can be brought forward.

We are putting victims at the heart of the justice system and delivering on our promises. Our plans to reduce unnecessary parole hearings for offenders will reduce stress for victims of crime. Victims of crime should not have to face the very stressful prospect of parole hearings year after year when an offender is clearly not safe to be released into the community and has made little or no effort at rehabilitation. Each year there are about 5,000 parole hearings. On average, offenders have three hearings before being granted parole. Added to this, the bill provides that a victim, offender, or other authorised person can attend a parole hearing remotely, such as via video link or phone. Our changes are to bring efficiency into the system and also to protect the victims from ongoing trauma when it is unnecessary for this to happen. Our changes will provide strong incentives for prisoners to address their offending behaviour, and that is a good thing.

Just before I close, all prisoners have education screening with individual learning plans designed for them now. The number of prisoners gaining qualifications has increased by 830 percent, up from 197 in 2008-09 to 1,833 in 2012-13. Almost 3,000 prisoners have started literacy and numeracy programmes in the financial year 2013-14, up 155 percent compared with 2007-08, and there has been an almost 1,500 percent increase in places on drug and alcohol treatment programmes available for prisoners since 2008. There is every opportunity for prisoners to engage meaningfully in a rehabilitation process that enables them to receive their parole hearings. So not only will this prevent the unnecessary trauma or the revictimisation—nearly—of victims through that ongoing year-by-year parole basis but it also puts an onus upon prisoners to engage in that rehabilitation process in order to qualify for those parole reviews. I am very happy to commend this bill to the House.

It is interesting that we are debating this Parole Amendment Bill at this particular point when issues around early release of inmates from prison prior to completion of sentence are somewhat topical for obvious reasons to do with a particular individual’s sort of ill-considered trip to South America.

But before speaking to the specifics of the bill, I would just like to make some general comments about the value of parole. We are hearing voices—misguided voices, in my view—that would suggest that we ought to completely abolish parole. Clearly, this is not the intention of this bill—or anything near it—but we are starting to hear propositions that people sentenced to 3 years, 5 years, 7 years, whatever it is, should serve every day of that sentence and that parole should be eliminated, as has been applied in one or two constituencies, I think, in the USA, with not particularly satisfactory outcomes, I would have to say.

Parole has obvious and significant value. It allows for a degree of control to be applied to people after they have been released from prison and while they are returned into the community. It does give to the State a mechanism to apply some conditions and to keep a level of control and management of those individuals that would not otherwise be possible. There has been, again, one proposition that judges could set release conditions at the point of sentencing, which is a ludicrous proposition when you think it through. How on earth could a judge, whether they are sentencing someone 3, 5, or 10 years down the track, possibly be prescient enough to understand what conditions would prevail in terms of that person’s attitude and behaviours, and the level of rehabilitation that has occurred?

Clearly, parole also provides incentives for inmates to behave well while they are in prison. Behaviour in prison is a significant determinant of eligibility or not for parole, and to take that away would almost inevitably lead to prisons becoming more violent and more dangerous and places where there is less likelihood of any significant rehabilitation.

The Green Party is not convinced or persuaded of the necessity for this legislation, or that it will be in any way a useful or an effective contribution or solution to some of the issues that do surround parole. We understand the preference for extending the parole period between reviews for inmates where the chances of those people being released are acknowledged as being very slim. Inmates themselves often recognise that, albeit they are going through the motions, their chances of being released are very, very minuscule. However, we know there are existing mechanisms available to the Parole Board that could be used in the interim.

We note that there are mechanisms in this bill that allow for inmates who complete milestone events to have their eligibility for parole review reinstated. Our fundamental concern about that is that we know already that the Department of Corrections is struggling to keep up with provision of rehabilitation programmes. In its scheduling of these programmes and its ability to link offenders who wish to undergo rehabilitative programmes, be they education, work readiness, psychological work, drug and alcohol treatment, or whatever it might be, the Department of Corrections is struggling already to provide for these people.

We know that if we imposed a regime like this where one’s continued eligibility for parole review was a function of achieving programmes, for instance, the Department of Corrections would be inundated with requests for people to go into programmes that it simply is not equipped to meet. So it is sort of putting the cart before the horse a bit. It is creating a major incentive for inmates to seek rehabilitation while the provision is not there for those people to be put through those programmes and to undertake that treatment. We have heard that directly from the Department of Corrections and from people in the prison service. The lesser part of the issue is around its IT capacity, and its ability to actually schedule these events and these programmes, but more fundamentally it is simply that the resourcing is not there. We, in the Greens, actively advocate for—and have done for a long time—spending a lot less of the justice dollar on punishment. We need to reinvest that justice dollar into the provision of programmes.

I do have to acknowledge that the previous Minister of Justice and the existing one are putting a great deal more focus on rehabilitation and reintegration, but unfortunately the spend, the dollar, is not following the good intentions sufficiently quickly in order to enable otherwise quite good intentions to be fulfilled.

Part of the rationale that we are offered for the extension of time between reviews is efficiency and cost saving. Again, I am not suggesting that this is primarily a cost-saving measure, but it is projected that there would be some dollar savings. I think counter to that you would have to consider whether the outcome of this new regime will be that people actually do spend longer in prison. Every inmate, we know, costs on average about $95,000 to keep in prison. It would not require many such instances for any dollar savings to be very quickly chewed up by the fact that people are kept in prison longer.

The more fundamental purpose of this—and we heard it from a previous speaker—is that it is true that we know that there is considerable stress on victims who do feel obliged to attend parole hearings. That is not a trivial matter, but again we need to put that in perspective. We know—and again, these are the Department of Corrections’ figures; they may be perhaps up to a year out of date, but I think they will not have substantially changed—that only about 7 percent of eligible victims actually make submissions to Parole Board hearings, so about seven out of every 100 make some form of submission and often it will be a written submission. About 3 percent of victims choose to address the board in person.

I think a lot of people imagine that when a victim addresses the board, they are obliged to confront the person who offended against them. That is absolutely not the case. Victims are never required to be in the same room as the inmate, the person who offended against them. There is no such requirement of them. We are aware that the Parole Board is very sensitive to victims and seeks to accommodate them in comfortable, non-threatening surroundings, and often even travels to the victim, rather than obliging them to travel to the site of the prison or wherever it may be. We know this directly.

I must say that the Law and Order Committee did a good job on this bill. We actually took it upon ourselves under the leadership of the former chair of the committee, Jacqui Dean, to visit a prison and actually sit in on some Parole Board hearings. That was a very informative and valuable exercise to go through. We saw firsthand how the Parole Board operates and how it makes its decisions. It was a very useful addition to our knowledge and understanding of what actually goes on in the real world.

I think the question that can be fairly raised is the extent to which this significant but very small minority of victims do participate in Parole Board hearings—one may fairly wonder how important their voice actually is. That is in no way to diminish their involvement or their engagement with this process, but I think that the Parole Board rightly makes its judgment based on its clear belief and expectation of how people will behave once they are released from prison. Quite frankly, I think it would be almost taken as a given that a person who has been offended against would want that person to serve the maximum amount. In very few examples we do see people who are offended against but nevertheless express their forgiveness, and I respect that, but for the most part I think that the views and input of the victim would be a relatively small part in the overall mix that influences the Parole Board decisions.

I think we have to consider that there is a danger that part of the requirement would be that people confess to guilt. There is a very real likelihood that people who genuinely do believe themselves to be innocent—and it must be acknowledged that people on occasion are imprisoned and later found to be innocent of the offence that they were found guilty of—would simply tell lies. They would be compelled to admit guilt simply to be eligible for one of these releases.

In short, finally, I would say that we believe the Parole Board has existing mechanisms that enables it to not go through the motions unnecessarily. This proposal is well intentioned but we do not see that it would deliver the outcomes that are expected or that it would be intended to deliver. For that reason, we will not be supporting it.

Debate interrupted.