Parole Amendment Bill

It is a pleasure to talk on the Parole Amendment Bill. I would just like to preface my opening comments by reading from an article from Mana magazine. It is an article by reporter Aaron Smale. The article is called “Inside out” and it looks at the reasons why Māori tend to be incarcerated more often than they should be. There is a reference to Judge Sir David Carruthers that I would like to read out. Judge Sir David Carruthers has worked in virtually every area of the system. He has been the Principal Youth Court Judge, the Chief District Court Judge, the head of the Parole Board, and is currently the chair of the Independent Police Conduct Authority. It says: “He well knows from his time at the Parole Board that parole is often portrayed as a risk to the community, but the whole purpose of parole is to reduce the risk by managing an offender’s reintegration into society. The alternative is to simply kick them out of the gate without any of those support structures in place. The international research shows that release on parole is something like four to five times more successful at preventing reoffending than automatic release at the end of the term.” I think that is a very apt start to the Committee stage of this bill.

This bill requires the board, when it declines to release an offender on parole, to specify when the offender will next be considered for parole. The bill also gives the Parole Board the power, when it is setting the date of the next hearing, to identify any milestones relating to the risk of the offender. That is a great segue into the first clause that I would like to touch on, this whole risk milestone that was referenced in the Bills Digest. They have removed that term “risk milestone” from the bill and have replaced it with what they call “relevant activities”. So a relevant activity is an activity or a programme for the rehabilitation or reintegration of offenders that is specified by the board. I think “risk milestone” is too much of a negative term and had negative connotations. It said that prisoners had to pass certain milestones, and if they did not, then they were at a bit of a risk. I think that has rightly been corrected and that “relevant activities” is better terminology. As I have said, these are programmes for rehabilitation or reintegration.

You may ask what programmes for rehabilitation or reintegration into society would look like. For example, there are drug and alcohol programmes that are available for prisoners. When prisoners go into prison now, they are assessed for their needs around whether they have a drug or alcohol problem and they are given these programmes to address that need. It is appropriate that these drug and alcohol programmes are there for them. There are also employment activities, like participation in employment training, so that they can actually be prepared for their release or reintegration into society and, hopefully, reduce their risk of offending.

I would like to move on now to clause 5, which amends section 13A. Funnily enough, this is about epidemic preparedness. You might wonder what on earth preparedness for an epidemic has got to do with parole. Funnily enough, if there happens to be an epidemic—swine flu or pig flu or bird flu or man flu or whatever epidemic there is going around—prisoners are entitled on their release date to be released back into the community. It would be inappropriate for something such as an epidemic to stop people from being released on the appropriate day.

If you have a Parole Board meeting, people from around the country come in and have the right to attend the Parole Board meeting. If they come from an area where there happens to be one of these epidemics, such as swine flu or whatever, there is facility here for that Parole Board hearing to actually not go ahead in the usual form but instead for documents and documentation to be the basis on which the board makes its decisions. I think that that is fair because, as I have said, we do not want people to be denied the opportunity to be released on the day that their sentence ends.

I know that there are organisations in New Zealand such as the Sensible Sentencing Trust that would not care less if people were locked up and the key thrown away and if none of their needs were ever addressed. I think that is a very sad indictment on the sort of society that those people wish to live in. They really do not care about the imminent rehabilitation and reintegration of people into our society.

Clause 5A amends section 14, which is around standard release conditions. Standard release conditions are the conditions that an offender who is subject to release conditions must comply with. After section 14(3) a new section 14(4) is inserted. For example, when an offender is released, they need to report to a probation officer not later than 72 hours after their release. You can understand why that is needed. They are released from prison and they need to see their probation officer to make sure that they are adhering to any conditions. The offender must notify the probation officer of his or her residential address, obviously so that where they are living can be checked to make sure that they are living in an appropriate place.

Another standard release condition is that the offender must not move to another residential address in another probation area. So if they are released to one probation area they cannot just up and move into another probation area and set up shop there without the probation officer knowing. They can apply for that and, if the probation officer gives them permission to do so, they may move and then they need to notify the new probation officer in the new probation area that that is actually the case.

So there are all these sorts of standard release conditions that they must adhere to. A few others that they must adhere to include when a probation officer has directed that they do not engage with any specified person—and you can understand that. There might be somebody who would be a bad influence on the offender or who may have been involved in the crime or may be a relation of the victim of the crime and they are not to go near or associate with those people. And that is another appropriate release condition.

New section 14(4) inserted by clause 5A states: “For the purposes of any provision of this Act relating to the imposition of standard release conditions, those conditions must be treated as if they were imposed by the Board.” This means that even though the probation officer imposes the conditions, they must be treated as if it is in fact the Parole Board that has imposed these conditions, not just the parole officer, though the parole officer is acting under the direct line of the Parole Board.

As we go through and debate this bill there are going to be a number of further clauses that we discuss as we get into the nitty-gritty of it, so I will leave my initial contribution there and I look forward to some contributions from other members around the Chamber. I think we really do need to address these amendments so that we do actually make sure that people are released into the community, they are rehabilitated, and they do have opportunities for education and upskilling and growing before they are released.

I seek leave for the Parole Amendment Bill to be taken as one question.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is none.

Part 1 Amendments to Part 1 of Parole Act 2002 (continued), Part 2, and clauses 1 to 3