Parole Amendment Bill

I move, That the Parole Amendment Bill be now read a third time. The bill implements the Government’s policy to reduce the number of unnecessary parole hearings where the offender has little prospect of release. It also includes a range of other measures to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the parole system. There is general agreement that hearings where the offender has yet to address the reasons for their offending and continues to pose a risk to the community serve little purpose. They also cause unnecessary stress for victims, for whom parole hearings can often be a significant cause of anxiety. Under the current Parole Act, the Parole Board is generally required to consider each offender at least once in every 12 months after they become eligible for parole. On average, each offender has three hearings before they are approved for release, and a third of all offenders have four or more hearings. It is estimated that in excess of 800 parole hearings that do not need to take place are held each year.

The bill increases the maximum interval between the hearings and the general run of cases from 1 year to 2 years. This will give the board greater flexibility in scheduling future hearings and the ability to better align future hearings with the completion of core components of the prisoner’s sentence plan. The bill requires the board, when it declines to release an offender on parole, to specify when the offender will next be considered for parole. It also gives the board the power to identify any relevant activities that it expects to be completed before the next hearing. To provide an incentive for prisoners to address the reasons for their offending, the bill includes a new process for having their cases brought forward where the specified activities are completed earlier than expected.

The bill also makes significant changes to the revisions relating to postponement orders. Under the current Act the Parole Board can make one of these orders where it is satisfied that in the absence of a significant change in the offender’s circumstances, they will not be suitable for release at the time when they are next due to be considered for parole. Currently, the board can make orders for up to 3 years for prisoners serving indeterminate sentences and up to 2 years for other prisoners. The increase in the maximum interval between hearings from 1 to 2 years in the normal run of cases will remove the need for postponement orders for prisoners serving sentences of less than 10 years. The bill, therefore, restricts postponement orders to prisoners subject to indeterminate sentences—that is, life imprisonment and preventive detention—and determinate sentences of 10 years or more. The maximum term of a postponement order will be increased to 5 years, accordingly.

The Parole Board makes 30 to 40 of these orders each year and they play an important role in parole decision-making. They are commonly made for offenders convicted of the very worst murders who continue to pose a serious risk to the community. Importantly, the orders provide comfort to the families of victims. In these cases the board will now be able to make an order postponing the further consideration of an offender for up to 5 years, as is appropriate.

In addition to these important changes, the bill includes a number of other measures to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the Parole Board’s operations and to reduce the number of unnecessary hearings. These measures include transferring the power to deal with written applications from prisoners to have their hearings brought forward from a panel of board members to the chairperson or a panel convenor, and removing the procedural steps in the Parole Act for deciding whether a hearing should be held as an attended or unattended hearing. The bill takes a more practical approach of specifying the circumstances in which the board can conduct an unattended hearing, although the prisoner will have the right to attend if they wish to do so.

Parole hearings can cause unnecessary stress and anxiety for victims. This bill is further demonstration of our commitment to put victims at the heart of our justice system. The measures outlined in the bill will better support victims by making significant improvements to the parole system, which performs an extremely important role in keeping our communities safe. I commend the bill to the House.

I want to begin, as many of my colleagues in the House have done today, by paying my respects to the advocate, storyteller, and, ultimately, world-changer in her own right who was Celia Lashlie. Many of her works actually sit on my bedside table, not least because she was always one of those individuals who managed so carefully to put stories where previously only statistics existed. She reminded us that behind every grim headline and every known story was, in and of itself, a very grim story, and one that is within our power to change. It is an important lesson, which I first learnt from my father. She gave us the uncomfortable truth that change for many young people was something that politicians could play a role in too. Although I hold great hope that groups like JustSpeak will continue her fantastic legacy, for now it is up to us to pass on our condolences to her family, who have not lost a campaigner; they have lost a grandmother and mother.

I come now, though, to the Parole Amendment Bill. This is obviously the last point in our justice system, really, at which we interface with an offender, at a time when they are meant to be transitioning, eventually, back into the community. I want to acknowledge the origin, though, of this bill. It was introduced in 2002. It was crafted by Phil Goff, who was Minister of Justice at the time. He saw fit for the Parole Board to have one principle as its primary consideration when considering whether or not an offender would be released into the community, and that was the safety of the community. That has not changed. Alongside that, within the Parole Act, are also set out the parameters around when an offender can be deemed to be eligible. Previously, there had been automatic release dates built into sentences. That was removed and was instead replaced with the possibility for an offender to be reviewed by a Parole Board every 12 months once they reached a certain point in their sentence. For indeterminate sentences their eligibility is to be reviewed every 3 years, and that is appropriate given the severity of the offences that those individuals may have committed.

But parole and the Parole Board do play other roles, and that is something we have discussed a little bit in the debate on this bill. Probably one of the most significant roles that the Parole Board plays, aside from determining whether an offender is to be released or not, is checking whether or not milestones, as they were originally called, are being reached by an offender—and, I will add, being reached by the Department of Corrections. An offender cannot themselves access a programme without it being facilitated by the department. Those programmes are many. They are drug and alcohol programmes; stopping violence programmes; specialised sexual abuse programmes like those offered at Rolleston Prison, which are highly effective; and work-to-release programmes. For instance, it is even the role of the Parole Board to check whether a prisoner would have access to adequate housing if they were released. They also check behavioural change. At a meeting they ask prison officers what the interaction with the prisoner has been like in the intervening period. I even sat in on a meeting where a discussion was had as to whether or not the offender had reconnected with their family as an important support group. These are the kinds of questions that the Parole Board will ask. Those are all important mechanisms, and when you delay an offender from coming before a Parole Board at regular intervals, you remove its ability to check that those things are occurring.

I want to come back to that in a moment, though, because, ultimately, primarily, that was not the driving force behind this bill; it was not about how regularly the Parole Board checks an offender’s progress against those milestones. The primary focus of this bill was to remove unnecessary parole meetings and to focus more on the victim. I understand absolutely those principles and those goals, and that is the primary reason why we are supporting this bill, because we do believe that there is value in doing that and that perhaps we are not being as efficient as we could be in the way that the Parole Board is currently operating. But we do need to keep it in perspective.

Engagement with the Parole Board by victims is somewhat limited at the moment. That might be for many reasons. It might be because a victim chooses not to be engaged. It might be because the scale of crimes involving victims is, as a proportion, somewhat smaller. But roughly 7 percent of victims make submissions to the Parole Board, and 3 percent are likely to attend. That is not to trivialise the impact that a Parole Board hearing—and frequent Parole Board hearings—has on a victim, particularly when there is no hope of release. In fact, we heard from many victims who found ongoing repeat Parole Board hearings, particularly for those offenders who had indefinite sentences, to be a repeat victimisation. They found the hearings extremely traumatic, and that is totally understandable. So that is also why we support increasing, at the Parole Board’s discretion, the possible gap between Parole Board hearings from 3 years to up to 5 years for those offenders at the extreme end. But at the same time, it is also important that we are monitoring, on behalf of victims, the way that the prisoner is engaging with the prison system in the intervening period.

One of the things that was raised at the select committee, which we discussed, was whether it is possible to separate out those two roles. Yes, the Parole Board decides whether or not a prisoner should be released, but it also checks that the department is doing its job and making sure that the prisoners are attending all of the programmes that are available. If we are not sending a prisoner back to the Parole Board for consideration for release, is there a way at least to send them somewhere where there can be some discussion as to whether they are attending programmes—whether they are on track to get back to that Parole Board meeting and demonstrate some engagement at all. At the moment, for the Parole Board it seems that by ruling out one option—consideration for release—we are removing the check and balance role that it has played against the Department of Corrections, which has had issues in the past.

There are scheduling issues with programmes within our prison system. The Auditor-General has raised this and has confirmed it. The scaling up of the availability of programmes has meant that, actually, there has been a bit of a hitch with all of it, in that we are not always getting prisoners into programmes where we should, and we are not necessarily timing the programmes for the appropriate time in their sentence pre-release. That is something that is of concern, and by doing this, we do lose that ability to monitor them.

I want to speak just very quickly about a couple of the things that the Law and Order Committee has changed as part of its work, which we have traversed a little bit, all of which we think are suitable changes. The term “risk milestone”—that is, some of the things I have talked about that the Parole Board can set out as needing to be achieved—has been changed to “relevant activity”. This makes total sense. A milestone implies that if you achieve it, you are going to be released. Nothing is automatic, nor should a Parole Board’s decision be predetermined in that way. Standard release conditions—we made sure that when no set time frame is set out by the Parole Board, there is, at least, a standard default term of 6 months for release conditions.

We made a change to references to the Department of Corrections in several clauses of the bill, so it reads “the manager of the prison in which the offender is detained”. I have to say I disagree with the rationale that was given for that in the explanatory note of the bill, which is that there was a lack of clarity. I think there is plenty of clarity in stating that the Department of Corrections has responsibility. There is less clarity when you just open it up to the manager of a prison, because then we are not sure whether or not we are talking about a Serco prison or a Department of Corrections prison. So let us be really honest about why that was changed and broadened in that way. Dates of future parole hearings—we made sure that there was discretion to bring forward meetings if that was deemed appropriate.

Finally, and very importantly, because this bill is about to come up soon, we wanted to highlight with the Minister that information sharing with the Parole Board was lacking, particularly in civil orders. We understand that via the Judicature Modernisation Bill there will be the ability to have a memorandum of understanding to make sure that information is shared. We want to highlight again and put on record that information sharing with the Parole Board is critical to ensure it makes appropriate decisions. Otherwise, we do support this bill, we think it contains sensible changes, and we commend it to the House.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak during the third reading of the Parole Amendment Bill.

National is committed to building a safer New Zealand. Presently, we have the lowest crime rate in 35 years. Before we took office in 2008, crime was increasing, gangs were growing stronger, prisons faced a critical shortage of beds, P was seriously damaging communities, violent repeat offenders were being freed on parole, and the courts were congested. National embarked on a comprehensive programme of reforms. We have passed new laws and made some other policy changes to improve public safety and the rights of victims. This has resulted in less crime, tougher sentences and parole law, more police on the front line, a crackdown on illegal drugs, and $1 million of seized assets from gangs. We have averted the prison crowding crisis and increased public confidence in law enforcement.

The Parole Amendment Bill implements the Government’s plan to reduce the number of unnecessary parole hearings where the offender has little prospect of release. The bill also includes ways to improve the effectiveness of other parole systems. The purpose of the parole hearing is to determine whether the offender has managed to address the issues, or whether he or she continues to pose a risk. On average, each offender has three hearings prior to release, but there are four or more hearings in a third of all cases. The exception is where the Parole Board makes a special order postponing further consideration of a case for a longer period.

The bill increases the maximum interval between hearings in the general run of cases from 1 year to 2 years. This will give the Parole Board greater flexibility in reducing further hearings. Depending upon the advice that the Parole Board receives from corrections officials, it may then prepare for future hearings. The existing law requires a hearing at least once every 12 months. This has, without doubt, led to a number of problems, which this bill will address. A further hearing has to be scheduled in a few months’ time, in many cases because the offender is still completing core components of their offenders plan. This bill requires the board, when it declines to release an offender on parole, to specify whether the offender will next be in consideration for parole or not. It allows the board to specify any particular milestone relating to the offender’s risk that is expected to change before the next hearing. As an incentive for prisoners to address the reasons for their offending, the bill includes a process for having their cases brought forward when a milestone is achieved earlier than expected.

The person who suffers the most is the victim. Therefore, by way of legislation, we want to put victims first. We want to deliver on our promise of reforming legislation that may be outdated. Our reforms are targeted at ensuring that we protect our communities, reduce crime, and put victims first. The bill proposes a number of amendments to the Parole Act 2002. I commend the work of the current and previous Ministers of Justice and officials for their initiative and for the progress the bill has made through various levels. We want to put victims first, but we also want to ensure that prisoners who show good, positive behaviour have every chance of being let out on parole.

As I said earlier, our intention is to put victims at the heart of the justice system and deliver on our promises. Our plans to reduce unnecessary parole hearings for offenders will reduce stress on the victims of crime. Victims of crime should not have to face the stress 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. As it is the victims of crime who suffer a lot psychologically and emotionally, we should try to relieve some of their stress and not add to it. Each year there are about 5,000 parole hearings. On average, offenders have three hearings before being granted parole. By no means may this be fair on the victims, especially when the chances of being granted parole are very slim. 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 a strong incentive for prisoners to address their offending behaviour, and that is a good thing. We have, since returning to Government, introduced a number of changes that have resulted in positive changes to the lives of prisoners. We have educational plans for prisoners. This has resulted in the number of prisoners gaining qualifications increasing from 197 in 2008-09 to 1,833 in 2012-13. In addition, an extra 3,000 prisoners have enrolled in literacy and numeracy training in 2013-14. This number has increased by 155 percent.

It is with great pride that I can share that the drug and alcohol treatment programme has seen a dramatic rise of 1,500 percent. The more we can assist prisoners in getting back to a normal lifestyle when they are inside prison, the better the chance is that they will not reoffend or commit a crime when they are released. Further, with the training and qualifications that they can gain, there is a fair chance that most of these prisoners may well become positive, contributing members of our society.

At the Law and Order Committee we had a good discussion on all these elements of this legislation. The committee felt that we should replace the term “risk milestone” with the words “relevant activity”. Further, in a case where the Parole Board did not specify a time frame for the standard release conditions, then the default time has to be 6 months. The committee recommended that this clause be inserted in the legislation. The committee also recommended that when a Parole Board application is declined, the board may specify a set of activities that the offender must complete before an application is reconsidered. By way of these and other amendments proposed, the National-led Government wants to ensure less stress on victims, while giving offenders an opportunity to improve their behaviour.

Based on the behaviour displayed by offenders, the Parole Board may, of course, set an earlier hearing date. Hearing dates can be aligned with the completion of their rehabilitation programme. By way of making these changes, we hope to save the Department of Corrections $700,000. I am sure that this amount can be used towards improving services elsewhere. This focus is in line with our goal of prioritising spending and delivering better public services. Most of all, we are putting victims first in our attempt to reduce their stress. With these words, I commend this bill to the House.

💬 Chris Bishop: Oh, great speech.

I do not know about that being a great speech, as interjected by the member Chris Bishop. I think Mr Bakshi should sack the researcher who carefully drafted those notes that he read out. I do so on the basis that, frankly, they are factually incorrect. If the member looks at the facts, he will read that crime in New Zealand has, in fact, been declining in the trend lines since the 1990s. If he looks at the facts—and I can help him with a little institutional memory because I was in Parliament over that period of time—the major pieces of reform of legislation in this area were conducted under the last Government: the Parole Act, the Sentencing Act. The very Act that this Parole Amendment Bill amends halved the rate of reoffending of people on parole. If the member does not believe me, read the regulatory impact statement in the bill on the Table. It tells him that. The Parole Act toughened the legislation. It said that safety must be the paramount consideration of the Parole Board and that the Parole Board should not take decisions that put the public at undue risk.

I made those changes at a certain cost. The cost was that people who should not be released from prison were not released from prison, and prison numbers went up. This bill—and I do not condemn it for that—will not increase the days spent in prison by any prisoner in any way at all. I support this bill. But please, Mr Bakshi, get the facts right. The changes in the prison system about rehabilitation, about education, about providing work, and about dealing with drug and alcohol problems began in the first decade of the 21st century. And to give credit to this Government, it continued them. But let us not bend the facts for political purposes.

When I say that, I want to take a moment to acknowledge, as my colleague Jacinda Ardern did, the passing of Cecelia Lashlie. She was a woman whom I hugely admired. She was passionate about what she did. She was utterly committed and dedicated. It was a way of life for her to do something to help the people who ended up in our prison system and to keep people out of the prison system. The thing that Cecelia Lashlie would have most condemned is the politicisation of law and order issues to score political points. That is what she deplored—that is what she deplored.

💬 Chris Bishop: Oh!

Read what she wrote, Mr Bishop. You will see for yourself. She looked at this from the eyes of a person who wanted to make life better for the individuals who ended up in the corrections system and so keep New Zealanders safe, because she would address the causes of the offending, not treat the symptoms. As we consider any piece of legislation like that, we should keep her philosophy, her principles, and her values in mind. I pay tribute to her memory.

We support the changes in this bill. We supported them in the first reading of the bill and through the select committee process and through subsequent readings. We support them because these are rational and sensible changes to make. The Parole Board, to which we give responsibility to act under this legislation, also supports the changes that are being made. It also made the point that, if anything, this will not extend the time people spend in prison, but it may well reduce it. But it will do so on a rational basis.

Parole is a controversial area. The Parole Board will make mistakes from time to time. It will make mistakes either because it does not have the full information it needs or simply because human behaviour is not always predictable in this area. But generally it will get it right. What was noticeable with the people who appeared before the Law and Order Committee on this bill was that everybody, from the hard-liners on law and order—the Sensible Sentencing Trust—right down to people like Kim Workman from Rethinking Crime and Punishment said the Parole Board did a pretty good job.

One of the things the Parole Board has remarked upon is that it was seeing people three, four, five times before it made the decision that the person was ready for release. And because in the original legislation we set the period of time for review by the Parole Board to no more than 12 months—which meant, effectively, that it would often be looking at the person every 11 months—the offenders were coming before the Parole Board without having completed their rehabilitation programmes. The offender, the prison managers, and the Parole Board would know that this was not the right time for their release. So this is not a hard-line law and order issue. This is simply saying let us give the Parole Board the flexibility to determine that maybe a person does not need to come before the Parole Board every 12 months; they may come before the Parole Board every 2 years, initially. It gives the Parole Board the additional flexibility, which I think is really sensible, that if a person actually achieves their rehabilitation goals early, then they can come before the Parole Board early and be released early.

I know there are some people who say there should be no parole. From time to time—from the ACT Party and from the right wing of the National Party—we have had a preaching of these words: “Truth in sentencing. Let them serve to the last day of the sentence, and then release them.” It sounds good in the electorate when people are concerned about law and order issues, but what actually happens in practice is that it does not work. For a start, you end up keeping the vast majority of people in prison who would not reoffend for longer than they need to be there and at a cost of over $90,000 per prisoner per year. We are spending a hell of a lot of money, to no good public purpose. If a person is ready to be released because they have shown remorse, because they have acknowledged the causes of their offending, and because they are unlikely to reoffend, why would you keep them in prison until the last day of their sentence? It does not make sense at all.

But there is another factor, and it is this: when offenders are kept until the last day of their sentence and are then released, the empirical evidence shows quite clearly that they are much more likely to reoffend. So what do you do? Do you release them from total confinement to total liberty? That is dumb; it is a really stupid thing to do. It increases the rate of reoffending. Or do you put them on parole, where they have to report weekly to a probation officer, where they are under the close supervision of a probation officer, and where they can be directed as to where they live, work, and with whom they associate? That works, and that is the system that we should sustain, and this bill actually improves the way that system works. That is why the Labour Party is supporting it.

The critical change, as I mentioned, is that the Parole Board now has the ability—the flexibility—to determine that there will be a wider space between parole hearings, where appropriate. The Parole Board can also, as I mentioned before, bring forward parole hearings, and the Parole Board can also issue postponement orders. Postponement orders allow it to extend the period between parole hearings to 5 years, compared with the normal restriction of a 2-year period. But that will be done only when a prisoner is serving an indeterminate sentence—a life sentence or preventive detention—or when a person is on a determinate sentence but has more than 10 years in prison. Postponement orders will not be used frequently, but they will be available, as they were under the last Act, but extended to that 5-year period.

I think this bill strikes the balance between protection of the community and the rehabilitative needs of those who are in prison, and the need for the community to be safe and a rational system that will cut down the number of parole hearings—not in a way that disadvantages the offender but in a way that is rational. I commend the bill to the House.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.