Ardern Jacinda: Parole Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Parole Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1522. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour):It is my pleasure to take a call in the Committee stage of the Parole Amendment Bill. I thought it would be helpful to backtrack slightly just to cover off—before I come to some specific clauses that the Law and Order Committee considered at greater length—the overall issue that this bill as a whole is seeking to tackle.The Parole Act is I guess relatively speaking a newish Act. Well it feels new to me because I remember its introduction. It probably feels very new to the Hon Phil Goff who obviously was the Minister in charge at the time. The Parole Act 2002 the Act we are seeking to amend sets out some core principles that remain unaltered in the way that the Parole Board operates the most key of which is that the Parole Board when considering parole for offenders will give paramount consideration to the safety of the community. Amongst all of the other competing issues that the Parole Board considers the No. 1 consideration when determining the release of an offender and indeed when determining when the board meets again to consider the release of that offender is the safety of the community. So that continues to be the guiding principle of the Parole Board in that consideration.Having said that the Parole Board obviously has a number of offenders that it is continually having to review in order to determine whether or not they have reached that threshold. Under the status quo the board is required once every 12 months to give consideration to an offender who is eligible for parole—that is once every 12 months for a general sentence but if there is an indeterminate sentence for an offender that is every 3 years. The bill seeks to extend this to 5 years as a possibility for the Parole Board if it so chooses. That however does mean that we have a reasonable number of Parole Board hearings.The regulatory impact statement sets out that in 2010-11 the board held around 5000 parole hearings. However given that this bill as a whole seeks to check the efficiency of that number of hearings it is interesting to see that those are not all parole hearings where the potential release of an offender is considered. As the regulatory impact statement sets out 500 are recall hearings 200 are variation of condition hearings and 500 hearings are where the board’s only role is to set conditions because an offender has reached their statutory release date. We now know however obviously with some of the additional bills that have recently been passed through the House that a statutory release date does not now necessarily mean the end of supervision or necessarily the end of imprisonment.Having deducted those hearings you are then left with roughly 3800 Parole Board hearings where we can assume that there is potentially the consideration of an offender for release. Not all of those hearings—and we heard this at the select committee and I think it is an important point to make—will necessarily involve a victim. Of course not all of the offenders who are serving in our prisons will have a victim in the traditional sense of the word; their victim may have been an entity—it may be white-collar crime for instance. So not all of these hearings will involve a victim but a number certainly do. And in considering whether or not we are using the Parole Board most efficiently we must also consider whether we are inappropriately re-traumatising victims unnecessarily because there simply is no prospect of an offender potentially being considered for parole. I am sure the Minister in the chair the Hon Amy Adams will correct me if I am wrong but that does seem to be the primary driver of this legislation and it is hard to deny that principle when that is at the heart of this bill.But I think it is still important to note that some of these Parole Board hearings can of course be unattended—the Parole Board may make a decision that it does not require an offender to be there. That would of course from the perspective of a victim change the nature of a Parole Board hearing. And there is the ability to delay a Parole Board hearing but we heard at the committee that that can be litigated by an offender and that it can turn into quite a lengthy and drawn-out process and one that benefits no one.Also I think it is critically important to note that Parole Board hearings are not used by the Parole Board just to consider release. In fact the Parole Board will often use hearings when it views itself that an offender is simply not ready in order to set down for want of a better word goals or milestones that it would like to see an offender achieve in order for them to be considered for release at the next board hearing. One concern we raised at the select committee regarding the idea of delaying adding lengthier times between Parole Board hearings was whether there would be a check against the goals the Parole Board is setting down for an offender to ensure that they were actually occurring.Let me explain what I mean by that. It might be that the Parole Board does not consider an offender eligible for parole but sets out to the prison manager that its expectation is that the offender will be enrolled in a work-readiness programme or that they will undertake one of the many stopping violence programmes that our prison service offers. It is not a given that because a Parole Board makes that request that programme will be undertaken. In fact we heard a lot of evidence to suggest that many times the Parole Board would see that those milestones—although we are not using the word milestones because in the legislation we did not want to give the suggestion that if they were achieved it meant automatic release. We heard a lot of discussion about how if those specified actions were set down we would then check that they were completed by the prison management and ensure that they were taking place. That remains a concern. We even had a discussion as to whether we actually need an alternative mechanism that is not the Parole Board and is an independent body that ensures that the Department of Corrections is making sure that prisoners are fulfilling some of those milestones.Some of us even had the opportunity to sit in on Parole Board hearings. A prime example: I sat in on a hearing where an offender had been before the board. The board had set down a number of things they wanted to be completed. They had all been completed bar one: appropriate housing had not been found for that offender. The Parole Board considered that offender to be ready for release but because no suitable housing had been found—and of course the Department of Corrections was involved in that—they refused to release that offender. It is not a good use of taxpayer resources to continue to imprison someone whom the Parole Board considers ready for release because there are elements of the service that were just not being provided. That is something we continue to have a concern about; however the principle of the bill in terms of discretion for the board we consider sound. Allowing that extra time delay between Parole Board hearings was we think something we could certainly support.I want to look specifically at new section 21A inserted by clause 10—in it we made an addition as a select committee. New section 21A says this: the board “(a) must specify a date (the specified date) by which the offender must be further considered for parole;”. This provision also gives the ability that where the date for the next parole hearing is beyond 12 months if the Department of Corrections considers or as the bill states if “the manager of the prison in which the offender is detained considers”—obviously because the department does not run all of our prisons now—“that all of the relevant activities have been completed” they can give notice to the offender that the board may consider hearing their application. So there is some discretion built into that. It is interesting that in new section 26 inserted by clause 11 again we actually talk about the manager not of the department but of the prison and there is no reference to the Department of Corrections. It does make you wonder whether or not this bill is in preparation for the further privatisation of our prison service.We thought that was a sensible amendment for the select committee to make and as I have already said in those clauses it also sets out “relevant activities” rather than “milestones” because it was certainly just too misleading to claim a milestone because it does give the impression that if an offender were to reach it it would mean there would be some kind of automatic release.One of the other key considerations that came up as a by-product of hearing this bill—I see my time is possibly about to expire. I would happily take another call to expand on that issue.