Goff Phil: Parole Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Parole Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 06 November 2014. Volume:701;Page:741. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):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 8000 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.