Clendon David: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4232. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green):I am pleased to make some initial brief comments on this Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill. It could scarcely be described as a bold bill. It will not change the world but it makes some useful and positive incremental changes to the Parole Act and the Sentencing Act.This bill is largely a response I guess to improvements in technology that enable some variations in the sentencing and parole management of prisoners which do provide alternatives to prison. For that reason alone the Greens would support it and indeed I should stress that we are supporting this legislation. It will come as no surprise to anyone to know that we are no great fans of prisons as an alleged solution to offending and crime. The Minister of Finance the Hon Bill English has quite accurately described prisons as a moral and fiscal failure in the 21st century. I think that awareness should underpin a lot of our work as we progress with considering how best to deal with matters around crime and what is appropriate in terms of imprisonment or not.As we have heard this legislation would allow some alternative sentencing to the paroling of people sentenced to less than 2 years. It deals with sentences of intensive supervision and enables electronic monitoring in those situations.I should just make the point that the regulatory impact statement and other documents around the bill do highlight the fact that there are issues around the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act with regard to this legislation. That has been a conundrum and that has been the reality with many of these Acts that now allow for extended supervision orders and the like. These are not trivial matters and we will be paying some quite close attention to that in the course of the select committee conversations because the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act is something that we ought not to tamper with or compromise readily without some really serious thought and evaluation of the cost and benefits. So that is something we will engage with at the appropriate level as I say in the select committee process.I mentioned that the nature of technology has changed. Historically electronic monitoring has really been an electronic leash if you like—something that tied an individual to a particular address—and OK it had some value in that. It was again often a better alternative to imprisonment. But it was very limited technology. It had somewhat perverse characteristics given that it operates on a radius from a given point. Very few of us live in perfectly round properties so it made it possible for people to do some strange things like jump the fence and visit the neighbour but not actually be able to go to the full extent of the property that they were allegedly confined to. So it is imperfect technology but it has got better.This new technology the GPS technology is much more enabling. It does allow people a level of freedom of movement subject of course to their staying out of identified exclusion zones and that is very positive. It means that people can be subject to monitoring subject to limitations on their movements but it does allow them to perhaps go out to work to go out to be educated and to go out and be involved in positive social activities such as allowing them to do their shopping or to develop these life skills that unfortunately a lot of our long-term inmates particularly simply do not have or they lose in the period of their imprisonment. It is a positive aspect of the proposed bill in that sense—that it is more enabling. It enables people to be participants but fairly carefully monitored to endeavour to limit the likelihood of them offending.I think we have to understand that the monitoring is a very limited tool albeit better than the old technology. It is a tool for managing but it is not a cure. It is not a treatment. It will not in and of itself assure us that these people will stop offending in the long term. Of course if somebody is wearing some sort of an electronic tag that enables people to be monitored either in real time or for them to leave an electronic trail if you like of their whereabouts that is going to discourage people for the period they are wearing that bracelet or subject to that monitoring. In and of itself it will not change people’s behaviours. It will not change their attitudes. To me this electronic monitoring is a useful tool to keep people a little bit on the straight and narrow while we are investing heavily in actually changing their attitude changing their behaviours and changing them in a long-term sense.If anybody was unsure of the power value or potential of rehabilitation they would have done well to join the Law and Order Committee last week. Some members of that committee visited Rimutaka Prison. We had a very compelling hour or so getting a presentation from two young men two young inmates—and they were young men in their 20s perhaps early 30s—who had been on a violence management programme for about 12 months. It is a very intensive programme and one that they found very difficult. It has changed those young men for the better undeniably. Their stories were different. They had no connection prior to prison. But unfortunately there were some very obvious and common characteristics to their backgrounds: very early exposure to drug and alcohol abuse dysfunctional families the gang became the safe haven the refuge and their sense of identity was embedded in gangs and all the violent behaviours associated with that. These men were put into an intensive programme for 12 months and at the end of that year they have broken through some barriers. Their level of self-awareness is what came through to me. They now understand that their offending hurt other people as well as themselves that it was not a way to live their lives that it did not enable them to stand proudly as parents as fathers.So rehabilitation can work if we invest in it if we put the right programmes in place and if we sustain those programmes over time. It is no good having a programme in the community for 12 months or 18 months and then can it through a lack of funding. We need to identify programmes that work for rehabilitation and reintegration invest in them and sustain them over time. It takes a long time for somebody who has 20 years 30 years or 40 years of offending. You do not turn those people around in 6 months a year or even 2 years. These technologies are useful in providing a means of transitioning out of the prisons which to my mind is often the worst solution into community-based treatment and programmes. Given that you cannot offer or expect a level of trustworthiness with some of these offenders who have proven themselves untrustworthy the electronic means the technologies do enable us to just keep them on the straight and narrow for a little while. But we must not confuse monitoring electronic technologies with long-term solutions. These are a means of enabling that transition to deal with the deep-seated causes of offending that have been embedded in their lives over time.We are happy to support this legislation albeit as I say with some ongoing concerns about the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act implications of it. We look to obviously minimise those and to see what best we can do with that. I think we must recognise that technologies are useful but of themselves are not a solution. We need to continue to invest in the long-term solutions and look for reintegration patterns.I am always reminded of Anne Opie’s book From Outlaw to Citizen where she makes the very clear and obvious statement which I think is perhaps not that obvious at times that as well as offenders needing to change and be willing to come back into society society needs to create a place for these people to come into. That is a shared responsibility for all of us. We will support this bill. We look forward to engaging with the submitters and with our colleagues on the committee. We hope to come out with something at the end that will be fit for purpose. Thank you.