Franks Stephen: Sentencing (Community Sentencing to Fit the Crime) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Franks Stephen: Sentencing (Community Sentencing to Fit the Crime) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:624;Page:19281] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I rise for the ACT party and for Muriel Newman whose Sentencing (Community Sentencing to Fit the Crime) Amendment Bill was drawn to speak in support of the bill. I worked closely with Muriel Newman in preparing the bill. 
Nandor Tanczos 
: Oh that explains it! 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: I believe that Mr Tanczos would be well aware there are unlikely to be very many misconceptions on my part about what the Sentencing Act and the Parole Act do after the time that we put in to passing that legislation in 2002. I was not surprised to hear Phil Goff sing the same song that Mr Tanczos sang on this bill. The first thing Mr Tanczos turned to of course was the provision that suggested that people on parole—offenders under supervision—should be required to stay free of illegal drugs and that there should be random testing or that it could be imposed as a condition of parole. That is obviously a subject dear to his heart and though Phil Goff did not address it it was once a subject dear to Phil Goff’s heart. The Hon Phil Goff started his career as Minister of Justice with a ringing speech in which he undertook to reform the cannabis law. I think that Mr Tanczos will agree there was encouragement in 1999 for him to think that his moves to get cannabis legalised would get some official support from Labour. But that prospect seems to have faded as it became clear that the electorate would not support that. 
We have now had a series of speeches that tried to duck the real issues raised by this bill. First I say that judges no longer pass sentences. Judges instead send people off to the Department of Corrections and it is the head office in Wellington that decides what the real sentence is. When it comes to community work community work sentences do not mean a thing to many offenders. Community work sentences are essentially optional. What we have in some areas—and we cannot get accurate figures—is a completely demoralised probation service that organises supervisors to turn up. It has no idea how many people it will be supervising because community work now is based on people turning up if they do not mind doing so. In some areas the turn-up on a typical Saturday is as small as 19 percent. So a sentence that was supposed to be a punishment to deter offenders and that was supposed to make sure people felt a price was being paid for committing crime is now the very opposite of that. It sends a message to people—a message that Labour actually wanted to send—that the Government apologises for punishment. It sends the message that the community is a sucker. 
The bill also restores or tries to restore a power that was very effectively used in the days when New Zealand had a low crime rate—that is non-association orders. It states that people sentenced to supervision can be made subject to conditions against associating with gangs. Non-association can be a condition of remaining under supervision instead of going to prison or instead of going into a harder sentence. That is very important. At the moment the Sentencing Act makes it very plain that the only reason that a supervision order can be made is in the interests of the rehabilitation of the offender. So a supervision order cannot be used for example to ensure that the offender is properly punished. It cannot be used to ensure that the offender is not out there encouraging others to offend. This bill states that one of the express purposes of a supervision order should be to make it a condition to “reduce the risk of offending by associates of the offender;”. The whole focus of the supervision order in the Act is on the particular person who is being sentenced when the purpose of that kind of order should be focused on his or her associates: on the gang if it is gang offending or on those people whom offenders would encourage or mislead—the bad company that every community’s wisdom knows is the likely cause of problems for young people particularly. 
The bill also requires a judge when he or she is replacing an ineffective sentence of community work with a sentence of imprisonment to take into account the unexpired period of the community sentence.