Dean Jacqui: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDean Jacqui: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4235. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki):I am speaking to the first reading of the Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill. It seems that this bill will enjoy the support of the House through the first reading and into the select committee stage. Having sat on the Law and Order Committee in the last term and a half of Parliament I see this as another step in improving the criminal justice system. I share the concerns of the previous speaker Mahesh Bindra about this bill not being the answer to keeping communities safe and I know that David Clendon also raised the same issue. Although this is a step forward in terms of electronic monitoring—and I will talk about that in a little while—I do not think that it was ever intended to be the silver bullet if you like. But I do believe that this is another step in a suite of legislative changes that have been through this Parliament and previous Parliaments to make sure that prisoners are kept where they need to be and are kept under control while they complete their sentences and to focus on keeping our communities safe. The previous speaker did mention a victim of serious crime and the member is absolutely right: it is so hard to protect vulnerable people in our society.I will not stray too far from this bill but I will go back a little bit and talk about our work on the Bail Amendment Bill which sought to make it safer for society when people who are out on bail for crimes of which they have been accused go on to commit further crime. That is the nature of what we are dealing with is it not? It is about people who have committed crimes at the expense of innocent victims. I think that around this House and around New Zealand there is certainly widespread support for additional measures to keep everybody in our society safe. I think back to the discussions on electronic monitoring that we had in the Law and Order Committee in the last Parliament. We made amendments to that bill and it was at a time prior to GPS technology. It is a very new technology and it is revolutionising the way we monitor prisoners and people out under intensive supervision.The issues back then only just a few years ago were around electronic monitoring. The perimeter would be a round circle so you would have an offender on home detention with electronic monitoring wearing a bracelet or an anklet and of course there would be a field around them that was the perimeter of the electronic monitoring. In one or two cases they could not even go to the letterbox because it was in the corner of a square section. Now with GPS this is another step forward in terms of what we can do to monitor people after a prison sentence of 2 years or less. In this case the amendment is to the Sentencing Act and to the Parole Act in order to allow offenders to be released with conditions. We are talking about pretty serious offences—pretty serious repeat offending—that require people to be sentenced to incarceration for a period of 2 years or less.On the other hand as another member has mentioned—I think it was one of the National members—all prisoners bar a very few in the criminal justice system will be returned to society eventually. Long gone are the days when a term of imprisonment came to an end the door creaked open and a plastic bag filled with belongings was given back to the person and it was a case of “Good wishes go with them” only for them to go out into society and reoffend because they could not find their way or could not find their feet. I hope that those days are long gone in New Zealand. I know that successive Ministers of Justice Ministers for Courts Ministers of Corrections and Ministers of Police have given an awful lot of time and have brought through legislative changes and changes within our prison system to make sure that these days prisoners do not simply come to the end of their sentence and be released back into the community with high recidivism a high rate of reoffending. It is a serious issue that we have tackled quite consistently and with great success over the past 4 or 5 years. The rate of reoffending is dropping in New Zealand and that is something we should all be proud of.Our working prisons are of course transitioning from being places of incarceration and punishment to being places where there is an opportunity actually to provide education and improvements in health. Many prisoners who end up in prisons all around New Zealand have poor oral health poor mental health or low rates of literacy and numeracy. Those issues are being addressed in our prisons increasingly so year on year Budget on Budget. Further to that the extent of training now being provided in prisons is growing again year on year and Budget on Budget. We now have from recollection—I am no longer on this committee—four working prisons in New Zealand and the plan is to increase that number over the next few years so that all prisons in New Zealand are working prisons.Why? Well the benefits are pretty obvious are they not? I would say that the major benefit is that those prisoners as we know are going to be returned to society and will become our neighbours once again and we are giving them the best chance of not reoffending of finding their feet back in society where they may never have had a job or a permanent home or pride in themselves. A working prison can give those prisoners the opportunity to gain the skills that they need so that when they go back into society they can do so with the greatest chance of success. As I said this Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill catches up legislatively with the modern technologies of GPS tracking. What that will do is allow prisoners to be tracked in real-time. I am sure that when the committee meets to discuss this bill those aspects of the deterrent effect will be pointed out.Again I will be interested in this debate as it goes through the House in the months to come when it is returned for its second reading and the Committee stage. Several members have pointed out deficiencies in the bill. The New Zealand First member did. I think the Green member did. Well I am interested to see what those deficiencies are because from what I can see in this bill it is on the face of it a relatively simple straightforward bill that takes into account new technologies and their applications—where they were expressly forbidden to be used previously. Prisoners released on conditions after a prison sentence of 2 years or less and offenders serving sentences of intensive supervision were expressly forbidden to go out using GPS. This bill catches up with modern technology and modern practice and with modern treatment of policing.I am unclear from the speeches of the members opposite just what they were referring to when they were talking about deficiencies in this bill. I think it is a good bill. I think that it is another step on the way to addressing the issues of reoffending and the number of wasted opportunities and wasted lives that we have in the New Zealand corrections system. I too have visited a number of prisons in my time as chair of the Law and Order Committee. It was very heartening to see a young man who was very busy—I think he was a bricklayer in Auckland; I think it was Mt Eden Prison—doing a bricklaying apprenticeship which was going to be very useful. He wished to get away from his gang-affiliated friends and associates in the Auckland region. He wished to move down to Christchurch in the future and for a start to get a job constructing letterboxes out of masonry. This guy was looking forward to a future. It is very inspiring to talk to people like that and to see that although they are paying their debt to society they are also looking forward to a better life for themselves. This is a good bill and I commend it to the House.