Ririnui Mita: Corrections (Mothers with Babies) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Ririnui Mita: Corrections (Mothers with Babies) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:643;Page:13357] 
Hon MITA RIRINUI (Associate Minister of Corrections) 
: 
 I thank the two previous speakers for their contributions to this discussion. Some important points were made by both those speakers. I listened very carefully to the previous speaker Judith Collins who touched on one point that I also want to touch on—that is the best interests of children. 
As I take a call on this very important Corrections (Mothers with Babies) Amendment Bill I speak in support of the interests of the most vulnerable in our communities our children who are usually the unintended victims of maternal imprisonment. Maori children are particularly impacted as Maori women make up over half the prison population and this makes it difficult to break intergenerational offending. Not a lot of us in this House can relate to that but we have seen it in our own communities. 
Maternal imprisonment has been shown to have a negative impact on a child’s future development across a range of indicators including physical and mental health academic achievement social skills employment and risk of offending. Maternal imprisonment has much more detrimental impact than paternal imprisonment because women continue to carry out most of the primary caregiving responsibilities for children and especially young children. This means children are likely to have a stronger attachment to their mother and this is disrupted when they are separated from their mother. Women are also more likely to be sole parents than men and therefore likely to face greater difficulties in finding alternative caregivers for their children. The family unit is more likely to break down when the mother is imprisoned than when the father is in prison. 
In addition to being separated from their mothers these children may often experience disruptions to their living arrangements. They may be required to move to someone else’s home. If they have siblings they may be separated from them. They may not receive the level of care from a new caregiver that they would from their mother. They may experience being handed from caregiver to caregiver for the duration of their mother’s time in prison and they may also lose contact with friends and the wider whanau. From a social perspective they could also get lost in the system—and we can all relate to that—if they go from school to school change doctors change friends change contacts and change from the environment they are accustomed to. There are wide-ranging social effects in terms of children of women prisoners. 
The best way to reduce the impact of maternal imprisonment is not to send women offenders to prison at all particularly if they have dependent children. It is a very serious matter when we consider the impact on the family of sending mothers of children—young children—to prison. This Government has introduced a range of changes to improve the existing sentencing regime. It has provided tougher alternative community-based sentences to reduce the need to send offenders to prison because there is no suitable alternative. I acknowledge the work of the previous Minister of Corrections the Hon Damien O’Connor in introducing these programmes and providing the courts with broader sentencing options particularly when it comes to women prisoners who have children. 
As of 1 October 2007 three new sentences came into effect. Home detention became a sentence in its own right. Home detention is a sentence that requires an offender to remain in an approved residence at all times under electronic monitoring and close supervision by a probation officer. Community detention requires an offender to comply with an electronically monitored curfew imposed by a court order. Offenders can be sentenced for up to 6 months on community detention and the curfew can be for up to 84 hours a week. Intensive supervision is a sentence in its own right and can be used in tandem with other sentences like home detention and community detention. Intensive supervision requires offenders to address the causes of the offending with intensive oversight from probation officers. 
If these sentences are used as intended the children of women offenders should benefit as their mothers are not sent to prison and thus are able to continue to care for their children within their own homes or other environments. Using community-based sentences also presents an opportunity to get women engaged in key social services like Family Start Strengthening Families and many others. Community-based sentences also present a better opportunity to utilise community-centred approaches to addressing offending and creating positive futures and that is likely to be particularly beneficial to Maori children. 
If prison is unavoidable we need to determine how best to mitigate the negative impact on our children. Our focus should be on what is in the best interests of the child. The options for mothers and babies are solutions for very young children so that babies or toddlers do not experience a dramatic disruption to the key development stages of bonding and attaching to a primary caregiver. If the mother is breastfeeding the child can continue to breastfeed. Breastfeeding has well-established health benefits for the child and mother and child may enjoy a more stable and supportive environment than they might experience outside of prison. 
However even allowing for the above it may not be in the child’s best interest to reside in prison simply because there may be a person or persons willing and able to provide good primary caregiving to the child. From the child’s perspective what matters most is not the biological relationship with the caregiver but that the caregiver meets his or her developmental needs including providing love. The mother may not be able to support the child and provide all those things because she is grappling with big issues in her life such as serious alcohol and drug addictions. 
Either way our focus should always be on what is in the best interests of the child not what is in the best interests of the mother. I believe that this bill’s proposals go some way towards that. We do not want to see women cynically trying to take advantage of the options for mothers and babies simply because they view it as an easy way to serve their prison sentence. 
I have outlined in my contribution to this debate that the Department of Corrections has come some way over time in providing a range of options in terms of sentencing and this particular option put to the House by the member Sue Bradford is another one of those options to improve the environment around children whose mothers spend some time in our prisons. I understand that the Law and Order Committee heard a range of submissions throughout the hearings that during the select committee process there was cross-party support for this proposal and that the bill came back to the House with some minor amendments which had been proposed during the first reading and highlighted at that time by the previous Minister of Justice the Hon Mark Burton. 
It has been my pleasure to contribute to this discussion although I have not had any input to it prior to today. I congratulate the member on introducing the bill and I am sure there will be many more valuable contributions made on it. That is my contribution to this bill.