Delahunty Catherine: Parole Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Parole Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2013. Volume:695;Page:15096. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koutou katoa. Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. I am going to take a short call on this issue because my colleague who is the expert on justice is doing something else. But it is very important that we are on the record because we are at this stage opposing the Parole Amendment Bill. We are not saying we will continue to oppose it all the way through. We look to the select committee process. We believe in improving justice law parole law and all of those other strategies. We think that the Law and Order Committee could make some fair improvements to this bill and we will be watching it closely. We would like to be able to support legislation that improves things for victims and offenders but at this stage we cannot support the bill as it is currently written.The bill purports to reduce unnecessary parole hearings for offenders who do not acknowledge their offending and have made little or no effort at rehabilitation by increasing the maximum time between hearings particularly for offenders serving sentences of 10 years or more. We have real concerns about the strategy of keeping people in prison longer if they can be rehabilitated. We recognise as does everybody that there are people who need to stay in prison for the well-being of society and for whom rehabilitation is a very challenging issue. But we also believe that there is a large large number of people who are incarcerated at the moment—and we need to remember that this country has one of the highest rates of incarceration—who are not in that group and who may be moderately un-socialised at this time but through genuine rehabilitation and support once they are out of prison can actually become part of the peaceful synergy of a decent society. That is a big challenge.We support all parties’ efforts with rehabilitation but we think that this particular bill in lengthening parole could affect that in the sense that there are a number of experts who are concerned about this bill and do not believe that it is actually going to work to motivate offenders to join programmes. If we are going to motivate them then those programmes have to be of quality they have to available they have to be robust they have to be culturally appropriate and they have to actually address the issues. When we think about some people in prison who are illiterate who are dyslexic or who have experienced extreme abuse we see that those people’s engagement with rehabilitation in order to make changes in their lives is quite a sophisticated business. It is not simple for them to change their lives. It is not simple if programmes that would be helpful do not exist or are too overloaded at the time to actually work.We do listen very carefully to people who work in justice and we do acknowledge some of the suggestions of people like Kim Workman who says that these changes could encourage inmates to lie. He says that rehabilitation programmes could be inundated and are not resourced at this time to cope and that there could be an argument that the change could force prisons to improve access. The problem is that it could also deter innocent people from pursuing appeals. So there are a number of interesting issues associated with costs and associated with victims’ rights as well.The statistic that only 5 percent of victims attend parole hearings is an interesting statistic. In reality there is also a challenge we would make around cost. We would argue that the idea that saving $10000 per hearing by delaying parole hearings does not mitigate the cost of the $95000 that it costs to keep an inmate in prison for another year. So this bill does not necessarily address the issue. If one is thinking about financial efficiency the bill does not necessarily make for a more efficient system in terms of cost. The reduction in parole hearings may not be the most robust way to actually deal with rehabilitation. It may not be the best way to incentivise prisoners to engage in rehabilitation. I think that at all times we need to be thinking about how we can move people from incarceration into the community and we are not yet convinced that these strategies will firstly save money and secondly actually lead to the kind of motivation that is being discussed.We in the Green Party take a stance on justice that is very much about what is going to work. We have had a lot of punitive rhetoric in this country and it is very easy to support the “throw away the key” rhetoric when you see the pain that some people have inflicted on others in this society and some of the unthinkable things that have happened but that is actually a small percentage of the prisoners who are locked up sometimes for quite a long time.We need to look at the other body of prisoners the large body and look at why it is that they have ended up where they have ended and how we can change that so that they actually can leave prison—ideally much much earlier before the “University of Crime” makes it impossible for them to change—and regain a relationship with the community. There are many experts in this country who talk about the critical period when prisoners have reached parole and are about to leave prison. That is when we really need to look at these issues as well as before. So there are some serious issues here about parole and about postponement orders which already exist as a mechanism but are claimed not to incentivise behaviour change.We are not yet convinced that this bill is going to do what it says it is going to do so we will be coming to the Law and Order Committee and hoping to hear from those experts and from community groups that work in prisoners’ rehabilitation and in victims’ rights as well to see whether this bill actually does what it claims to do and whether it will actually make a substantive difference to justice for all parties in this situation.The regulatory impact statement does not claim that the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act has been breached in terms of parole delay and in terms of prisoners’ rights but there may be interesting select committee submissions on the issue of rights and what that does in terms of disincentivising people to rehabilitate if they feel they are being hard done by. There are complex issues around change in the prison system. There are complex issues around justice. If cost is the driver we are not sure that this bill is going to save money. Every year that we keep a prisoner in prison reduces the chance of rehabilitation. It reduces the chance of saving money for the State and for the taxpayer and we think that a more creative and innovative approach to justice is needed at every step in the justice system before we get so many people locked up for so long with little hope of change. If we take away hope that they can get paroled and if we try to force them in a way that does not work to stay longer in prison it is not going to work.We applaud rehabilitation; we just hope that it is going to be properly resourced. We will be watching this bill very carefully at the select committee so that if we see genuine change that is going to support genuine rehabilitation we will be open to it. But at this stage we are unable to support the bill. Thank you.