Clendon David: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Clendon David: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 20 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8824. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a short call on this bill the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill which the Greens have supported to this point. We will continue to support the legislation. 
I recall in my first reading speech that I confessed we were somewhat suspicious of this bill when we first saw it because it was a Government justice bill that on the face of it actually did a lot of good. At that point—a year or so ago—we did not have much experience of Government justice bills that threatened to do good rather than be regressive and backward-looking. So yes good sense prevailed. It is a useful set of amendments that are being made and for that reason we are pleased to continue our support. The point has been made that this bill amends legislation that is in every instance relatively new—certainly nothing more than perhaps 10 or 12 years old. But clearly some of the work of the bill is to acknowledge technology changes particularly in the area of electronic monitoring and those sorts of things. 
We had some really interesting conversations at the Law and Order Committee in terms of how continued technology changes might require us to adapt and adopt in terms of the increased sophistication of GPS which will enable us to much more readily identify exactly where offenders are located. I think there will be a lot of goodwill to amend our legislation our regulations to enable us to adopt that technology as it evolves and improves. 
Some of the other minor—well not minor—amendments we agreed to were giving more discretion to people at the coalfaces if you like giving more discretion to probation officers to make and effect changes without necessarily having to have recourse to the courts. We think that is appropriate giving these people who are disciplined hard-working people a degree of authority. Discretion making is a good thing with the one provision that we must also acknowledge that they must be well supported in that work. We must not devolve responsibility without also devolving the ability and the resources those people require to do the very difficult work that they do in the community. 
I would say in a general way we are supportive of this bill because we see community-based sentences as the way of the future. We know community-based sentences are far far preferable to imprisonment particularly to short terms of imprisonment. Mr Faafoi and Mr Goff have already rattled off the numbers and that is useful so I need not delve into it but we know community-based sentences are dramatically less expensive in financial terms than a short imprisonment to the tune I think of barely one-quarter of the cost. We know the recidivism rate of people who have served community sentences is also dramatically lower than for people who do short prison terms—or indeed long prison terms. So we do see that community sentences are the way forward. We should be resorting to them much more routinely. We need to be quite creative in how we assign and how we structure the requirement that people do community work do community service or indeed do home detention in order to repay to be punished and to acknowledge that they have done wrong to the wider society. 
One of the great advantages of community sentences generally is that they remove that transition phase. If I may be so bold as to insert an advertisement into these comments we saw last year an excellent book written by Anne Opie called  
from Outlaw to Citizen 
:  
Making the Transition from Prison in New Zealand 
. It highlighted the enormous social and economic cost of imprisoning people acknowledging that very very few inmates in New Zealand do not ultimately end up back in our communities. To the extent that we can we should keep people out of prison in the first place. Prison brutalises people. It dehumanises them. It reduces or even eliminates the ability of those people to function in normal society. It is not helpful that we imprison such large numbers of people in New Zealand. Anne Opie made the point that her book was very solidly grounded in academia in research. Anywhere you see in a bibliography references to Derrida and Foucault you know you are not in for an easy read but it was also blended with real-life stories based on interviews the lived experience of New Zealanders who have been through the prison system and have come out worse off—and we are collectively worse off. 
As others have commented and I am under no illusions we will always need some form of imprisonment. There are those people who are so damaged that they cannot be and will never be able to be released back into society for its general safety and well-being but that does not describe the something like 85 percent of our prison population who could be dealt with in ways other than imprisonment. So refining improving and broadening the range of community-based sentences that are available to the courts that are available to us to clearly signal our disapproval of people’s offending and to ensure there is a level of restraint on their freedom for a time is important but the purpose must always be to make them better able to operate in civil society and less likely to offend against it. 
 I am pleased that we have got a degree of unity in the House on the importance of community sentencing and some of the ways and means by which we might ensure that people do become contributing citizens that they become the citizen rather than the outlaw—the recidivist outlaw whom we are seeing far too much of at the moment. I think I can leave my comments there except to once again close with yet another advertisement. I do believe that there is a great deal of good research being done— 
Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman 
: Very commercial. Didn’t know he had it in him. 
DAVID CLENDON 
: Very commercial today indeed but all in a good cause. This evening I am looking forward to going to the launch of yet another book. Professor John Pratt a professor of criminology at Victoria University is releasing a book that is essentially a comparative study of New Zealand corrections the justice system with those of the Nordic—the northern European—countries. His findings in brief—and I do him a disservice by trying to sum them up in a line or two—are that effectively we are getting it very very wrong with our focus on a punitive prison-based system rather than one that seeks to deal with the individual and with their behaviours and endeavours to keep those people within the community rather than isolate them from it except in those extreme cases that I referred to earlier. 
So we do have an emerging body of knowledge an emerging body of research that tells us how in New Zealand we can get it right. [ 
Interruption 
] Thank you for the indication of support for my comments Mr Hayes. I value that highly from you. We have a body of research and information telling us how we can get it right in New Zealand. We have been getting it wrong for a long time. Increased focus on community sentences improving the quality of those improving the likelihood of success turning people round turning them away from a vicious cycle of offending and reoffending is clearly to our collective good and we are happy to support this legislation. Kia ora.