Faafoi Kris: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFaafoi Kris: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 26 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13806. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak in the Committee stage of the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill. We on this side of the Chamber find ourselves in the not too unfamiliar position of supporting the Government on this piece of legislation.As the Minister of Corrections said this bill is about improving the effectiveness of sentences that are served in the community and I think we will find over time that we will be encouraging where appropriate sentences to be served in the community for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that there is evidence that those offenders who have the opportunity to serve their sentences at home have a lower recidivism rate than those who serve their sentences inside a prison—I will be able to talk in much detail about that—and the second reason is obviously a fiscal one. We simply cannot continue to lock people up for long periods of time given the fiscal constraints we have at the moment.As the Deputy Prime Minister has already pointed out our prison system is both a moral and a fiscal failure. We simply cannot afford to let the level of expenditure the track the Department of Corrections is on continue. Making sure we are being much more effective with our spending and with our rehabilitation of people who are sentenced is something that I think people on all sides of this Chamber would want.I thank the submitters who gave evidence to the Law and Order Committee. This is a select committee that unfortunately I no longer have the pleasure of being on. Iacknowledge the chair of the select committee Jacqui Dean who has just walked into the Chamber for the way in which this bill was handled during the select committee process. There were some odder moments during the select committee process when we were told about the difference between a square and a circle for the purpose of the electronic monitoring of people who are on home detention. For those who are wondering about that and how that may work if someone is on electronic monitoring at home the signal that is sent to the box essentially to make sure that they stay at that residence is an electronic signal that is very much a circle. But there could be a patch outside that residence where that circle does emanate out to so technically they could be within the electronic zone of their monitoring but technically outside the address—Simon O’Connor: Is this Euclidean geometry or non-Euclidean geometry?KRIS FAAFOI: Do not ask me those kinds of questions please. Technically they could be outside the address where they were meant to be but the electronic monitoring would not be able to pick that up. So there were some interesting moments during the select committee process and certainly some of those technicalities were ironed out.I have mentioned the rates of recidivism for offenders who served their sentences in the community and for offenders who went to prison. There was a submission during the select committee process from the Salvation Army and I would like just to refer to that now. It quoted some 2009 Ministry of Justice figures that said the ministry had found that 23 percent of those on home detention in 2009 were reconvicted in the 12 months after they served their sentence. But conversely 52.6 percent of those who served a custodial sentence in 2009 were reconvicted in the following 12 months. So there is certainly hard data from the Ministry of Justice that suggests that offenders who serve their sentence at home have a much better chance of not reoffending. The numbers are quite stark: 23 percent of those who serve a sentence of home detention are reconvicted of a crime in the 12 months after they have served their sentence and 52.6 percent of those who serve a sentence inside a prison went on to reoffend.So there is good hard evidence as to why we should be investing much more time and energy in making sure we are much more efficient and effective in terms of home detention sentences. Certainly there are some people who should be serving their sentences in a prison; they cannot be trusted to be in the community when they are serving those sentences. I think those numbers also bear that out. But for those who do have the privilege—and I guess it is a privilege—of serving their sentence within our communities the recidivism rate is much much lower and we should give the credit where credit is due and make sure the community sentence regime is much much more effective.There was a range of views at the select committee about whether or not there should be more investment in our prison service. But I think that on this side of the Chamber we would certainly like to see more focus on community sentences and more investment in rehabilitation services as well. That is not to say that there is not good work going on within our prison service on rehabilitation. There certainly is good stuff going on there and the Chairperson Lindsay Tisch was I think part of the Law and Order Committee that visited some prisons where we saw some very good work. That was very starkly shown in some of the drug treatment units around the country where there is some very good intense work going on not just by prison staff but by outside agencies to make sure that these people—and these are hardened drug users who are in our prison service—are getting very intense drug treatment as well as support after they finish their prison sentences.If there is one thing that I think we should be making much of a priority it is wrapping around services for those inmates who have gone through a 3-month—I think it is—course in these drug treatment units in our prisons. They are released into thecommunity after they have served their sentences and we really need to make sure that the investment we have made in them while they are in prison does not go to waste when we release them. Many of them will go back into the same communities and the same situations and some will put themselves into situations that are very similar to those that got them into trouble in the first place and we do not want to see a huge waste of time energy and aroha I guess you could say—because some of these drug treatment courses are very much focused aroundMāori culture.We need to make sure we are getting good bang for buck out of the drug treatment units and other treatments we are putting these inmates through and we need to make sure we wrap services round them after they leave prison. Of course there is a danger to that because some will say: “We should just let them go. They have served their sentence and we don’t care about them; they are people who have broken the law.” But if we are going to make an investment in these people and try to get them back on the straight and narrow—off the drugs off the alcohol and into a place where they are not reoffending—we need to make sure we are supporting them in our communities. That means fewer victims. That is what everyone in this Chamber would want and that is why we should be making sure that there is much more intense post-release support for a lot of these people who are going through drug treatment units.Just before I conclude I go back to the usefulness of community sentences which we are debating here in this bill. As I have said a couple of times now the recidivism rate—it is not an easy word to say fast—of those people who serve community sentences is almost if not half that of those who serve prison sentences. It should be something that we as a country should look to do much much more about in cases where it is possible and safe to do so because it has been proved that people who serve community sentences do not reoffend as much as those who serve a prison sentence. It also gives the ability for those people to still be integrated within their community and to still be supported by their families or support people in the community and I think that is something that we should look to do much much more in order to help rehabilitate these offenders.Of course there is a fiscal argument to this as well. It is much much cheaper. Of the $4 billion that is spent in the justice sector I believe that about 30 percent of it is spent on corrections. It is $1.2 billion and that will grow if we do not do anything about it. We must do something about it. Community sentences are certainly one way to do something about it. The rehabilitation aspect works we make sure there is less reoffending and fewer victims and the pennies are watched too—because there is $1.2 billion of taxpayer money going into the correction system. So Labour does support this piece of legislation. It makes the community sentences much more efficient and that is why we will continue to support it.