Clendon David: Parole Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Parole Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 24 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1862. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): May I just begin by responding to one or two of the points made by the member Todd Barclay who has just been sharing his wisdom with us. I agree that there have been some positive moves made by this Government particularly around corrections: the notion that every inmate as they enter prison will receive some screening for alcohol and drug issues problems dependence whatever; the idea of a needs-assessment when people go into prison which is positive and long overdue; the provision of meaningful work in all of our prisons for those inmates who choose to do it; and programmes around rehabilitation and reintegration. These are all good things. Unfortunately what we are seeing is a lot of rhetoric about them but very little investment. We spend something like $1.4 billion on corrections and a minuscule part of that budget is being committed to these quite positive changes. Drug and alcohol assessment on entry to prison—we simply do not have the skilled and experienced people to do that; nor are we investing in creating that pool of people who could do that very positive work. I do commend some of the changes on paper but now we need to put in the investment reinvest the justice dollar into putting these things into practice in a meaningful way. I look forward to the member’s support within his party to see that that investment is made.I return to the Parole Amendment Bill. The Greens have tried hard to like this bill since it was introduced but unfortunately we find it is flawed. I guess the fundamental flaw is that it was introduced as a reaction to some very noisy vocal minorities who were calling ideally from their point of view for an abolition of parole—the simplistic and completely adrift notion that we should actually do away with parole completely. I fear this bill is essentially a political response to try to placate those people. In defence of parole I would quote the former chairperson of the New Zealand Parole Board in the 2012 annual report of the Parole Board headed at that point by Judge Sir David Carruthers who said: “The most important reason for a Parole Board lies in the fact that the international research shows that managed release on parole with a right of recall back to prison during the term of a sentence is about four times more effective in preventing reoffending than automatic release at the end of the term of imprisonment.” Releasing people back into the community with conditions with management with monitoring is vastly superior to this flawed notion of simply making them stay in prison up until the last minute of the last day of their sentence.What this bill does of course is increase the permissible time between parole hearings to allow for the increase in the maximum term of a postponement order from 3 to 5 years. Again a number of speakers on this bill have talked about this giving the Parole Board more flexibility. In fact the board already has some flexibility. Where it sees that a particular individual is almost certain not to get parole—I think section 27 from memory of the Parole Act allows for postponement orders. There are existing mechanisms that can fulfil the aims of this legislation. What this bill does is it creates a mechanism where inmates can apply to have a parole hearing subject to completion of relevant activities and that is seen as a positive thing. However it assumes that inmates know their rights are able to articulate them and are literate enough to read the legislation to understand what their rights are around these issues. Unfortunately the profile of a standard inmate in our prisons does not match that person who is literate confident and able to assert their rights.We know that some of the relevant activities—that is the milestones although we are discouraged from using that word—that prisoners must meet to be considered for a parole hearing under this new rule could include things like group or individual counselling literacy work drug or alcohol programmes and work training. These are all good and positive things and should be readily available to inmates. But the reality is that they are not. They are not now and we have no reason to expect that they will be sufficiently available in the future.We had one excellent submission from one Sue Shone a parole lawyer. She came to the select committee in March of last year with a couple of very good case studies of inmates who were motivated to get themselves on to parole who were doing all the right things but who for very sound and understandable reasons were not getting access to some of these programmes. One inmate who was required to do group counselling pointed out that if he was obliged to do group counselling it would put him at considerable risk. He was endeavouring to extract himself from a gang. Group counselling would oblige him to state publicly and in front of other inmates his ambition to get away from the gang which actually would put him in considerable danger. There were other similar examples presented to us of inmates who had the goodwill the motivation but simply were not getting access to the programmes that the Parole Board was keen for them to do that the inmates themselves were keen to do and that could have led to their release on parole and ultimately their reintegration. Unfortunately the—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.DAVID CLENDON: Before the dinner break I was beginning to talk about motivation. We had what I thought was a rather debatable claim from the Department of Corrections officials. They told us that in respect of inmate motivation “entitlement to an annual hearing”—a parole hearing that is of course—“provides no incentive for unmotivated offenders to address their offending behaviour.” the proposition being that if inmates know that the delay or the time between the parole hearings can be extended they are more likely to be motivated by that. That is not the experience of people working in prisons of inmates themselves of their families. Inmates are not foolish. Well at some point they are to get in there I guess but in terms of Parole Board hearings they understand very well that simply sitting and doing nothing for a year and then walking in front of a Parole Board is not actually going to advance their cause. The inmates understand very well that in order to improve the likelihood of them getting parole they will have to demonstrate behaviour changes attitude changes completion of programmes—whatever it might be. So to suggest that this change the extension of the term between the mandatory hearings is somehow a motivating factor—I think it could actually be quite the opposite: inmates could become quite unmotivated if they see that the horizon to the next hearing is being extended.As we have discussed in earlier speeches in this bill the fact that the availability of the hearing is dependent on prisoners conceding guilt could simply lead the prisoners to lie. There are people in prisons who do declare themselves innocent and on rare occasions those are actually true claims.Briefly I will speak about the human rights issues that we are running close to the boundaries of. The changes in this legislation take us further away from the UN Human Rights Commission requirement that effectively says that to ensure an offender’s continued detention beyond their parole eligibility does not become arbitrary there must be regular periodic reviews of the individual offender’s case. So this is built into the UN Human Rights Commission documents to which we are signatories. To the extent that we allow the term between hearings to become extended the decisions can run perilously close to being seen as being arbitrary decisions given that there will not be the level of interrogation the level of evidence of investigation into just what is going on. Crown Law is satisfied that the current arrangements keep us well within the boundaries of the Human Rights Commission requirements but moving to the extended breaks and the extension of the 3 to 5 years could be a step too far in terms of assuring that we do stay in line with our international human rights obligations.Finally is this question of “relevant activity”. Assuming that when inmates appear in front of a Parole Board all of the information about their activities over the previous 1 or 2 years has been correctly recorded is disputable. We have had recent examples where inmates’ security classification reviews have been found to contain significant errors of fact that worked to the detriment of the inmates. For these reasons and many more we will not be supporting this bill.