Logie Jan: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 26 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13816. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): I am pleased to take a brief call on behalf of the Green Party in support of this legislation the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill. I hope the Minister of Corrections is coping with the Greens supporting two initiatives in 1 week. It is possibly groundbreaking. I do want to offer formally in this Chamber congratulations on the change in the policy around transgender prisoners. It will make a huge difference to people’s lives and that is a wonderful thing.We are supporting this legislation. It is absolutely consistent with our view in terms of justice and the best evidence of what works in this country. We recognise that primarily it is made up around administrative changes to make the system more efficient in relation to community sentences and orders in the community but there are some minor drafting amendments that are significant in terms of policy and we also support those.The drafting amendments are primarily to the Sentencing Act the Parole Act and the Bail Act. The minor policy changes will improve the effectiveness and efficiency of home detention community-based sentences and the electronic monitoring regime. That relates mostly it seems from my reading of the bill to now matching when an offender is released into the community with electronic monitoring to ensure that they are living in an area that is capable of being monitored by that electronic monitoring system. That just seems an incredibly logical thing to match. It does not really seem very sensible that people are being released into areas that cannot be monitored in this system and apparently there are some occasions where offenders have been on community sentences and they have been bunking out on them and on occasion have not been found until the end of that sentence.I guess the core of our system working is that people take responsibility and they are held accountable for their actions. Clearly that was not the case with the system in that situation. So an amendment to ensure that there is the ability for an application to be made to vary or cancel the sentence to match that and to ensure that they are held accountable does seem to be appropriate and consistent with the intent of the legislation.We also support the move to focus more on rehabilitation. Clearly that is something that works for all of us. Enabling probation officers to direct up to 20 percent of sentences to be spent in working and living skills courses without the need to apply to the court is also a really positive measure. We all know that sometimes education can make a difference as well as those wraparound services that people have talked about. We certainly would like to see more investment in those because we believe that they really work and the evidence shows us that. To streamline that system to enable people to get access to those things is just a sensible and good thing.This bill is around improving that system of community-based sentences. It has been mentioned earlier but it is worth restating that we know that the recidivism rate is much lower with community-based sentences. Clearly part of that is going to be because there is a threshold in terms of the seriousness of a crime and the likelihood of somebody being caught up in criminality that would be more likely in a prison environment but it is also because of the nature of the sentencing. There is something about the limitation of somebody remaining in their community that can hold them into more positive outcomes at times. This is something that potentially saves us money in that financial bottom line. It is a good social result and a good economic result.We would like to encourage more of those kinds of solutions so we are supporting this bill.