Bindra Mahesh: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBindra Mahesh: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 01 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11615. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MAHESH BINDRA (NZ First): I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill. The intent of this bill is to make provision for the courts to stipulate electronic monitoring for those offenders who have been judged as being under intensive supervision conditions and those offenders who have served or are likely to serve less than 2 years of imprisonment. This is in addition to provisions for offenders to be on home detention community detention extended supervision parole and release-to-work schemes or for those who are bailed with specific conditions.This provision will also cover the offenders involved in family violence who pose a very high and serious risk to the victims. This provision may apply to any prisoner serving 2 years or less and who in the opinion of the Department of Corrections requires electronic surveillance to forbid them from entering or remaining in specified places or areas at specific times or at all times which used to be known as the whereabouts condition. This in our view will contribute towards enhancing public safety only as long as it is an additional condition and not the only condition for such a release.At the moment as the Hon Phil Goff mentioned there are about 40-odd offenders who are at large who have violated their conditions and breached the electronic monitoring system. With this legislation coming into force—I will quote from one of the submissions. Mr Kim Workman who represented the Robson Hanan Trust said “the bill would expand monitoring to an additional 5800 prisoners serving less than two years in jail without proper consideration of what that would entail.” He further said: “Electronic monitoring allowed people to be released without a proper reintegration strategy and support. The effect over time would be that jurisdictions using it would ‘slack-off” in rehabilitation and reintegration strategies as they came to rely on electronic monitoring.” So this would result in over-reliance on a system that has failed 15500 times in the past since 2008.Also funding is the other thing that we are worried about. There is nothing in the Budget to provide for the 5800 extra offenders who will be covered under this new legislation. On the contrary $3.4 million has been reduced under the heading “Sentences and Orders Served in the Community”. This category is limited to the management and delivery of sentences and orders served in the community and electronic monitoring of people on bail. We fail to understand how the agencies or the contractors or the department that are responsible for monitoring these offenders on the electronic system will cope with 5800 more offenders with $3.4 million less. That is the risk that we see in this. The system has already failed. It has proved to be a failure and still we are over-relying on this system and then we claim that the communities are going to be safer by relying on this system. We think that this is a disaster waiting to happen as happened in the case of Blessie Gotingco. Tony Robertson was on electronic bail—not only was he on electronic bail; he was on conditions for the next 10 years. Within 5 months of his release he reoffended. The result was that an innocent victim was raped and killed. So this system has again proven to be a failure.We want electronic monitoring extended to those offenders currently serving a custodial sentence who have to leave the secure confines of a prison for any reason. This will enhance public safety in a scenario where a prisoner escapes custody during an outing but is not able to cut remove or otherwise tamper with the electronic monitoring device. Public safety relies more on surveillance than on just electronic monitoring. It has proven to be effective in some instances. However at no stage has this system been foolproof. Even the Minister has admitted that even after these changes this is not going to be a foolproof system. So why are we relying overly on a system that has failed 15500 times?The other thing that comes to our mind is the one instance where it can actually work which is the outing that has been declined for some Māori offenders in the past. This has been for two reasons: one they were high security prisoners and the other reason is that they could not be handcuffed on a marae. We think that the Department of Corrections can actually think about this as an option. This is an operational matter for the department and this is my suggestion: if it looks at it it can actually make the system work by sending those offenders to a tangi with only the electronic bracelet. This is because if the offenders can be sent into the community without handcuffs—with just electronic monitoring—then the offenders can actually be sent on a marae with just an electronic bracelet with two officers as is the practice now. But that is something that the Department of Corrections will have to see as an operational matter.On the one hand this legislation may be helpful in providing some relief to Māori prisoners. Other than that we do not believe that this system is going to make any changes in the safety of the community at present. Having another 5800 offenders monitored under this system which has been proven to be a failure is not going to be supported by us. We do not support this bill. Thank you.