Faafoi Kris: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Faafoi Kris: Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 20 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8820. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana) 
: 
 Thank you very much for the chance to speak to the second reading of the Administration of Community Sentences and Orders Bill and to just say from the very outset that Labour will continue to support this bill. 
Can I acknowledge the members of the Law and Order Committee for the way in which it worked on this bill. Our select committee as Mr Goff and I will say works in a very collegial manner and in respect of this bill because we did not have any major opposition to it we worked well. I note that the previous bill the Natural Health and Supplementary Products Bill that was debated had 739 submissions. This bill had only five. I think they were from the Law Society the Salvation Army and JustSpeak which is the youth wing of Rethinking Crime and Punishment. They were the main submitters on this bill and we thank them for making their submissions and for making some very good recommendations on the bill to the select committee. Can we just also acknowledge the work of the officials who helped us during the select committee process. 
Labour supports this bill. It does make some technical changes to enable the Department of Corrections to more effectively and efficiently manage community sentences and orders in our community. We do support the corrections system which secures public safety and ensures rehabilitation. This legislation makes as the Minister of Corrections said changes to the barriers to the effective management of home detention community-based sentences electronic monitoring parole and extended supervision orders. 
 The Department of Corrections is set to become the largest Government department. I think it was the Deputy Prime Minister himself Bill English who said that prisons are a moral and fiscal failure. It is important to note that we do have an approach with the Department of Corrections that is evidence-based and that works well to make sure that we have effective rehabilitation of prisoners. Before I traverse some of the details of the bill I just want to look at what Bill English said around the moral and fiscal failure of the prison system. We did have a submission from the Salvation Army that looked at some Ministry of Justice figures from 2009 that said 23 percent of those on home detention in 2009 were re-convicted in the following 12 months. Conversely 52.6 percent of those who served a custodial sentence who were locked up in our prisons in that year were re-convicted in the following 12 months. So we are doing a much better job of reducing the recidivism rate of those serving community sentences and community orders than of those people whom we are locking up. 
Let me be clear: there will always be an element of people in New Zealand who when caught and convicted of serious significant or sickening crimes need to be locked up and kept away from the rest of the community. Some are so bad that they may never taste freedom again. But for those criminals who are serving shorter sentences we have to ask the question of whether the public is safer in the long term due to their incarceration. Are we serving our duty as the State to protect the public by rehabilitating people so we have fewer victims and less crime? The question has to be asked as to whether we are serving the dual purpose of punishment and ensuring that upon release those people do not go out and create more pain. Again as I have said the Salvation Army did quote those figures from 2009 that say we are doing a much better job of rehabilitating those on community orders than we are with those people whom we are locking up. 
Safeguards must be put in place to make sure that we get rid of as much risk as we can when we have people serving community-based sentences. I believe that in the future we must look at community-based sentences as a way of being much more fiscally prudent and ensure we are doing a better job of making sure we rehabilitate the people whom we are sentencing. On the fiscal side it is costing taxpayers about $58 a day to keep someone in home detention and that is roughly a quarter of what it costs to keep someone in prison which is a cost of about $250 a day. So on the fiscal side of things it makes sense to ensure that for those who we think can be rehabilitated and can serve a sentence in the community it is much cheaper to do that and it could be much more effective. 
I would just like to look at the bill as I have said and look at some of the details. The Law Society did have some concerns around one of the points that the Minister raised about halting community sentences while a non-compliance order was appealed in the court. It believes that if the sentence continued to be served some people could serve an extra-long sentence while the court considered that. I think that in the bill we have given the courts some flexibility to be able to use some discretion as to whether time has been served or time has not been served. Also as the Minister mentioned we have given the Department of Corrections some more flexibility around its ability to transfer community sentence hours to community sentence training. 
I do want to note the work that the Minister is doing around education in prisons. I think she was recently at Arohata Women’s Prison in Tawa where she was promoting some more education work within the prison and for inmates. As she said and we agree with her on this side of the House education is a very important part. That is actually the key to making sure that we rehabilitate inmates to make sure we reduce crime and reduce the number of victims when those inmates come out of prison. So credit where credit is due for the commitment the Minister is making to those education schemes. 
One other point I want to look at is that we are giving a little bit more flexibility to the Department of Corrections as Melissa Lee said when there is a change of address when a residence where a sentence of home detention is being served has become unsuitable. We think it has been onerous when in the past a parole officer has made a temporary change of address and has had to go to court to change the permanent address. We are now giving the chief executive the option of being able to vary a home detention residence so that we do not have the hold-up we have had in the past. I think that is another way in which the Department of Corrections can effectively and efficiently manage a home detention or community service order. 
In conclusion we will support this bill. It does make some technical changes that we think will help community services to be much more effective and efficient and we believe that these kinds of sentences should be the way to go forward. Cheers.