Clendon David: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Continuation and Reform) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Continuation and Reform) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 08 May 2013. Volume:689;Page:9747. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): I would like to make a few comments on some of the detail of this bill the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims (Continuation and Reform) Amendment Bill and to talk initially about the clause that reads as follows: that this bill makes “it clear that certain persons unlawfully detained by or on behalf of the Crown are and have always been for the principal Act’s purposes and the period of their unlawful detention persons under control of supervision… ”. Roughly translated that means that this prisoners’ and victims’ claims legislation—that is the denial of any restitution to prisoners for any wrong done to them while they are in prison—will be extended to include the situation where prisoners are kept in jail longer than they ought to be.This happens surprisingly frequently. The flip side to the advantage of some individuals of course is that occasionally prisoners are released sooner than they ought to be. These are administrative errors. They ought not to happen—I am sure people in corrections work hard to see that they do not—but they do occur. Sometimes people are kept in beyond the expiry of their sentence for some significant periods of time.It is interesting that we are told in the regulatory impact statement that the intention of the original legislation was that people unlawfully detained beyond the expiry date of their sentence would nevertheless be subject to this prisoners’ and victims’ claims legislation. The insertion of this clause as they say is for the avoidance of doubt whether it was because of case law or simply an observation that it could perhaps be read differently. For the avoidance of doubt we are told that prisoners kept beyond the expiry date of their sentence will nevertheless for that period be subject to claims by any victims. Any restitution paid to them for that unlawful detention will be subject to claims by any victims.The argument has been made this morning—and I do not think it is a compelling argument nor defensible—running roughly like this: people who offend and are imprisoned therefore lose their rights or lose some of their rights beyond simply their right to their liberty. We are told that people bring that on themselves essentially. They offend against people’s property or against people physically violently or whatever therefore for the period of their incarceration they should not be entitled to any restitution. I fail to see how you can extend that argument to say that people should not get restitution if the Crown fails in its duty to release them on the appropriate date. You can argue that the period of the sentence has been brought on the prisoner by their own actions and quite reasonably. I fail to see how an unlawful detention beyond the term of the sentence is the fault of the prisoner.By this reassurance by confirming that unlawful detention is subject to the prisoners’ and victims’ claims provisions that somehow implies it is the prisoner’s fault; that it is by their action that they have been unlawfully detained and therefore they should suffer the penalties and they should be denied any possibility of restitution. Frankly that argument makes no sense to me. I would be really interested to hear a justification for including unlawful detention for the period that prisoners are kept in jail when they ought not to be through no fault of their own. How is it their fault? How is it therefore that they are subject to then denied any possibility of restitution for that unlawful detention? I would be very interested to hear exactly how that spins out in the mind of the Minister of Justice who drafted this bill.The other point I will make is a more general point. We have in our prisons a complaints process which is an internal complaints process managed and operated by corrections. Beyond that there is also an appeal available to the Office of the Ombudsmen. I think it is important to realise that there is a very low level of confidence with inmates with their families with other interested parties with NGOs who observe these things in the complaints process. To a large extent it is because prisoners are often in the slightly odd situation where they are having to hand the complaint to the person who could well be one of the people they are complaining about. That is a very perverse situation and one that I think we need to think harder about. The point is that if prisoners’ complaints are not heard and if prisoners and other interested parties are observing that the complaints process is not working then we are more likely to get outbursts of violence and incidents in our prisons. It is very hard to see in the context of this bill how revictimising people while they are in the care of the charge of the State—