Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): This bill covers a lot. It is a reflection of all the detailed reform that this new Government will need to undertake in the area of corrections and our criminal justice system to make it effective—to move away from what has been failing.I note today the release of the report by the Prime Minister's chief scientist Peter Gluckman that says unequivocally that our criminal justice system is broken and imprisoning more and more New Zealanders is not going to fix it. We in the Green Party commend this. We have been saying it for years and years. We need a focus on rehabilitation and we need a focus on evidence-based policy because the rhetoric of politicians calling for tough-on-crime policies—their policies have failed. Crime is up imprisonment is up and it is not helping. Telling victims over and over again that being tough on crime by locking more and more people up is going to protect them from crime has now become callous. It's expensive and reckless. All it does is make those politicians look tough whilst they keep failing their communities and keep filling up our prisons.Hon David Bennett: Keep talking. It's good stuff.GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: Thank you. So we must acknowledge the evidence otherwise we will continue to fail. That's what the Green Party calls for; that is what this bill introduces to our corrections system.Where imprisonment is necessary a rehabilitation focus will help us keep people out of prison once they rejoin their community. Sometimes that's going to look like fairness and compassion for offenders and we're OK with that—because it turns out that as a society the way we react to deviancy the way we react to crime is going to be the making of us and it also turns out that that is exactly what reduces crime.In particular in this bill I just want to highlight a few points—because there is a lot to it as you will know. The first of those things is the framework for treating detainees that are at risk of self-harm. Now we know that the overwhelming majority of our prison population have come to prison with serious mental health issues with brain injury or with addiction issues. As the previous Government defunded mental health services and addiction services our criminal justice system was the only point of intervention. Our courts were forced to lock people up when they needed mental health support. Right now those people when they do come to be identified as at risk of serious self-harm don't have a way of planning for their treatment. This bill introduces an at risk of self-harm plan. They will be supported through that which will aid their rehabilitation once they rejoin their community. That's the kind of move we need to make.The next thing is the use of imaging instead of strip-searches. I can't believe that this technology wasn't already in use. Strip-searches are sometimes necessary but hopefully in an ideal world in very very few cases. However we know before the courts right now is a human rights case because our prisons have been using strip-searches en masse as a preventative measure to prevent risk rather than assessing where the risk is actually there. This is incredibly invasive it places prisoners at risk of abuse and it's probably also enormously burdensome on guards who probably don't actually want to be conducting a mass strip-search of detainees. This kind of imaging will mean that that kind of degrading treatment won't happen in our prisons any more.The next thing is something close to my heart as a Green Party MP in particular because I want to remember the work of Sue Bradford a previous Green Party MP who first brought legislation before this House that eventually enabled mothers and babies to stay together in places of detention—in prison. This bill wants to introduce an appeal process. When mums are denied the right to be together with their young children in prison they can appeal that decision and hopefully more mums and children will be kept together. We know it's enormously traumatic for children to be separated from their mothers and it is also traumatic of course for those mums. Keeping those familial bonds intact while people are in detention is something that will also aid in rehabilitation and better behaviour in prison because of that very deep trauma. So we're going to keep more of those bonds intact while mothers are in prison and that's only a very good thing.The last but certainly not least of the rehabilitative—I'm going to call it rehabilitative" but actually this is huge for our justice system. The last point I want to emphasise in this bill is a Green win and it's something that's enormously close to my heart personally because before I entered this House I worked on children's rights. I helped draft New Zealand's last two non-governmental reports to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child and this bill will for the first time introduce a prohibition against children under 18 being put in places of detention and police cells with adults. I say with some confidence that in terms of international human rights law our refusal to abide by the prohibition against age-mixing in places of detention is one of the most serious breaches ever. Since 1990 we've refused to abide by this human rights prohibition. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is one of the most universal pieces of international human rights law and we are in breach. So this law brings us a bit closer in line with what's expected of us.If we look at the general prison population we say that it is overwhelmingly filled with people who suffer from mental illness and brain injury. If we look at the population coming in conflict with the criminal justice system as young people those stats are even more horrifying. For girls it's more often than not immediate trauma that they've suffered that's caused them to offend and act out; for boys it's generally longer-standing mental health issues that have come about as a result of serious neglect or abuse. That is who we're locking up with adult criminals at the first point of intervention when we actually have a chance to protect those kids who we failed before. So it is a good day when we say that we are going to try a bit harder to stand up for the rights of these children because the criminal justice system should be fair and it should be about helping people to rejoin society and to lead healthier lives and to keep our community safe through what actually works.In terms of the child rights aspect of this law and the approach to compassion that we need to bring further into our youth justice system I want to quote from the director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime Yury Fedotov who said "On any given day children in conflict with the law encounter violence including from police and security forces from adult detainees from staff at detention centres and from their own peers while some even attempt suicide. These are the invisible children; our role is to bring their misery into plain sight". This bill does a little bit of that so I am happy to commend it to the House."