Davis Kelvin: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDavis Kelvin: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 30 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:10085. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): I rise to speak on the Electronic Monitoring of Offenders Legislation Bill which the Labour Party does support. It amends three Acts: the Corrections Act 2004 the Sentencing Act 2002 and also some amendments to the Parole Act of 2002. To clarify the situation for the House and for people listening I would just like to go through the matrix that the Department of Corrections has provided to the Law and Order Committee that describes when different electronic monitoring systems need to be put in place because it is quite confusing.When someone is found guilty of a crime the least restrictive punishment before they are sentenced is that they are bailed into the community. The next least restrictive is that they receive electronic bailing—so they go out into the community still but it is electronic bail. Then the most restrictive is that they are remanded into custody. So that is all before they are sentenced and the court does that sentencing. And then the least restrictive of the sentencing is community work and most people will know that as periodic detention or PD. When I was the principal at Kaitāia Intermediate School every 6 weeks or so we would get the PD gang to come in and help tidy up the school and the gardens and to do various jobs. Basically that is so that those people atone for a minor crime they may have committed in the community.The next step is supervision. So if it is supervision it is a community-based rehabilitation sentence that requires offenders to address the causes of their offending. The next step up is intensive supervision and we are looking to bring electronic monitoring into intensive supervision in some cases. Intensive supervision is a longer sentence and it involves attending programmes to address issues that led to offending. The next level up—we are getting more severe now—is community detention which is basically a curfew that requires electronic monitoring. So somebody might still be able to go to work but between the hours of say 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. they have to be at a certain residence or the curfew might mean they are not allowed to go near other people or other places. The next step up is home detention where somebody has residential conditions. They have to stay at a residence basically 24/7 maybe with an hour out each week to go and do their shopping or go and see the doctor or pay bills or whatever. Then after home detention the next most serious sentence is a term of imprisonment for fewer than 2 years which is pretty self-explanatory. The next most serious is a term of imprisonment greater than 2 years. Only the court can impose those sentences.The next part of an offender’s journey I guess you could say is the release and the post-sentence order. The least restrictive is the post-detention conditions. Then going up the scale there is release at half of the sentence’s term and they have conditions with that. Those are imposed by the court. And then the next level up is parole release conditions imposed at the sentence expiry date and they are imposed by the Parole Board. This is another one of the areas where we are looking to in this case beef up the electronic monitoring. Above that are extended supervision orders where offenders mainly highly violent or sexual offenders need to be highly monitored once their sentence is over and they are back in the community. Then public protection orders are another step up again.That matrix I think is really important because when you have all these different orders—many of them sound very similar such as intensive supervision which is a sentence and then you have extended supervision orders—it is easy for people to get confused as to where everything sits. But the thing with electronic monitoring is that it does work if it is done well. The basic reason for it is to make sure that people are where they should be. If they are subject to the conditions of electronic monitoring the bracelets ensure that the person is where they should be. But it also raises an alert if the person ends up somewhere where they should not be—it raises an alert.The next thing is that electronic monitoring can provide evidence to show that the person was in the wrong area. So it is one thing to get an alert—the person absconds and ducks off somewhere where they should not be but then comes back. The GPS tracking of the electronic monitoring bracelet can be used to show that they were somewhere where they should not have been. You can also use the bracelet—I am not sure how this works though—to make sure that the person has not tampered with the electronic monitoring device.The reasons for electronic monitoring are to make sure that if somebody has committed a crime and has a condition where they say should not associate with gang members then that will be part of the conditions. The bracelet can tell whether or not they have gone near a gang residence. They might not be allowed near a school or near a park or they might not be allowed there at certain times of the day. So that is what electronic monitoring does.The thing with electronic monitoring though is that it is only as good as the monitoring. We have heard over the last couple of months actually about a number of offenders who have cut off their bracelets. It is good to hear that the Minister has ordered a thousand of these new tough electronic bracelets from somewhere and that they are going to be used. As it stands right now an offender can basically walk down to the nearest Warehouse and buy a $2 pair of scissors and cut off the bracelet.We heard in the last 2 days too that on any given day there is somewhere between 20 and 47 offenders who have removed their bracelets and are running around in a community somewhere. The Government tried to downplay that by saying: “Well 47—that’s less than 1 percent of all the offenders who have got bracelets.” The Government should not downplay that because it means there is somewhere between 20 and 47 communities that do not know where somebody is. That person is running around in their community. That is 20 to 47 communities that are living in fear. If you take a community like Kaitāia which has a population of about 5000 that means there are just under 200000 people in New Zealand who are living in fear. They do not know where an offender could be at any particular time. So I do not think the Government should downplay those numbers. It is very serious to the people who are most affected—that is all the communities around New Zealand. Right now they do not know where these people are. They do not know where they are running around. Most of them will not go and commit a crime but we do not know which ones of them will not go and commit that crime.Debate interrupted.