Hague Kevin: Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 26 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:2027. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): It is a great pleasure to take a call on this bill on behalf really of my colleague David Clendon who has followed the issues that the bill canvasses with considerable interest. I wanted to begin by referring to what has happened in Auckland over the last year or so and that is a trial of a new specialist kind of court the alcohol and other drug treatment court. The principle behind those courts is to take offenders who meet certain criteria—they are repeat criminal offenders whose offending is fuelled by alcohol and other drug consumption who otherwise would be on their way into a custodial sentence—and it says in respect of those offenders: “Let’s divert them away from that custodial path and instead let’s try something else. Let’s try actually treating the alcohol or other drug use that is actually fuelling their criminal behaviour.” What the court does is it imposes on them a strict regime of irregular—rather than regular—frequent testing and compulsory alcohol or other drug treatment programmes. It involves frequent reappearances in court in front of the same judge and in front of the same team who were present at their first appearance to monitor progress.I spent a day in Judge Emma Aitkin’s court in Auckland following the process that was employed by the court. It was an extraordinarily rewarding day. I have spent a lot of time over the years in courts and it is usually a pretty depressing process but in this particular court I saw in the morning a panel convened by the judge that involved the prosecution defence lawyers social workers and treatment providers all getting together discussing the cases that they were going to be considering in the afternoon and thinking: “What progress has this person making? What is the best thing that we could do for this person when they appear this afternoon?”. I was hugely impressed by the genuine goodwill and concern shown by all of those parties. Then in the afternoon I was able to see the offenders who had been discussed in the morning appearing in court and I saw the plans that had been worked out in the morning actually being implemented. I have to say after years of administering alcohol and other drug treatment services for district health boards and other health service providers that I saw a really rewarding process with the people appearing before this court actually making progress and changing their lives which was fantastic.I was particularly encouraged because it is a new way of dealing with criminal offending whereas the old way which is traditional punishment is clearly not working—clearly not working. Prison and other forms of punishment simply do not address the irrational behaviour that emerges from the consumption of alcohol and other drugs. These are irrational processes that are not possible to change through punishment mechanisms that intend to impact on offending.That is why this bill is so important because it provides a springboard to allow us to do something a little bit different in community-based sentencing and in bail. That is one of the reasons why the Green Party is supporting this bill today. We are supporting it at least as far as the select committee because although currently some treatment is available in prisons and in other corrections system settings the simple fact is that most of the offenders who need that treatment are not getting it. Yet as we have already heard from Kelvin Davis in this debate much—perhaps most—of the criminal offending that comes before the courts is actually fuelled by alcohol and other drug consumption. So we have a fundamental disconnect between what is causing offending what might change that offending and how we respond to it.So typically the corrections system aims to do several things. It aims to provide a disincentive for other offending it aims to take a person who has committed offences out of circulation so that they cannot reoffend during that time and it sets out to provide—I hesitate to use the word—a kind of revenge or retribution for the offending. It does not set out to change the fundamental drivers and that is where this bill comes in.I want to quote from Roger Brooking who is one of our most experienced drug and alcohol counsellors involved in the corrections system. He wrote a book called Flying Blind: How the justice system perpetuates crime and the Corrections Department fails to correct. What he says is that by failing to place offenders into substance abuse treatment in particular the justice system actually contributes to criminal reoffending and to New Zealand’s high rate of recidivism. The biggest obstacle in the system is that although 80 percent of offending occurs under the influence of alcohol and drugs only about 5 percent of all offenders are required by judges to attend a treatment programme as part of their sentence.The Green Party supports this bill for these reasons. It provides the opportunity for us to connect offenders with alcohol and drug treatment programmes which is a connection that is simply not occurring at the moment and also for the absolutely obvious reason that if we have got 200 or 250 people—I guess estimates would vary—who have been required to be abstinent by judges when they have appeared before the court and who would pose a serious risk to New Zealanders if they are not abstinent but there is no mechanism for monitoring their abstinence then that is a fundamental problem. It places the public at risk and it means that those offenders themselves are actually at risk of further offending.So we would say that intensive targeted testing is going to be the most effective at improving public safety because it focuses the testing on those who pose the highest risk of breaching an abstinence condition and causing the greatest harm if they do so. The House has already heard that research from the United States in fact has shown that a higher likelihood of detection is a significant factor in avoiding further offending. We do want to see the testing that this bill provides for linked up with treatment programmes. We believe that that is in the best interests of achieving a health approach to offending rather than having a purely punitive criminal justice approach.We agree with the other concerns expressed by Phil Goff around some of those other issues and that is why at this point we support the bill but only to a select committee because this regime could be used—could be used—as a means of harassment. So that is why we say that at the select committee we will be looking for the processes for determining who will do the testing and the processes for how testers will gain access into private homes. We will be looking for the mechanisms to ensure that there could be independent oversight and review of the testing processes that have been used. Those are the concerns that we are going to be looking out for but we are very happy to support the bill’s referral to a select committee at this point. Thank you.