2016-10-25
Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) — The Greens will be supporting the Corrections Legislation Amendment Bill 2016. The provisions of the bill have been extensively outlined by Mr O'Donohue and by Mr Mulino just then, but I will certainly go through the major provisions of the bill, which we are supporting, and make some comments on them.
The bill amends the Corrections Act 1986, particularly to establish a new role for prison officers in the security and emergency services group (SESG) of Corrections Victoria in the supervision of prisoners who are on parole. This draws on the recent reforms in relation to the supervision of serious sex offenders who are released into the community. That particular group, the SESG, has a role in the supervision of that cohort of ex-prisoners. We are talking here about prisoners who are on parole but who may pose a high risk of violence or threat to the safety of persons in the community. That is why this bill is providing that particular group, the SESG, with a role in the supervision of this cohort of high-risk parolees.
As the Greens have said many times in this chamber, parole serves a very useful and worthwhile purpose in releasing prisoners prior to the end of their sentence but making sure they are still under the supervision of Corrections Victoria. In many cases parolees are released on parole with a number of conditions applying to their parole. When corrections staff are required to, for example, visit the homes of parolees particularly after hours to check on electronic monitoring equipment or to check on the compliance with curfews or other conditions that have been put on the parolees by the Victorian adult parole board, that can be a safety risk for those staff.
That is why, as I understand it, the SESG are being charged with the supervision of that cohort of parolees. It is not to apply to all parolees but to those who have been identified as posing a risk to the safety of not only corrections staff but also other members of the community. This builds on the role that the SESG has in the supervision of serious sex offenders. Mr O'Donohue mentioned the issue of serious violent offenders being released on parole, and we have raised that issue many times in the Parliament too and the need for some similar legislative program for the post-sentence supervision of serious violent offenders similar to that that applies to serious sex offenders.
Under this particular bill, before these supervision powers can be used by the SESG the circumstances surrounding the particular parolee and the supervision of that parolee must be assessed by the commissioner of Corrections Victoria as posing a high risk of violence or other threat to the safety of that person. This is a higher threshold than under the Serious Sex Offenders (Detention and Supervision) Act 2009 (SSODSA), because in the context of parole this means that the SESG will be engaging with a much larger category of offenders than the small cohort that are under the SSODSA, and this may involve posing a range of risks that the SESG and community members will be exposed to.
These are significant powers involving the use of reasonable force and the use of instruments of restraint — for example, if the specified officer believes on reasonable grounds that the use of force is necessary to prevent a prisoner on parole or any other person being killed or seriously injured. It is the same for the use of an instrument of restraint. These are significant increases in the powers of those officers so it is appropriate that they be under the direct supervision of the commissioner. Also the bill requires an officer to report any incidents of the use of reasonable force or restraint to the commissioner, who is then required to report these matters to the Secretary of the Department of Justice and Regulation. Any breaches of the parole conditions or risks to community safety identified as part of this new role by the SESG in supervising prisoners on parole may also lead to a report to the Adult Parole Board of Victoria, which may in the circumstances lead to the cancellation of parole.
It is certainly a change in the supervision of serious offenders on parole who pose a risk to the community. It is always an issue of balancing the safety of the community with the right of the person who is on parole, as long as they are complying with the conditions, if any, that are applied to their parole, to go about their business. It is community safety, the safety of corrections officers and the safety of the person on parole that needs to be considered here.
Other provisions under the bill include the provision of a clear power for the Secretary of the Department of Justice and Regulation to issue a warrant or to authorise an application for a magistrate's warrant authorising a police officer to break, enter and search a public place or a private residence to arrest and return an unlawfully released prisoner to custody or for a prison officer or an escort officer to arrest the prisoner in a public place and return them to custody. This is with regard to unlawfully released prisoners. I would presume and hope that only a very few prisoners have been unlawfully released, but I take the government's rationale here that the act currently does not allow for those particular specific provisions, in particular to enter a private place of residence to arrest such a prisoner.
The bill also improves and clarifies information sharing provisions in section 9E to expressly incorporate the current ministerial authorisations permitting a relevant person, such as staff of Corrections Victoria, to share personal or confidential information about offenders and prisoners, where required, and for the purposes of the Working with Children Act 2005 to protect children from sexual or physical harm and also to share information with correctional services authorities in other states, territories or countries, in particular New Zealand, to prevent crime and to monitor offenders who may pose risks to the community and are moving within those jurisdictions.
The bill provides an exemption from liability for any damage or injury caused by the use of reasonable force by corrections staff to ensure that is consistent throughout the act and makes various other technical amendments that I will not go into in any detail.
The Greens are always concerned to look closely at increased powers of police or correctional officers, but in this particular bill we are satisfied that the oversight of those powers is adequate and that in some circumstances, with a particular cohort of parolees who have conditions imposed upon them and who may pose a risk of not complying with those conditions and pose a risk to the safety of themselves, the corrections officers who have to check on the compliance with those provisions and/or to the community we need to have those SESG officers who are highly trained in these areas to be the people who are supervising those particular prisoners.
Having said that, it is also important to raise again that it is imperative for the parole system that all parolees have access to secure and stable housing, which is not currently the case. There certainly needs to be a lot more resourcing of and a lot more attention paid to the ability of people who are on parole — and we want people to be on parole because they are supervised, and we want them to be properly supervised, and they do have conditions imposed on them — having access to secure, stable and affordable housing and accommodation because not having that puts them at risk of recidivism.
Mr O'Donohue talked a lot about recidivism and the rise in the rates of recidivism, and that is because the access to secure and stable accommodation and housing is not universal for parolees. If they do not have that, then it is not safe for the community because we have an issue of increased recidivism. In order for people to get their lives back together and to be rehabilitated and reintegrated back into the community, that is a key issue. Continuing rehabilitation programs and access to housing are critical to reducing recidivism, as are post-release programs and education to assist prisoners to not reoffend. That is what the community wants. It wants offenders to not reoffend, so we need to put in place programs to assist offenders who are on parole and post-release not to get caught up back into the correction system.
Other countries have trialled programs such as using reformed prisoners as mentors to discourage others from reoffending and returning to prison. There are programs such as this in the US, the UK and Sweden, for example. These are the sorts of things we also need to look at, as well as the law and order approach of supervising prisoners — making sure that they have support and stable housing to enable them to reintegrate into the community and not reoffend and become part of that statistic of recidivism that Mr O'Donohue was talking about.
While we are on this subject, it is just over a year — in fact it was in September last year — since I wrote to the Attorney-General raising the issue of spent convictions. I wrote to him on 11 September last year asking if he would legislate for a spent convictions scheme here in Victoria, and I made particular reference to a model that the Law Institute of Victoria has put forward. The Attorney-General responded in October last year saying that the government is committed to promoting rehabilitation and safely integrating those who have come into contact with the criminal justice system into the community and that the government was examining the merits of a legislative spent convictions scheme in Victoria. We believe that this is a scheme that is imperative. In fact currently all states and territories as well as the commonwealth have this legislation. Victoria is the only state without such a scheme.
In terms of this issue there were 481 945 criminal history checks reported in the 2013–14 year, according to the Victoria Police annual report. In a submission to the Attorney-General, the law institute and other groups argued that the findings of guilt without conviction and less serious and irrelevant convictions should no longer appear on a person's criminal record after 10 years for adult convictions and 3 years for juvenile convictions. Currently information is routinely released by Victoria Police for up to 10 years for adults and 5 years for children since they were last found guilty of an offence, unless Victoria Police exercises discretion in its disclosure of older convictions. The proposed scheme would apply to sentences that attract no imprisonment or imprisonment of less than 30 months, and that would align with commonwealth and Queensland legislation, for example.
Spent convictions and findings of guilt would no longer be required to be revealed. Exceptions to this would be sexual offences, in line with other jurisdictions, and the register. But I have also mentioned that the register needs to be reviewed in terms of the types of people who are still on the register and the fact that that does not distinguish between serious offenders and others who may be in the category of less serious offenders.
This would mean that people who have been involved in and convicted of non-serious crimes a very long time ago and have never been convicted of anything else since would not be discriminated against in terms of employment or housing et cetera, which is currently the case. People have been known to have lost their jobs or been refused accommodation based on a longstanding conviction for a very minor offence a very long time ago, when since then they have been convicted of nothing. So in terms of putting everything into context, that is another thing that I think the government could move on in the foreseeable future. Otherwise the Greens are supporting the bill.