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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 11 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 3338 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

My view about it is that as soon as the worst criminal can be rehabilitated and returned to society, that is where they ought to be, not locked away at great public expense just to satisfy some perception that we need to punish people. Punishment or retribution is part of the approach that the community expects for serious crimes. But in many of the cases we are talking about here public safety is not an issue; deterrence is an issue and rehabilitation seems not to have been treated with proper emphasis.

These Bills will maintain the need to rehabilitate people and to get them back into society, operating as normal members of society. If we are to focus on giving people public satisfaction by unduly punishing them to create a deterrent, I think we have lost the plot. Have a look at what goes on in some States in the United States. Massive numbers of prisoners are locked away, and they regard that as a successful corrections philosophy. It does not seem to reduce the amount of crime.

Mr Humphries: Crime is coming down. The latest figures show that crime is reducing.

MR BERRY: I was talking about in States of the US, where the law and order drum is beaten all the time. I do not necessarily think that these sorts of things create less crime in the community. In fact, if you take hope away from people, you create recidivism. If you do not give people hope for the future and they have nothing to lose, you put them in an extremely bad position and they are more likely to commit crime again.

I think the position of the Government and the crossbenchers is quite appalling. Any move away from rehabilitation, or a prospect of rehabilitation, is an abandonment of our responsibility as legislators to create a humane and proper social structure. Punishment is not something I find particularly tasteful as part of the principles of a corrections system. Punishment might give some people a nice warm inner glow. It does not give me one. I understand that victims of crime may have different views about these things.

Yes, we have to deter criminals. I do not know of anybody who likes to fulfil community service orders. I heard somebody refer lightly to removing graffiti or doing some other public works. They are still punishment and they are still deterrents. Most importantly, they do not put people in gaol. For the most part, people ought not to be going to gaol unless public safety is an issue. We should use all of our efforts to keep people out of gaol rather than putting them in. If you think crime is going to go away because you increase the likelihood of gaol, you have got another think coming. I do not know that it has a successful track record in many places.

I am concerned that the move towards retribution and punishment as some sort of silver bullet is fraught with dangerous probabilities. Deterrence has limitations when it comes to dealing with people who offend. The number of people in our prisons and the number of people who reoffend clearly indicate that our rehabilitation programs need some improvement. On the surface, the position of the Government and the crossbenchers seems to be a backward step.

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