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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 13 Hansard (27 November) . . Page.. 4839 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

That brings us to the question of what works to achieve this outcome. A reading of the research into this question supports the notion of seeing crime as a social issue which requires an understanding of the human story of the individuals concerned. To a degree, the tension in this debate is between being punishment oriented or problem oriented. It is not, as some like to portray, about being either tough on crime or soft on crime. That simplification of a complex issue has to be condemned for the political rhetoric that it is.

I want to make clear that the problem-oriented approach does not rule out prison for certain offenders, but it recognises that other responses are appropriate as well and that if we are focused on reducing and preventing crime we must be prepared to invest in those alternatives. If the ultimate agreed objective is to reduce crime in our community, we must recognise that evidence does not indicate that the prison experience turns people into law-abiding citizens. In fact, the opposite is true.

It is clear that the potential for a person to be healed and rehabilitated in prison is very limited. That is an argument for a much better prison system, but it is also clear that prison is just one part of a suite of measures necessary to deal with the problem of crime. I stress again that this approach does not rule out prison and it does not remove the notion of punishment. Punishment is within the suite of responses available to a community.

The Greens are not of the view that there is no place for punishment, but we do regard other responses as appropriate, including sentencing programs which give people sentencing options which deal with their particular issues in a more effective way. Restorative justice is also an alternative approach which the Greens support. In the preface to Restorative justice and responsive regulation, John Braithwaite says:

For informal justice to be restorative justice it has to be about restoring victims, restoring offenders and restoring communities as a result of participation of a plurality of stakeholders...So long as there is a process that gives the stakeholders affected by an injustice an opportunity to tell their stories about its consequences and what needs to be done to put things right, and so long as this is done within a framework of restorative values that include the need to heal the hurts that have been felt, we can think of the process as restorative justice.

The evidence also supports the premise that this approach can be important in reducing reoffending. The evidence suggests that it is much more powerful for some offenders to be shamed by those we respect and trust than by police, judges, and so on. To quote John Braithwaite's research again:

In terms of reintegrative shaming theory, the discussion of the consequences of the crime for the victims (or consequences for the offender's family) structures shame into the conference, the support of those who enjoy the strongest relationships of love or respect with the offender structures reintregration into the ritual. Evidence from the first 548 adult and juvenile cases randomly assigned to court versus conference in Canberra indicates that offenders both report and are observed to encounter more reintegrative shaming in conferences than in court. Data such as this calls into doubt what was a common earlier reaction that contemporary urban societies are not places with the interdependence and community to allow the experience of shame and reintegration to be a reality.

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