Page 2459 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 1 July 2008
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However, there are provisions in the law which would mean if that person was going exceptionally well, they were of good behaviour, they had been rehabilitated very well, perhaps after 10 months that person could then be let out on a licence.
You might say, “What is the real difference?” The difference is that you can reward a person’s good behaviour whilst they are in custody, as opposed to a court deciding initially, “This is 18 months but, for whatever reason, I am going to let him out after six.” It does not matter how good or bad that person is in the youth detention centre, they will be let out after six months, go onto a bond to be of good behaviour for the rest of it and, if they breach the bond, or theoretically at least, they come back before the court and they should be sentenced for the remaining 12 months. Sadly, in practice, that rarely applies in the ACT which I think does not really advance our justice system very much either.
The flexibility inherent in the current system is to be commended. I think it is better if someone is given a term of incarceration to start with, but there is then provision for them to be rewarded for good behaviour, rewarded for undertaking rehabilitative programs that are working and then being released into the community on licence. I think that is a system that enables a greater degree of flexibility and is able, especially with young people, to reward good behaviour.
Even with the young people who are incarcerated, what do we want to see? Surely it is that they will be rehabilitated; they will not get on that treadmill of getting involved in the adult system and end up being an old lag in the criminal justice system, in adult prisons. We would like to see some break in that behaviour, some rehabilitation, some attempt at deterring that person from perhaps a lifetime of crime, through good measures undertaken whilst they are incarcerated in the new youth detention centre. Hopefully, they will be deterred from a life of crime.
If a young person is responding to that, I think a licence system is a very good way of rewarding the good behaviour and keeping tabs on them to make sure they are doing the right thing. If they regress to a very bad pattern of behaviour, they can then be re-sentenced; they can then forfeit the term of imprisonment that they had been allowed out on licence for and come back and serve it. So I think by getting rid of that there are problems.
Those are the points I want to make on this particular bill. We do not have amendments. We will be monitoring it very closely. We considered making a series of amendments but it is the government’s bill. They have to live with it. It is a very complex bill. We will see how it works. We will continue to monitor it, as certainly I will continue to monitor the criminal law aspects of it. I am hopeful that it will succeed in what it purports to do but we will see what occurs. There are, I think, some significant problems still that perhaps need to be resolved. We will monitor the bill and seek to make any necessary amendments to the bill that may crop up if required as a result of the bill not quite doing what it is meant to do.
Debate interrupted in accordance with standing order 74 and the resumption of the debate made an order of the day for a later hour
Sitting suspended from 12.31 to 2.30 pm.
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