Page 279 - Week 01 - Thursday, 11 February 2016
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MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo—Minister for Corrections, Minister for Education, Minister for Justice and Consumer Affairs and Minister for Road Safety) (4.06): As the minister for justice with responsibility for Corrective Services, I am deeply interested in reducing the number of people who are in our prison. The AMC, along with every jail in Australia, has experienced extraordinary increases in the number of detainees over the past three years. I find myself in the unfortunate position of regularly updating the community on prison population records with the most recent high figure being in the 420s.
As a member of the government and a member of my community, I also have an interest in reducing offending and reoffending. We all know that this will lead to a safer, more secure city, and that less crime is good for everybody in the community— not just victims but also their affected families, the police, our schools and our hospitals.
While Canberra has low levels of crime compared to most other jurisdictions, we need to do more to achieve an overall reduction in prisoner numbers. With detainee numbers showing no signs of reducing under a business as usual response, the ACT government has embarked on a new and innovative justice reform strategy. Two years ago I convened a series of roundtables that saw government and non-government representatives come together to consider what we were doing well and what we could improve in terms of responding to increased incarceration rates.
From this, the government started to implement changes that are now showing practical and tangible legislative outcomes, which leads us to today’s debate. The purpose of the bill before us is twofold. It will see the ACT move away from the outdated weekend detention model and make available a new sentence called an intensive community correction order. It introduces both a new community-based sentencing option into the territory’s sentencing framework and implements phase 2 of the restorative justice scheme in two stages. Both aspects of the bill reflect the government’s priority of creating a fair and safe community.
In 2014 I supported the attorney’s collaborative development of the justice reform strategy and the justice reinvestment strategy. The justice reform strategy is focusing on sentencing law and practice and the justice reinvestment strategy is developing a whole-of-government strategy aimed at reducing recidivism and those at risk of becoming offenders from the justice system. ACT Corrective Services is also working to develop new prison industries and detainee employment services to sit alongside our existing education and training programs. And in the near future the government will respond to the 55 recommendations of the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety’s inquiry into sentencing. All of this work combined is a welcome approach designed to both tackle overcrowding in our jail and, as I have stressed, make our community safer.
A fair and safe community means one that is fair and safe for everyone. That includes victims of crime, offenders and the broader community. The challenge for any government is to create a justice system that balances the rights and needs of all sections of society, not just one. It has long been recognised that sending offenders to
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