Page 424 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 18 February 2020
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the Crimes (Sentencing) Act 2005 and the Crimes (Sentence Administration) Act 2005 by the Crimes (Sentencing and Restorative Justice) Amendment Act 2016 as part of the justice reform strategy. The ICO provisions commenced on 2 March 2016. This tied into the amendments introduced by the Crimes (Sentencing Amendment) Act 2014, which provided for an end date for periodic detention on 1 July 2016.
ICOs were introduced with several strategic aims, including to establish an alternative sentencing option to full-time imprisonment, to provide effective supervision and rehabilitation of offenders in the community, and to reduce rates of reoffending and imprisonment. The ICO was designed to be a stand-alone way of serving a sentence of imprisonment while remaining in the community. In the ACT sentencing hierarchy, it sits just below a sentence of full-time imprisonment. It is intended as a sentence of last resort for offenders before full-time imprisonment. The sentence can fulfil a range of purposes of sentencing in circumstances where community safety and other sentencing considerations do not require the sentence to be served by way of full-time imprisonment.
The review sought feedback from a range of criminal justice stakeholders on the operation of the ICO provisions. The general view was that the ICO is an effective sentencing option, and some stakeholders considered it was likely to contribute to reducing reoffending. Available data indicates that 62 per cent of offenders referred for assessment for suitability for an ICO were sentenced to an ICO, with only six per cent of offenders returning to custody in the ACT on either new offences or on remand, and 24.7 per cent returning on a community corrections order or another ICO. Of the offenders who completed their ICO since the commencement of the scheme, 61.5 per cent have not returned to custody or otherwise been sentenced to supervision by ACT corrective services.
The responses received from stakeholders noted two main opportunities to improve the scheme: the timeliness of the ICO processes and its resourcing; and the need for clarification of the operation of some provisions. The provisions identified for clarification relate to eligibility, suitability and the complexity involved with offenders carrying multiple court sentences and orders, including the ability to credit time served on remand.
Recommendations from stakeholders included reviewing the necessity for both a pre-sentence report and intensive corrections order assessment report whilst maintaining a robust assessment process and ensuring the timeliness of information provided to the court; considering the impact of potential aggregate or global sentencing legislative provisions within the ACT as is applied in other jurisdictions; a review of the Crimes (Sentence Administration) Act 2005 to exclude certain serious offences from being amenable to an ICO and limit availability of ICOs to lower terms of imprisonment; revising exclusionary restrictions listed under section 46D of the Crimes (Sentencing) Act 2005 to ensure that target cohorts are not excluded from ICOs unnecessarily; and optimising the effectiveness of community corrections supervision orders through alignment to the ACT corrective services’ risk, needs and responsivity framework. A further recommendation was for ACT corrective services
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