Page 2342 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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Parallel to the legislative changes that I introduce today, ACT Corrective Services will make complementary improvements to their detainee disciplinary policy and related procedural tools. These changes will provide better guidance to corrections officers. The improvements will include information for corrections officers on suitable penalties for certain types of offences as well as guidance on how to conduct proper investigations when required.
The bill also provides for several important technical amendments to the Crimes (Sentence Administration) Act. These modifications include providing that offenders who are not performing periodic detention will not be given credit for performing period detention over excluded periods; clarifying the Sentence Administration Board’s power to give retrospective approval not to perform periodic detention; amending section 70 of the act in relation to cancellation of periodic detention orders by the board; and ensuring the chair of the board has the power to reorganise divisions of the board where board members are unavailable.
The first technical amendment will prohibit holiday exclusions applying to offenders who do not consistently attend periodic detention for a number of periods. At present, the Crimes (Sentence Administration) Act provides that offenders serving periodic detention are deemed to have attended a periodic detention period for those days where holidays, such as Christmas Day and Easter Sunday, fall during a detention period. In effect, this provision excuses all periodic detention detainees from their normal reporting obligations on these holidays.
The amendment will ensure that in order to be eligible for the holiday exclusion an offender must attend, or be taken to have attended, periodic detention the week prior to, and the week following, the prescribed holiday. In circumstances where the offender’s last term of periodic detention will fall on a prescribed holiday, the offender will only be required to attend the week prior to the holiday.
The second technical amendment will clarify the board’s power to manage an offender’s absence from two or more periods of periodic detention in situations where an offender’s health or unexpected circumstances justify the absence. This amendment provides the board with the ability to give an offender retrospective approval not to perform periodic detention on two or more occasions, and up to a maximum of eight occasions, if the offender’s health or exceptional circumstances justify such approval.
The amendment will also ensure that for each period of leave granted to the offender, the offender’s periodic detention period and sentence of imprisonment will be automatically extended by one week. This amendment will allow the board to manage each individual case in line with the goals of sentencing set out in the Crimes (Sentence Administration) Act.
The third technical amendment will insert the word “commits” into the new section 70(1) of the Crimes (Sentence Administration) Act. The amendment is made in response to the ACT Supreme Court determination that cancellation of periodic detention orders by the board under section 70 should only occur where the relevant offence was committed during the periodic detention period.
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