Page 3625 - Week 10 - Thursday, 19 September 2019
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The practical effect of the bill is to ensure that, in general, if an offender’s parole order is cancelled more than three months post release from custody but before the parole period has expired, the time the offender spent in the community in compliance with the conditions of their parole order is counted towards the offender’s remaining sentence. However, the government has applied careful policy consideration to ensure that community safety and community trust are not eroded.
The bill includes a new part 7.5A in the sentence administration act which introduces a general rule that parole time credit applies to offenders who have their parole order cancelled. It provides exceptions from this rule for serious offenders who commit further serious offences while on parole, family violence offenders who commit further family violence offences while on parole, and offenders who commit any offences within three months of their release on parole. It provides a discretion for the court to apply parole time credit to offenders who fall within those exceptions if special circumstances exist.
It sets out detailed methods for the calculation of parole time credit. It includes provisions addressing how parole time credit will be applied when an offender commits a new offence in another jurisdiction whilst subject to a parole order made or registered in the ACT. It ensures administrative certainty in the application of the scheme by requiring the court and the Sentence Administration Board to state on the warrant, notice or order committing the offender to custody the date at which parole time credits stopped. And it includes transitional provisions which ensure that parole time credit will be available to all offenders who, on or after the commencement date, are on parole or who are in custody awaiting sentence for a new offence committed whilst on parole.
Currently, when a parolee is returned to custody following a breach of parole conditions, they are liable to serve the remainder of the sentence that was outstanding at the time they were released. For example, if a detainee is released on parole with 12 months remaining on the sentence and that person breaches their parole eight months into the parole period, currently they are liable to serve the full 12 months that had been outstanding at the time they were released.
The effect of the ACT’s current parole system has been examined in various Australian Law Reform Commission reports, including most recently in Pathways to justice: inquiry into the incarceration rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, which recommended the immediate abolition of parole schemes which require time served on parole to be served again if parole is revoked. Key justice stakeholders across Australia have noted the unnecessarily punitive effect of the current system, which in effect imposes an additional sentence on offenders.
In response to these issues, every other Australian jurisdiction except the Northern Territory has introduced legislative changes to develop schemes which credit time spent on parole. These schemes are known as clean street time or time to count.
Responses to combating crime are often viewed in binary terms as either tough or soft on crime. This simplistic duality has long had political resonance, but in reality the
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