Sir Ron Young, the head of New Zealand's Parole Board for the past seven years is retiring. Photo: Aaron Smale/IKON Media
The retiring chair of the Parole Board Sir Ron Young says it's an injustice that some people don't get an early release from prison because of a lack of available rehabilitation programmes.
Sir Ron, who spoke to Nine to Noon about his seven years in the job, said prisoner rehabilitation and reintegration was "significantly under-resourced".
He had seen dozens, maybe hundreds of people, not receive early release because they weren't able to access their rehabilitation programme.
"There's no question it's an injustice, it's wrong."
"No system has all the resources to do everything all the time," he said. "But this one could be better with more resources."
Rehabilitation, through criminogenic programmes that identified why someone offended, had helped to reduce violent and sexual offending by between 15 and 20 percent, he said.
He said the quality of the programmes was good but the availability "modest".
"For a lot of these offenders, getting onto these big programmes takes a long time.
"So for a lot of offenders they're sitting there in prison with really nothing to do and no advantage to them."
The same went for reintegration programmes.
"There's no release-to-work. Even accepting that there's high unemployment at the moment, having people within the prison organise jobs is difficult to find.
"What's called Guided Releases, taking people out into the community with a prison officer to get them familiar again with society."
Housing was also a problem for ex-prisoners, Sir Ron said.
"It's the people who need supported accommodation, and so they sit there (in prison) often for years, unable to find anywhere."
The Parole Board also faced great difficulty accessing forensic psychiatric reports for prisoners, with Sir Ron Young saying it was "now impossible" to get them nation-wide.
"They've said they will not write the reports because they don't have the resources and so that is hugely problematic for us.
"We have to try and get private psychiatrists who are also very busy, so that's a pretty difficult, stressful area for the Parole Board."
New Zealand's prison population was about 10,000, and the rate was comparable to Australia and the United Kingdom, according to Sir Ron.
He called proposed Sentencing Act changes, which would strengthen the consequences of offending by limiting the use of sentence discounts to 40 percent, "contrary to good policy".
"If we want, as everyone does, to make the community safer, my experience is that I can't think of any of these reforms that will do that."
Sir Ron singled out the Three Strikes law.
"If you say, you won't get parole, then people won't do rehabilitation and we will be releasing them in the worst of all circumstances.
"No rehabilitation, probably little or no support, no period of parole when they could get used to being in the community, is a prescription for trouble."
Sir Ron spoke in depth with Nine to Noon about how the prison system was working, the challenges of assessing the risk of reoffending for those inmates eligible for parole, along with the wider picture of bulging prisons, rehabilitation failures and a changing political environment.
In the past year, the Parole Board conducted 8261 hearings involving 4234 offenders serving long-term sentences.
In the time he'd been on the Parole Board around 51,000 cases had been dealt with.
Sir Ron conceded that sometimes the Parole Board didn't get things quite right, and within the wider Corrections system there had been some mistakes that resulted in catastrophic affects.
The Board saw between seven and 10 prisoners eligible for parole each day and on average each case gets 50 minutes.
He said there had been huge change in the seven years since he'd been on the Board, including changing the way it approached victims.
"What we're trying to do is make it the best system we can for them."
The Board had reviewed and re-wrote all information provided to victims.
It then looked at better protecting the home addresses of victims in relation to where offenders would be released to, which included funding for Victim Support workers to liaise directly with victims.
"And then we've had further information for Parole Board members on how to approach the discussions with victims. We now see lots of victims."
Sir Ron said a victim's input into a hearing could carry significant weight, particularly if a victim knew the offender.
The murder rate in New Zealand was 19 per one million people in the 1990s, reducing to between nine and 11 today, Sir Ron said.
The Parole Board used all the available information and reports on a prisoner to assess their undue risk - the risk of reoffending multiplied by the risk of harm.
They considered the chances of reoffending, the prisoner's background, psychological profile, and what work they'd done to rehabilitate.
"But it's a judgement call. There's no doubt about it."
The highest rate of reoffending was by people who went to prison for less than two years because they were almost guaranteed to return, Sir Ron said.
"They'll come back and they'll be worse. No question they'll be worse."
He said overseas "halfway houses" allowed prisoners to live and function in a community while maintaining a night curfew.
"They learn to live a positive life - so all of these things are possible and much cheaper."
