Simon Power MP
National Party Justice & Corrections Spokesman

14 December 2007

Labour’s home detention fails again

The Labour Government’s decision to not review home detention may be coming home to roost, after a woman was allegedly viciously attacked again by the same man, says National’s Justice & Corrections spokesman, Simon Power.

He is commenting after a man on home detention for bashing his partner, allegedly bashed her again – after he was sentenced to home detention in a house across the road from where she lived.

“Here we go again.

“Labour’s flawed home detention scheme is to blame here because it allows too many violent people to serve their sentence in the community.

“If Labour had reviewed home detention as it promised, it would surely have seen the disturbing trends – at last count, half of those on home detention had been convicted of violence (25%), sex (5%), or drug offences (19.5%).

“Figures like those would surely have had alarm bells ringing, because putting those sorts of offenders back into the community is asking for trouble.

“It’s no excuse for Corrections to say this woman wasn’t on the victim-notification register, because if Labour’s version of home detention didn’t put violent offenders back into the community in the first place, this wouldn’t have happened.

“This is all about Labour trying to save prison beds at the expense of public safety.

“Home detention needs careful scrutiny. Labour promised at the last election to review it, but couldn’t make the hard call when it came to the crunch.

“A Cabinet paper says the review was supposed to examine ‘the appropriateness of home detention for offenders convicted of certain offences (e.g. offences involving serious violence, sex offences, or offences committed in the home)’.

“But when home detention was made a separate sentence as ‘a key element in reducing the need for additional prison beds’, the review was abandoned.

“Labour has again let down victims of crime.”

ENDS

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