A home detention anklet – under the new law, home
detention is available as a stand-alone sentence.
Home detention as a stand-alone sentence and community detention are new sentences passed by Government in July, which will be managed by the department’s Community Probation & Psychological Services (CPPS).
Intensive supervision is the third new sentence to be introduced under the Criminal Justice Reform Bill, which aims to give judges a greater choice in sentences available from October this year.
Home detention is intended as an alternative to short prison sentences for lower level offenders. Community detention is an electronic curfew that might be suitable for speeding and property offenders, while intensive supervision is intended to be rehabilitative in nature.
CPPS has been recruiting an extra 300 probation staff to manage the new sentences, taking the total CPPS staff to 1900. The extra staff numbers include allowance for attrition and the extra workload expected from the recruitment of 1000 additional Police.
Meanwhile planning and implementation design for the new sentences continues with a large project team writing CPPS manuals and procedures and working closely with IT to organise on-line forms and systems to enable probation staff to administer the sentences.
Chief Information Officer Derek Lyons says an IT team of about 50 is busy changing code on the Integrated Offender Management System (IOMS) to provide for the new sentences, and on the Corrections Analysis and Reporting System (CARS) data warehouse to handle additional reporting details. Further work also has to be done on the interface with Justice for the transfer of information between Courts and Corrections.
CPPS General Manager Katrina Casey says staff throughout the CPPS group have contributed to the sentence design and implementation, and their input has proved, and will continue to be, essential to the success of this work.
Training for staff who will manage the new sentences will continue from now until the end of October. Around 6500 days training will be delivered.
After the sentences become available from October the workload managed by CPPS is expected to increase by a third over the next year or so. Under the new sentencing structure, home detention will only be served as a sentence in its own right. A total of 2900 offenders a year are expected to serve it, compared to 1500 in 2006/07 who undertook a home detention order as a way of serving or completing a prison sentence. When the total expected number of offenders on home detention has been reached, the introduction of this new sentence is expected to lower the daily prison muster by about 310.
Community detention is likely to have a throughput of 2500 offenders a year, and act as an alternative to a short-serving prison sentence for around 1650 a year. This will lower the daily prison muster by 140. The remaining number are likely to be sentenced to this electronic curfew instead of, or in conjunction with, the existing community-based sentences of supervision and community work.
Intensive supervision is intended to provide an alternative to the lower level supervision, with the judiciary expected to consider the gravity of the offence before potentially selecting either of these sentences. This is not expected to lower prison numbers.
The new tiered structure of communitybased sentences is intended to give judges a wide range of options, as well as alternatives to prison, when sentencing lower level offenders and when considering offenders who have breached their sentences.
The new community-based sentences hierarchy
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ISSN 1178-8453