Court Expectations, Truth in Sentencing and Parole
Saturday, March 27th, 2010
One of the mistakes we make with our treatment of crime is that we approach it almost entirely from the perspective of revenge and reward. Here doggie take your twenty years and shove it… here doggie you’ve been a good boy and you will be released on parole. That’s an expensive paradigm… and completely messed up.
Up until the late 1980s or early 1990s Tasmania had several ways to provide early release for prisoners. The first way was called remission, it was time off for good behaviour that was provided by default as one third of the imposed sentence. If the prisoner was bad then remissions were taken away. The second way was, and still is, the parole system – which at that time made a prisoner eligible for conditional release at half their total sentence.
To the layman that sounds pretty messed up in itself but I’ll paraphrase something I heard Justice Cox say in a sentencing hearing in the mid-1990s on the subject of truth in sentencing and parole. He said when someone is sentenced to 20 years which is considered by the Court to be a crushing sentence there is no expectation on behalf of the Court that he will serve 20 years in prison.
Justice Cox said, at the five year mark the prisoner has lost all ties to his earlier childhood friends and family; even if he was married with children at the time of his conviction he no longer knows them or has a personal bond. These people are strangers to the prisoner. At the 10 year mark the damage done to the man by a decade of incarceration is so profound that it requires another 10 years of supervision and guidance to bring him back to a state where he can function as a normal citizen.
The expectation of the Court is that a man sentenced to 20 years will serve close to his minimum parole term, which can be explicitly set above the half way mark of a sentence by the sentencing Justice, and he will then be released into society under supervision and with support to embark on that second stage of the process of punishment and rehabilitation.
Which is in direct contrast to how the Tasmanian prison system works in practice, especially since abolishing automatic remissions on sentences 20 years ago. Without remissions for good behaviour it became apparent by the early-1990s that parole in Tasmania was reduced to being the sole yard-stick to measure and reward good behaviour.
