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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-12-03 Daily Xml
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SUSPENDED SENTENCES

The Hon. R.D. LAWSON (14:46): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Leader of the Government, representing the Attorney-General, a question about suspended sentences.

Leave granted.

The Hon. R.D. LAWSON: The capacity of a sentencing court to suspend a sentence of imprisonment is a sentencing option that is very popular with the South Australian judiciary, even if it is somewhat less popular with Bob Francis and other commentators with whom the Attorney was once friendly.

In Victoria, the government has announced that suspended sentences will be phased out. This decision followed a report that highlighted the conceptual difficulty and artificiality of the two-stage process involved, namely, a judge is required to take into account all the circumstances of the offence and the offender and then rule that the crime and the offender warrant imprisonment, and then he or she is required to go through exactly the same process again and decide whether that punishment ought to be applied.

A second objection in Victoria is that suspended sentences tend to distort the length of sentence imposed. It is claimed that judges tend to pronounce longer sentences when they know they will be suspended. In other words, a judge says to himself or herself, 'This offence is three years but I'm going to suspend it; therefore, I'll announce a sentence of four years but suspend it.'

In Tasmania, a recent detailed study into suspended sentences came up with some interesting but not entirely surprising results; for example, it found that offenders serving suspended sentences had the lowest reconviction rates compared with those who received non-custodian and unsuspended sentences. It was found that those who had previously been given a suspended sentence were more likely to receive a more serious unsuspended sentence, regardless of any subsequent offence.

Finally, another finding I will mention is that only 5 or 6 per cent of offenders who were in breach of a suspended sentence were actually returned to court for action—and that was in Tasmania. As far as I am aware, there has been no recent study in South Australia on the effectiveness of suspended sentences. My question is: will the Attorney commission and publish a report on this issue in South Australia, including statistics about the number of those who have been given suspended sentences and who commit breaches of them, and also matters such as the differences in the recidivism rate between those who receive a suspended sentence as against those whose sentence is not suspended?

The Hon. P. HOLLOWAY (Minister for Mineral Resources Development, Minister for Urban Development and Planning, Minister for Small Business) (14:49): I thank the honourable member for what I guess will be his final question in relation to legal matters. The thought occurred to me while I was listening to that question that, with the retirement of the Hon. Robert Lawson (although the Hon. Mr Parnell perhaps has a planning law degree), he is probably the last lawyer in this—

An honourable member interjecting:

The Hon. P. HOLLOWAY: That's right—Stephen. I congratulate the Hon. Mr Lawson for, right up to the end, asking these questions about the operation of the law. In his time in this place he certainly has paid a great deal of attention to those matters. It is an important question and I will refer it to the Attorney-General in another place and perhaps he will correspond with the Hon. Mr Lawson in relation to this matter. I note the Hon. Mr Lawson's contribution to law reform and legal matters generally during his time here.

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