It seems some tidying up in the law and practice of bonds, suspended sentences and parole is in order.
Last week Chief Justice Jeffrey Miles criticised the system of setting dollar amounts on good behaviour bonds.
He said setting the amounts was useless because the money was never claimed by the court if the bond was breached. It made a mockery of the court process. He thought the law should be changed to get rid of this useless element of the system.
“”What the court ought to do really is require sureties, but there is no point in that either because no-one would take any action to ensure the sureties,” he said.
A surety is where someone guarantees that an offender will not breach a bond to be of good behaviour or breach bail on pain of being forced to pay the amount of the surety.
Also last week Justice Terence Higgins pointed out some anomalies in the action of the Parole Board which had resulted in a man being sent back to jail when the law did not require it.
Chief Justice Miles is right that it makes a mockery of the law to have a monetary amount set for a bond and then for it not to be collected if the bond is breached. And Justice Higgins is right to point out that the imposition of a suspended sentence for the commission of a subsequent offence did not automatically revoke any parole outstanding on the earlier offence. Moreover, Justice Higgins’s ruling that an offender who breaches parole still credit for the time spent on parole is no doubt correct in law. The sentence or any renewed parole would still expire at the end of the original head sentence, and not at some later time as if the earlier time spent on parole had not existed.
However, the upshot in the cases before both judges is not satisfactory. Rather than abolishing the bond amounts, they should be enforced. Maybe the bond money should be collected during the period of the bond and repaid on the completion of it. And sureties should be gathered and enforced. The aim here is to reduce custodial sentences. If you promise to behave you do not go to jail or get a fine, if you break the promise you should have to pay, or your surety (presumably and friend or relative) has to pay the amount of the surety. If the bonds and sureties are enforced, there will be an incentive to behave.
With parole, a prisoner has served only part of the sentence. There is a period of the sentence to be served. The compact with society must be: you get out early if you agree to behave for a period equal to the unexpired part of the sentence. If you break the deal you must serve a period equal to the unexpired part of the sentence. Time outside should not count as time inside if you break parole. Once again there would be a stronger incentive to behave.
And another thing . . . Australian authorities have refused to give permission to Iraqi doctor Aamer Sultan to attend a ceremony to be presented the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Human Rights Medal for his work on the psychological effects of migrant detention (under guard if necessary). Immigration the Minister Philip Ruddock could have overturned that decision. That Dr Sultan cannot attend the ceremony is vindictive, petty, mean, retributive, unjust, inexcusable, shameful, belittling, unjust and ironically lends support to Dr Sultan’s thesis about the psychological trauma caused by the rigidity of Australia’s detention policy.