THE Liberals’ Andrew Wall is in some dudgeon over legislation before the Assembly scrapping the practice of making low level crims check into prison for weekends.

“Changes to ACT sentencing legislation will reduce options for the judiciary and increase pressure on Canberra’s prison and the Canberra community,” Andrew said.

“The Crimes (Sentencing) Amendment Bill brought on by ACT Labor and Simon Corbell seeks to remove periodic detention from the suite of options available to the ACT courts when delivering a sentence, without providing an alternative.”

“The judiciary won’t be able to sentence criminals to periodic detention beyond July 2016 or combine a term of full-time imprisonment with periodic detention. The only options will be full time detention or releasing criminals back into the community.

“Furthermore, the judiciary could be pressured into prematurely releasing potentially dangerous criminals into the community because they would no longer have the option of periodic detention in sentencing.”

“The government needs to reconsider its actions and the opposition will not be supporting the government’s changes. It’s a bad policy decision based on flawed thinking,” Mr Wall concluded.

It does seem worth bearing in mind that a criminal in periodic detention is already out in the community quite a lot.

Nonetheless we did wonder why this option was being removed.

A question to Attorney-General Simon Corbell’s office saw us referred to Shane Rattenbury as Minister for Corrections. His office provided this thinking:

The ACT is the only jurisdiction that still has a PDC as it is considered to be an outdated and ineffective sentencing option that that lacks the therapeutic and rehabilitative focus of a modern justice system. The Attorney’s Bill today is simply the formal process of removing it as a sentencing option from legislation. It will be phased out over a number of years.

[Photo by C.P.Storm, attribution licence]