What is the reoffending rate?

Aaron Leaman at Stuff reports:

Some of the worst criminals sentenced to preventive detention are being freed after serving on average only 11 years in prison.

Corrections Department figures show preventive detention might not be as tough as the public perceives it to be.

A total of 22 inmates sentenced to the stiffest penalty the courts can provide have been freed on parole in the past seven years, 17 in the past three years.

The average time served was 11.7 years, despite the sentence enabling offenders to be kept locked up indefinitely.

Legislation introduced in 2002 lowered the minimum age for the imposition of preventive detention from 21 to 18.

However, it also reduced the minimum non-parole period from 10 to five years.

Thanks Labour!

However I don’t think we get enough data in this story to make conclusions. First of all the average release time of 11.7 years is just of those actually released – 22 people.

What we don’t know if how many people have not been released at all. There were 96 given preventive detention from 2006 to 2012. There may be 200 prisoners on PD in total, so the 22 released may be just 10% of the total.

I’d also be keen to see more than just the 11.7 years average. How many of the 22 were released in under 10 years?

But most of all what I really want to know is how many of those released on parole despite having PD have reoffended?

Those who get a finite sentence basically get automatic parole at two thirds of their sentence, so it is inevitable there will be a fairly high level of offending on parole for those prisoners.

However to get parole, if you have a PD sentence, is meant to be much harder – rather than a default assumption of release, there is a default assumption of no release. If not confident they will not reoffend, the Parole Board can keep them in for ever.

Hence I would expect a very very low reoffending rate for those given parole who have a preventive detention sentence. If the rate is not low, then it suggests the Parole Board is getting it wrong.

Does anyone have that data?