That’s why it is called preventive detention

Stuff reports:

No freedom is in sight for New Zealand’s longest serving inmate, who will have clocked 50 years in jail before he is next allowed to seek parole.

The Parole Board has issued a three-year postponement order to pensioner prisoner Alfred Vincent, 77, who has been locked up since being sentenced to preventive detention in 1968 for seven indecent assault charges against boys.

Vincent’s Auckland-based lawyer, Dr Tony Ellis, said the board had given Vincent a three-year postponement order, which was less than the five-year maximum allowed under newly-introduced parole laws.

“It rounds [his incarceration] up to 50 years before he can possibly get out.

“I think it’s inhumane to sentence anyone to 50 years in prison for indecent assault,” said Ellis, a human rights lawyer.

He is not in prison (any more) for indecent assault. He is in prison to prevent further sexual offending. That is what preventive detention is about.

Seven convictions for indecent assaults on five boys aged 12 to 14 had a maximum jail sentence of seven years, but Vincent got preventive detention in 1968 because of his previous child sex convictions.

Vincent, originally from Kaiapoi in Canterbury, has a glass eye, wears two hearing aids, and has serious heart condition.

It was “laughable” that he was still considered a risk, Ellis said.

In September, the board said in its decision to decline parole for Vincent that he still posed a high risk of sexual re-offending. 

“Despite his advanced years, he is said to exhibit a strong and persistent pattern of highly sexualised interest and behaviour.  If anything, he has become more disinhibited. But he is not amenable to treatment,” its written decision said.

If he was released, he’d probably be charged with another offence within a week.  It’s sad, but from what I understand he has no self control, and even within prison he has dome stuff highly inappropriate in public.