Our View: Review of home detention needed

Rotorua may be doing better than nationally as far as breaches of home detention sentences go but only slightly better and one in every five is still too many.
What that figure appears to show is that one in five people who are granted home detention are thumbing their noses at the second chance the sentence offers.
Perhaps the screening process for home detention is in need of review.
Is it too easy to get home detention? It certainly seems too easy to breach it.
Such disdain should not be tolerated and it's horrifying to hear about the case of Rotorua woman Moanata Karaitiana who has breached home detention no less than 12 times. She is now - finally, one might think - in jail where she obviously belongs.
Home detention is basically a privilege, society's show of confidence in that person to take their punishment but to move towards change for the better.
Without that option, these people would be in jail.
How has it taken 12 breaches for Karaitiana to finally land in jail? How many chances should one person get?
It is unfathomable someone should be given 12 chances but perhaps not surprising, given how many times people in New Zealand can appear for drink-driving before ending up in jail. Given that home detention is a privilege, allowing a person to stay within the confines of their own home, where family and friends can presumably visit easily, rather than behind bars where they would otherwise have gone, one breach should be enough to result in a jail term.
If that were the law, perhaps the one in five who currently so readily breach the sentence might think twice.
To most law-abiding, fair thinking people, one breach is enough to show that someone has perhaps received a second chance they did not deserve or certainly did not yet deserve. Such a sentence is to be earned, not granted as of right.
We may have what seems to be an out-of-proportion prison population in this country but jail is where some people should go to learn the lessons they are obviously incapable of learning on the outside.
We shouldn't have to put up with it and society deserves better from those qualified to ascertain someone's eligibility and those qualified to recommend, authorise and grant the privilege of home detention.