The ACT government is pursuing a raft of sentencing reforms, including the expansion of restorative justice and the creation of intensive corrections orders.

Those orders, known as ICOs, allow offenders to serve their sentences in the community under an onerous set of requirements and conditions.

The ACT Law Society and Bar Association strongly support the introduction of the orders, as a means of promoting rehabilitation and reducing the need for imprisonment.

However, it emerged last week that the government plans to give the Sentence Administration Board oversight of breaches and the power to cancel ICOs.

The board is not a court, but an administrative body which does not sit openly. Under the change, the SAB will have the power to imprison for breaches of the orders.

ACT Bar Association president Shane Gill said he holds serious concerns about the move, saying the decision to lock someone up must be made by a court.

"Courts sit publicly. Courts are given protections to support their independence from administrative government," he said.

"Taking someone's liberty away is the most serious penalty we as a community can impose, and the government proposes to vest this power in an arm of the bureaucracy."

The board can already imprison offenders who breach their parole.

Attorney-General Simon Corbell said last week that he was aware of concerns from the legal fraternity, but thought giving the board the powers was the best option, as it was similar to their existing work on managing parole.

He said the board could likely make such decisions with better efficiency and focus.

"The SAB, we believe, would also be able to deal with breaches in a much more focused manner, and potentially in a much shorter timeframe than the courts would," Mr Corbell said on Thursday.

But Mr Gill questioned that justification, saying courts sit daily, but the board does not.

"It is unclear where the assertion that the SAB may be able to deal with the matters more quickly comes from, unless it functions as a tacit acknowledgement that the courts are under-resourced," he said.

He said it was difficult to understand how the board would be able to deal with breaches in a "more focused" way than the courts, which actually imposed the sentence.

The Bar Association is also concerned that the introduction of the orders will not be supported by adequate resourcing.

He said the scheme would only work if significant resourcing was made available to support the intensive interaction with the offender needed to achieve rehabilitation.

"It is not enough to stretch the current insufficient resources to cover the new scheme," Mr Gill said.

"To do so would render the new scheme as little more than a rebranding exercise."

The reforms were introduced to the Legislative Assembly last week.

Mr Corbell said he expects the ICOs to begin operating next year.