The Parole Board. Working with others to protect the public.
About the Parole Board
Parole was first introduced by the Criminal Justice Act 1967 as part of a package of measures promoting the rehabilitation of prisoners. These reforms were intended, according to the then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, to keep out of prison those who need not be there. The first releases under the parole system began in April 1968. The report of the Parole Board for that first year noted that "Parole is not a sentimental gesture, it includes a strong disciplinary element, it makes serious demands upon the parolee, and the sanction of recall for misbehaviour is a realistic deterrent". In the early days, the Board acted only as an advisory committee to the Home Secretary and, save for a handful of lifer recall cases, it was only concerned with parole or early release.
The all-party support which parole enjoyed at its inception survived the changes in government in 1970, 1974 and 1979. The Criminal Justice Act 1972 relaxed the procedure for release on parole by allowing the release of prisoners with shorter sentences on the sole recommendation of local review committees in cases within categories agreed by the Board. In 1975 the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, announced more generous criteria for parole and in 1977, for the first time, more than half of the Boards parole recommendations led to parole being granted.
But the consensus in favour of rehabilitation was too good to last and various critics started to challenge the basis of parole. The May Committee Report in 1979 claimed that Confidence in the treatment model . has now been waning throughout the Western world for some years. The parole process also came in for criticism.
The then Home Secretary, Leon Britton, responded in 1983 by introducing a more restricted parole policy for prisoners serving sentences of over five years for violent or drugs trafficking offences. These prisoners were only to be granted parole when it could be shown that release for a few months before the end of a sentence was likely to reduce the long term risk to the public.
The Home Secretary also announced a tightening of the policy for the release of life sentence prisoners, principally by an increase in the length of tariffs, which were fixed at that time by administrative decision, and by toughening the release criteria he would apply.
At the same time he addressed a criticism current at that time about the length of the minimum qualifying period for parole by reducing it from 12 to 6 months with effect from June 1984.
The changes introduced in 1983 provoked a debate which culminated, in 1988, in a review of the parole system chaired by Lord Carlisle QC. The report concluded that the release of 120,000 fixed sentence prisoners from custody earlier than would otherwise have been the case over the previous 20 years had brought enormous benefits in human and resource terms.
It also noted that the number of instances of serious re-offending had been very small over that period. The report went on to say that the restricted policy of 1983 was flawed in principle and harmful in practice. The report, which was not concerned with lifers, concluded that it was both unworkable and wrong to try to operate a selective parole system for short sentence prisoners.
The Criminal Justice Act 1991 embodied most of the recommendations of the Carlisle Report. Local review committees were abolished and, for the first time, the Board was given the power to direct the release of certain classes of prisoner - those serving sentences of between 4 and 7 years.
Furthermore, following early court interventions in the Boards workings, more openness was introduced into parole procedures. Prisoners were given the right to see and comment on the papers considered by a panel and be provided with the panels reasons for their decisions. The Boards procedures were improved further in 1994 when prisoner interviews by a Board member were introduced and the information that was obtained was added to the review papers.
The Board owes the start of its slow transformation into a court-like body to the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in the Thynne case in 1990 which was concerned with the relatively few discretionary life sentence prisoners. The Court held that these prisoners were entitled to be considered for release at an oral hearing by an independent court-like body which had the power to direct release where continued detention was not justified. The Board was granted these powers by the 1991 Act.
The introduction of interviews, oral hearings and the giving of reasons placed a considerable extra workload on the Board. The budget rose from under £700,000 in 1990/91 to over £2.5 million in 1997/98. Member numbers rose from 55 in 1986 to 81 in 1997.
The Parole Board became an Executive Non-Departmental Public Body sponsored by the Prison Service in 1996. These changes allowed the Board greater autonomy and ensured that better systems were put in place to deal with the Boards' ever-increasing workload. Sponsorship of the Board moved to the Home Office in April 2003.
The 1990's saw the introduction and growth of offending behaviour treatment programmes in prison to address the risk of prisoners harming the public and further offending and to help to prepare them for release.
In 1997, the Boards' powers to hold oral hearings and direct release in lifer cases were extended to HMP cases following a decision by the European Court of Human Rights and were again extended to cover the recently introduced automatic life sentence imposed for second convictions for a serious sexual or violent offence.
One of the most significant court cases affecting the Board was the decision in Stafford in 2002 concerning mandatory lifers. The European Court held, for the first time, that post-tariff mandatory lifers were only entitled to be detained if this was necessary for public protection. It also ruled that the justification for their continued detention had to be considered at regular intervals by a courtlike body at an oral hearing and that that body had to have the power to direct their release if continued detention was not necessary.
The single most important milestone in the Boards transformation from an advisory to a decision-making body was the Criminal Justice Act 2003. This followed a detailed review of sentencing policy by the Halliday Committee which reported in 2001 and the subsequent White Paper "Justice for All" in 2002.
Parole was made automatic for those prisoners serving standard determinate sentences of more than 12 months sentenced on or after 4 April 2005. These offenders are now automatically released at the half-way point of their sentence and are on licence supervision until the end of their sentence. The role of the Parole Board is now the review of recall decisions taken by the Probation Service in respect of these offenders.
Instead the Board was given sole responsibility for dealing with decisions on the release of the most dangerous prisoners, who receive indeterminate IPP sentences and determinate prisoners who receive extended sentences for public protection.
The Criminal Justice Act 2003 introduced new indeterminate sentences of imprisonment for public protection and gave the Board responsibility for deciding when these prisoners were safe to release once they had served their tariff, just like life sentence prisoners. Although these prisoners are equivalent to lifers, most have very short tariffs and the huge and growing numbers of such prisoners (2,500 within two years of the IPP sentence being introduced in April 2005) is giving the Board a significant increase in work and creating pressures within the prison system.
In January 2004 the Board held the first meeting of its new Review Committee. The remit of the Committee was to look at cases of serious further re-offending committed by prisoners released on parole or life licence in order to learn whether mistakes were made in the Boards release decision-making process and to enable lessons to be learnt for the future by any other agencies concerned as well as by the Board itself. In its first three years the Committee looked at 171 cases, of which 69 were lifers.
The determinate sentence release rate fell to about 43% in the mid 1990s, compared with a rate as high as 63% in the mid 1980s. The recall rate also reduced from 15.8% of those on licence in 1991 to 8.2% in 1997/98.
The determinate sentence release rate has fluctuated since the mid 1990s, reaching a low of 36% in 1996/97, then rising to a peak of 53% in 2003/04, before falling back to 36% again in 2006/07. The recall rate has risen, since its 1997/98 low of 8.2%, to 13.1% in 2002/03, 21.2% in 2005/06 and 28.3% in 2006/07.
The Smith & West case, decided by the House of Lords in 2005, established that a determinate prisoner on licence is entitled to an oral hearing by the Board to consider his recall where there are significant disputes of fact. This is a further extension of the Boards court-like responsibilities resulting from the 2003 Act and other judicial review decisions of the courts. Some suggest that there is a lack of independence of the Board from the Secretary of State and this is currently being challenged in the courts. In May 2007 sponsorship of the Board was transferred from the Home Office to the newly formed Ministry of Justice.
The constitutional position of the Board, therefore, continues to evolve from an advisory committee concerned with early release to a court making risk assessments about the dangerousness of indeterminate prisoners and those on licence who have been recalled.
Grenadier House, 99-105 Horseferry Road, London, SW1P 2DX
Telephone 0845 251 2220