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HEADLINE NEWS - JUSTICE calls for ‘new parole system’

By: Sally Ireland Director, Criminal Justice Policy, JUSTICE

JUSTICE, the all-party law reform and human rights organisation, has called for major reform of the parole system in England and Wales

In our Report, ‘A New Parole System for England and Wales’, JUSTICE calls for the replacement of the current Parole Board with a new Parole Tribunal. This would be independent of the Ministry of Justice and based within the Tribunals Service, which already deals with, for example, mental health detention cases.

The Tribunals Service is the ideal forum for parole hearings. Tribunals, like the Parole Board, frequently sit with lay experts alongside judges. Further, a Parole Tribunal could be served by the existing Tribunals Service administration and could even share some of its members with, for example, mental health tribunals.

Establishing a sufficiently powerful and independent tribunal is key to improvement of the system, JUSTICE believes. The tribunal would have full control over the listing of its cases, subject to legal requirements under the Human Rights Act, and the lengthy delays that we have seen before some Parole Board hearings would, we hope, be avoided. Prisoners spending unnecessary months in custody is not good for them, their families or the public – it can impede rehabilitation and is a huge waste of public money.

The Ministry of Justice has itself consulted on the future of the Parole Board – although its consultation is limited to the setting and sponsorship for the Board. One option considered in the consultation paper is for the Board to be transferred to the Courts Service. Does it really matter whether the Board becomes a court or a tribunal? I think not: a court, like a tribunal, would bring its own standards of fairness and independence and would encourage efficiency by holding the Secretary of State to account. These are the really important issues. We proposed a Parole Tribunal rather than a Parole Court because we believe a tribunal is more suitable for these types of hearing. But either would be an improvement on the current situation.

The importance of independence from the Secretary of State is stressed throughout JUSTICE’s report. In particular, we recommend that an expert Rules Committee, independent of government, should generate rules for the Parole Tribunal – as already occurs for other tribunals, and that the Secretary of State should no longer issue guidance to the Parole Board or its successor.

High standards of procedural fairness are also recommended. One of the Report’s more controversial recommendations is that secret evidence should not be used by the Parole Board or Parole Tribunal. Instead, ‘public interest immunity’ hearings similar to those used in criminal cases should be used to determine whether material is too sensitive to be disclosed to the prisoner; if it cannot be disclosed, it should not be used in the proceedings. No one should be kept in detention on the basis of evidence that is kept from them and that they cannot challenge. A prisoner could have a perfectly good explanation for an allegation about his conduct or could have information that would reveal that evidence is unreliable.

Another potentially controversial aspect of the report is its recommendations on transparency. JUSTICE believes that while hearings are still held in prisons, consideration should be given to admitting journalists and that decisions – including the reasons for them – should be published, anonymously if necessary. ‘For the public to have confidence in the parole system it is very important that it is clear how carefully parole decisions are made. Otherwise the system will always be vulnerable to media headlines about offences committed by offenders on licence.

While the Report does not deal with the sentencing framework more generally, it does comment on indeterminate sentences (in particular IPP/DPP) which, the Report says, place ‘undue pressure’ on the Parole Board ‘effectively to determine the length of the sentence in a large number of cases’ and are ‘wrong in principle’ since they are in effect life sentences, ‘imposed for offences that would not justify a life sentence and where the maximum term could be out of all proportion’ to the offence.

JUSTICE’s report is timely and it is hoped that it will be influential not only on government considerations as to the future of the Board but also in broader consideration of what our parole system is for and how we can make it as fair and effective as possible.

Simon Creighton, a partner at Bhatt Murphy Solicitors and a member of the expert panel that advised JUSTICE on its Report, said: ‘The Report not only considers how the Board might function better within the current legal framework but also explores the future and the role it could have if the criminal justice system were more concerned with the progression and release of prisoners rather than their simple containment’.

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JUSTICE is grateful to the Nuffield Foundation for funding the Report and research project A New Parole System for England and Wales. The views expressed in the report and in this article are those of JUSTICE, not the Nuffield Foundation.