Safety first

PAROLE GILES PLAYFAIR

The much-vaunted parole system, intended, we were assured, as a bold assault on the hitherto intractable problem of overcrowding in prisons, came into operation last Monday. As a start, all of 350 prisoners have been released, out of over 4,000 technically eligible for parole, and 1,000 recommended to the Home Office by the local review committees as being 'suitable' (whatever that may be supposed to mean). If this is a fair indication of the rate of release to be expected, the effect on overcrowding will be negligible. What is more, an already menac- ing and eminently predictable unrest among the swollen prison population is likely to be intensified.

This is an inherent danger in any scheme which seems to favour one prisoner against another. Parole offers decisively compensating advantages, provided it is imaginatively run, with a willingness to take chances. But if its use is restricted to granting harmless or recidivism-proof prisoners an early release, it merely begs the question of what point there is, or ever has been, in the expensive business of locking up such people in the first place.

From this point of view, the Government— admittedly with aid and comfort from the Opposition—has landed us with about the least promising and most cumbersome parole system imaginable. One valid objection to leaving the release power in the hands of the Home Secretary was not that he would be too adventurous, but, from fear of the political consequences if he were to make unpopular or apparently wrong decisions, too timid. There was a further valid objection that he would be too remote. For if a chance exists of per- suading prisoners refused parole that they are not being unfairly discriminated against, they must be allowed an opportunity—as, in fact, they are in most American jurisdictions—to appear before the authority with the final say.

The best alternative might have been to set up a number of local boards, not only with the responsibility of keeping in close and continual touch with prisons in their area, but with the power of making decisions. If this reversion to the old principle of decentralised prison admini- stration was impractical, one might at least have hoped for a central board that would be both autonomous and perambulating.

The arrangement that has actually been made is a virtual guarantee of a remote parole authority discharging its duties with extreme caution. On the one hand, the Home Secre- tary retains the ultimate power of decision. On

the other hand, he cannot authorise a release.

unless he is advised to do so by a Prison Licensing Board, which he himself appoints and whose function must presumably be to act as a brake on his possible impulsiveness rather than as a spur to his daring. The present board, under the chairmanship of Lord Hunt, who has, so far as one knows, made no previous con- tribution to penological thought or practice, seems admirably suited for this purpose. Its degree of independence may be judged from the fact that a Home Office official serves as its secretary.

As the Bow Group points out in a recent pamphlet (The Treatment of Offenders), the

Government has thus far vouchsafed nothing

about the grounds for granting (or refusing) parole other than a statement in The Adult Offender 'that prisoners recognisably reach a

peak in their training at which they may re- spond to generous treatment, but after which if kept in prison, they may go downhill.' The Bow Group complains that there is 'little evi- dence to support this conclusion,' though with- out realising that whether there is or not, the

conclusion itself is palpably mendacious as a basis for granting parole. (Can anyone seriously maintain that Charles Wilson, say, will be in no danger of reaching a 'recognisable peak in his training' until he has been locked up under super-maximum security conditions for ten years?) An unidentified source at the Home Office was recently quoted by a Times reporter as saying:

The overriding consideration must always be the safety of the public, especially in the cases of

crimes of violence.' This served to confirm the vague idea which the public itself already has and of which The Times evidently approves. But it is, for two reasons, intellectually dis- honest and misleading.

No matter how liberally a parole system may be.4administered, it is quite untrue to

suggest that the safety of the public is, or ever can be, invariably 'the overriding consideration.' This is because retribution and deterrence, as opposed to reform, remain settled purposes of imprisonment. To take an example from the United States, where

parole has for many years been a part and parcel of penal practice: there was never a more model prisoner, nor one less likely to

endanger the public on release, than Alger Hiss. Yet Hiss was repeatedly refused parole, and was obliged to serve his full term, minus remission. Why? The answer is too obvious to need mentioning.

Under present conditions in this country, no Home Secretary Would dare show lenience to

a prisoner who had aroused the public's par-

ticular obloquy and desire for retaliation, nor, very probably, to one whose sentence, as in

the case of the train robbers. for example. was intended by the judiciary to carry an especially ringing deterrent message. But, equally, the

reason he may not dare to release a sex ()Render is not because the risk to the public's safety is realistically too great.

It would be different if we had a prison system wholly dedicated to reform, and a judiciary capable of assessing the exact mini- mum and maximum periods of incarceration needed to achieve such a beneficial end. But we have nothing of the sort. What we do have is

a judiciary still mainly concerned with punitive deserts, and a prison system whose promise of 'training and treatment' is more honoured in the breach than the performance.

A few prisoners can, of course, be held indefinitely, and while a serious danger remains that they will repeat their crimes, there can, obviously enough, be no justification for re- leasing them. It may also be unjustifiable to parole a man who is actually undergoing some kind of reformative treatment—psychiatric, say —and for whom the prognosis is good, pro- vided he serves his full term. But two facts have to be faced about the majority of actual and potential recidivists in prison. First, they are bound to be released sooner or later. Secondly, the longer they are kept in prison the more socially dangerous or inadequate many of them are likely to become. From the point of view of the public's safety, therefore, it may in the long run be a good deal more sensible to grant a parole to a 'risk' prisoner of this sort than to refuse it. Provided he can count on adequate supervision, a parole may, indeed, be the one last chance of preventing him from committing further and more serious crimes.

The rationalisation for present Home Office policy is evidently the fear that initial failures would provoke so hostile a reaction from the public that the whole idea of parole might be strangled at birth. But a parole system that risks no failures is almost by definition a parole system without point, and there seems no reason to suppose that the public will be readier to accept this fact at some unnamed time in the future than it is assumed to be at present.

Meanwhile, if there is not much good to be hoped for, one wishes the Home Office would do something to mitigate the harm by taking the prison population into its confidence and explaining the very limited grounds upon which a parole can, for the moment, be granted— and why. If prisoners knew what to expect, they might not feel, as one gathers they do now, victims of just another of the Govern- ment's gimmicks.