PUBLIC CONFIDENCE IN PAROLE - AND THE PAROLE BOARD

Parole is all about risk and risk assessment. However accurate that assessment, it is inevitablethat at some stage, a Parole Board will release someone who goes on to commit a serious oﬀence. The
Parole Board has a duty to do two things - the ﬁrst and most important is to do all possible to ensurethat its decision making and the systems that underpin it are sound; the second is to do what it can toinform and engage its stakeholders about its work.
A few years ago, when I was Chief Executive of the Parole Board for England and Wales, we had
two cases in a very short period when men we had released had gone on to kill. We had already taken
many actions to up our game in terms of quality of decision-making. We had also done quite a lot toinform and involve stakeholders. Those actions helped a little in dealing with the media storm that wefaced. But we knew that they had to be built on and I set out below the key elements of our strategy our quality agenda.

•The four pillars of wisdom - our starting point. This was a stringent appointment process forrecruitment of new members, excellent training and mentoring arrangements, a formal (andmeaningful appraisal system for members - we were the ﬁrst organisation to appraise judgesʼ
performance) and lastly a review system where people we released re-oﬀended.

•The Review System looked at all cases where a person we released went on to commit aviolent or sexual oﬀence. A Committee of experienced members, chaired by the Boardʼs ViceChairman, a High Court Judge, considered all such cases. The system was strengthenedby having distinguished external members on the Committee, including a Chief Constable.
Feedback on the Committeeʼs views was given individually to members and learning points
shared both by inclusion in the Boardʼs member newsletter as well as feeding into training. We
also involved an external academic psychologist to utilise outcomes to look for patterns as well
as setting up a Joint Review Process including other agencies such as the Prison Service andthe Probation Service to see if there were shared learning points to improve public safety.

•Member accreditation. We set up a system of career progression for members so that they
moved on to more challenging work only after additional training and formal accreditation. We
also set up a Quality Unit which supervised the routine monitoring of panel decisions to test
a sample of decisions for each Board member. Again, feedback was given to individuals andfurther training or mentoring arrangements made if necessary.

•Research. Our budget was not large but we managed to set up our lifer database which
recorded the outcomes of all lifers we released with a complex coding system. We had one
research project with Oxford University which considered the data and produced one importantreport. We co-hosted a conference with Cambridge University from which a book waspublished.

•An international proﬁle. We joined the Association of Paroling Authorities International andattended and presented at conferences, learning much from other practices. We hosted many
international visits and assisted in setting up or improving parole systems in other countries.

•Regular stakeholder events. We held events where we explained what we were doing andasked for input and feedback. We launched our annual reports in this way. We used the events251

to involve stakeholders in policy development and to consult and share information.
•Working with victims. We attended many victim events - presenting where invited. We
appointed one of our Directors to the Victim portfolio. We ensured that victims were included
in all our stakeholder events and that they were fully involved in setting up our new website.
Victim representatives were invited to observe panel hearings and contributed to member
training (as did ex-prisoners).

•Prisoners maintaining innocence. We took the same steps here as for victims. We hosted aseminar which investigated what could be done to improve and make fairer the systems for
those in prison maintaining their innocence.

•VIP visits. We had a programme of invitations to policy leaders, politicians, senior members of
the judiciary and other VIPs to observe panels to ensure a better understanding and respect for
the Boardʼs work.

•Media. We appointed a full-time Head of Communications who ensured good relations withspecialist journalists and led on media contact to ensure a single voice. We worked with theBBC on radio programmes about the Board and three television documentaries - Lock themup or let them out which were well received. The Chairman and I spoke regularly at highprofile public events and conferences, on radio and TV and wrote articles for appropriate
journals.

•Website. We won the best website award from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.
On our website, we included a short ﬁlm trying to debunk the main criticisms levelled at theBoard and showing some of our members to show that they were impressive and part of thecommunity. There are also contributions from some of our stakeholders. This ﬁlm is what I
will show to delegates at the workshop.

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