The deaths of John Monckton and Naomi Bryant have led to scathing reports into the parole board by its watchdog. Jon Robins finds out how such shortcomings may be addressed

The failings of the Parole Board that contributed to the series of events that led to the killings of London banker John Monckton and Naomi Bryant were laid bare recently when Andrew Bridges, the chief inspector of probation, delivered his reports. Damien Hanson, the man who stabbed the financier to death, was on parole after completing less than seven years of a 12-year sentence for attempted murder.


‘He will not be released until he has served at least two-thirds of the sentence,’ his trial judge had promised when sentencing the then 17-year-old at the Old Bailey. Tragically, that did not happen.


And Anthony Rice, who strangled and stabbed to death Ms Bryant, had been released on licence nine months earlier after serving 16 years for rape, indecent assault and actual bodily harm.


In the case of Hanson, commentators were appalled and mystified that the fatal decision of the Parole Board was made on a review of paperwork alone, though lawyers who specialise in prison law report say that this is not unusual. ‘The fact that this guy was released after a paper hearing doesn’t surprise me,’ says John Dickinson, who has specialised in prison law for 12 years and is a consultant at the law firm Irwin Mitchell in Sheffield. ‘He is a fixed-term prisoner and that’s the procedure. There is no automatic review or right to an oral hearing and they are generally dealt with on paper. I suspect that the Parole Board was faced with a dossier which said he had dealt with his offending behaviour, had behaved well, had a release plan and that the home probation officer was saying they could supervise him.’ On that basis there would not be any ‘caution flags’, adds the solicitor.


The Parole Board did turn down Hanson’s first parole application in May 2003, at the half-way point of his sentence, when he showed little contrition for his original crime. ‘You can’t say “my offending”. It’s not me that has done anything on any of my offences,’ he reportedly told the probation officer. But 12 months later, the Parole Board accepted his second application without any interview or a follow-up report.


According to Matthew Evans, a prison law specialist at Hove firm Bishop & Light, the all-important probation officer interview is often done over the telephone. ‘If, for example, you have a prisoner from Liverpool who is eventually allocated to a prison on the Isle of Wight, the particular probation officer is unlikely to spend the better part of the day travelling from Liverpool to the Isle of Wight and back again just to visit a prison and prepare a report,’ he says. ‘You sometimes wonder how much information they are able to glean from a simple telephone interview. Mistakes are bound to be made because the dossier does not contain a robust and proper risk assessment.’


Responding to Mr Bridge’s report on the death of Mr Monckton, the chairman of the Parole Board, Sir Duncan Nichol, said he would selectively reintroduce interviews for violent and sexual offenders.


As a result of the report, former Home Secretary Charles Clarke introduced an emergency package of measures designed to ‘enhance public protection’. These included plans to introduce a ‘violent offender order’ that will empower the court to make ‘specific prohibitions’ – for example, banning the offender from a certain place – breach of which will be punishable by five years’ imprisonment.


The furore over Mr Monckton’s murder has understandably knocked the confidence of the Parole Board. ‘We have a number of cases recently where the decisions have been fairly concerning and panels have taken a very conservative approach, presumably in response to the criticisms [expressed in the Bridges report],’ says Mike Pemberton, a solicitor at Bolton firm Stephensons, which specialises in prison law.


In fact, over the past two years, the Parole Board has begun to groan increasingly under the weight of its workload. ‘It seems to us that there has been this explosion of hearings over the last year,’ reports Simon Creighton, head of prison law at London firm Bhatt Murphy and co-author of a new Legal Action Group (LAG) book called Parole Board hearings: law and practice. In 2004, release arrangements of all kinds of life sentences were finally harmonised, with the Parole Board having the power to direct whether lifers were released following an oral hearing. It resulted from the ‘acceptance that the European Convention on Human Rights requires a judicial body and not the executive’ to decide whether lifers are safe for release, Mr Creighton argues.


For many years, Parole Board hearings existed in what Sir Duncan describes as the ‘dark ages’ in the introduction to the LAG guide. ‘You do not have to be a grizzled veteran to recall the end of the 1980s, when suddenly the doors of secrecy behind which the Parole Board worked were flung open to a curious world,’ he writes. It was not until 1992 that the oral hearing was introduced and, for the first time, prisoners and their lawyers met the board. Prior to that, communication was by letter or telephone.


Change continues apace, and last January the Law Lords ruled that recalled fixed-term prisoners were entitled to oral hearings as well (Smith and West v Parole Board [2005] UKHL 1). That case involved Trevor Smith, who was convicted of rape and making threats to kill. He was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in jail and released on licence in 2001 after serving two-thirds of his sentence, but recalled the following year as a result of drug use.


‘The ruling meant that people serving ordinary sentences, not life, who were recalled to prison were effectively entitled to oral hearings. That added about 5,000 more hearings a year,’ explains Mr Creighton. ‘The Parole Board’s workload went from a few hundred cases a year to several thousand effectively overnight.’


The Parole Board has just scrapped the use of clerks at hearings. ‘It is an indication of the workload that they are struggling to cope with, and the primary motive appears to be cost-saving,’ says Nick Wells, head of the prisoners rights’ department at Manchester firm Tuckers. He points out that clerks used to take contemporaneous notes of a hearing and so were important in providing an independent record.


It was the burgeoning workload and concerns about the quality of legal advice that prompted Mr Creighton to write the LAG guide, he says. Prison law work is paid by the Legal Services Commission under its general criminal contract. ‘People who have the criminal contract are automatically allowed to do prison law work, whether or not they can demonstrate any expertise or knowledge of the area,’ he says. ‘There is a danger that people who don’t really know the area are allowed to deal with it.’


It is a worry shared by Mr Dickinson, who says that ‘with the contraction of criminal defence work’, increasingly firms are expanding into prison work. ‘The concern is that the quality of work is very variable,’ he says. ‘I think that there should be a specialist quality mark for this area of work.’


One innovation that the Parole Board, as well as the Prison Service, is struggling to come to grips with is the new indeterminate public protection (IPP) sentence. Anne Owers, the chief inspector of prisons, revealed in her recent annual report that more than 400 criminals had been given the sentence in the first ten months since it became available to judges.


It was introduced in April last year, allowing judges to rule that an offender convicted of a violent, dangerous or sex crime must stay in jail until the Parole Board considers that the person is no longer a risk to the public. ‘Within eight months, over 330 prisoners were serving the new indeterminate public protection sentence, with little by way of a national strategy for maintaining them,’ Ms Owers said.


Nervous judges have been handing them out ‘like confetti’, reports one lawyer. The appeal court expressed concerns over this last November, in a case in which 13 people sentenced under the new provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 challenged their sentences. ‘They all have either had their tariffs reduced or their IPP sentences quashed on the basis that the appeal judges were critical of the lack of guidance given to Crown Court judges when imposing sentences,’ explains Mr Evans.


‘I have come across a number of these people who have indeterminate sentences who would never have attracted a life sentence even under the old “two strikes and out” regime,’ says Mr Wells, referring to the former Conservative government rule that anyone convicted of a second serious crime received an automatic life sentence. ‘It appears that prisons’ lifer units are full to bursting, and there are people who have been given these indeterminate sentences who should be allocated but can’t be, because there’s no room.’


Jon Robins is a freelance journalist