Mr. John Costello:

I am conscious that in my written submission I did not mention victims or their families. We receive many written submissions from victims and their families which we take seriously. They would also affect any decision we reach. In any decision the board makes, we must bear in mind it is correct for the protection of society.

I have been privileged to be chairman of the Parole Board for the past four years. There is incredibly good work being done under the radar by all the staff in the Prison Service, the Probation Service and the psychology and educational services. Obviously, there are a few bad apples. However, by and large, from my experience, we see very vulnerable prisoners being treated exceptionally by staff. That is the positive story but there are negative ones too.

I have great admiration for Peter McVerry. He recently said that not one prisoner has been improved in prison. I have to contradict him, however. Ironically, we mainly deal with lifers. As they are in for a minimum of 15 years, there is time given to let them rehabilitate themselves. We have seen very dangerous and vulnerable people completely rehabilitated over 15 to 20 years. Unfortunately, there are some who it will be impossible to rehabilitate and who will always be a danger to society.

When we visit prisoners, we make three key points to them. First, they have to serve their punishment; second, they must rehabilitate themselves; third, they have to be low risk for reoffending. The big philosophical debate we come across in practice is about when someone has served their punishment. Sometimes, there is a conflict between the rehabilitation of a prisoner and the serving of his or her sentence or punishment. When Michael Donnellan, director general of the Prison Service, attended our training day, he made the point that the length of time a person is in prison should not be the most important factor when it comes to rehabilitation. In other words, quite often, there is an appropriate time for someone to be granted periods of temporary release or to be moved to an open prison. There is no doubt that prisoners for life can become institutionalised. If they are imprisoned for too long, it may be too late to rehabilitate them fully and settle them back into the community.

The Parole Board only deals with a small number of prisoners. Only 344 life-sentence prisoners come under our jurisdiction while only 273 prisoners serve a sentence of ten years or more. On balance, we might only recommend parole for four or five prisoners a year. At least 70 former life-sentence prisoners are out in the community who have not reoffended. That is a sign parole is working. On average, only one life-sentence prisoner comes back into prison during the year.

We compiled statistics in 2013 which showed that only 24% of prisoners who were accused of murder pleaded guilty in the courts. However, in prison, when they were found guilty of murder, over 90% admitted their guilt. They had no incentive to plead guilty in the courts. This needs to be dealt with and I have suggested a reform. If a person pleads guilty, there is no mention in the appropriate legislation that this factor should be taken into account when considering parole. It is a major omission. If it could affect their parole decisions, it would incentivise more people accused of murder to plead guilty.

The Parole Board deals with many fixed-term sentence prisoners, say of ten years or more. They get an automatic 25% remission. For example, a prisoner sentenced to ten years gets out after seven and a half years. Quite often a number of these prisoners are going to reoffend because there are no post-release supervision orders. There is an onus on the Judiciary to make more post-release supervision orders because the Probation Service does not have any requirement to help these offenders. There is a role for the Judiciary to improve. I read recently that a private firm in the UK helped the post-release supervision of prisoners.

That firm was paid on the basis of results. In other words, if former prisoners did not reoffend, the private firm got paid. I do not know how it worked out but it was a very interesting idea. The incentive was they got paid if the offenders did not reoffend. It is interesting that we do not have an open prison for women. There is no training of board members but I have gone back to college and studied for an MA in criminology. One of the issues we looked at was private prisons. In Australia, 20% of prisons are private and those prisons have strict values to which they must adhere. It occurs to me that an open prison for women could be constructed privately on the Australian model. I throw that suggestion out.

My final point is totally irrelevant but refers to something that could have changed the face of history. In the American presidential election of 2000, George Bush won in Florida by 537 votes. If the prisoners of Florida had had a vote, they would have voted Democrat and George Bush would have lost the election. World history would have changed. I end on that note.