British parole system ‘in meltdown’

Britain's parole system is so over-stretched and under-funded that all a paroled criminal has to do to evade being returned to jail is move house and not tell his probation officer. "Beyond checking a last known address, there is not much an officer chasing a warrant can do," Harry Fletcher, a senior member of the National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO), has told The First Post.

His comments come in the wake of Justice secretary Jack Straw's announcement earlier this week that almost 1,000 criminals who had been recalled to prison could not be found by police. The announcement came as no surprise to Fletcher. "I suspect the actual figures are a lot higher," he said.

However, inquiries by The First Post have established that it is not the case that police were unable to give out names of criminals on the run because they have a right to privacy, as claimed by the Daily Mail last Monday in an article that provoked considerable comment.

The article was headlined 'Murderers and rapists at large: Police won't name 1,000 criminals who should be in jail but have vanished... to protect THEIR privacy'. In it, the Daily Mail claimed that both Surrey and Durham police had refused to provide details of missing criminals, citing their rights under the Data Protection Act.

However, contacted by The First Post, Surrey police denied ever saying this. Durham police explained that data protection laws had indeed prevented them from releasing the names of two individuals - but that was because they had already been re-arrested and were back in prison, a point not clarified by the Mail report.

Fletcher said the inability of police to find the missing men has nothing to do with rights to privacy. It is simply that the police cannot keep up with the increasing number of criminals being paroled too early - because of a lack of adequate prison cells - and then re-offending. In short, the parole system is in meltdown.

"We are in the middle of a deep recession," said Fletcher, "and as with past recessions, we will probably see a rise in crime. A five per cent rise would mean a five per cent rise in the number of people going to prison, which means a five per cent rise in the number of prisoners being paroled.

"Prisoners are expensive and the government will put pressure on parole boards to release more and more people," he added. "They just are going to be pushed out. But with cuts to the probation service, the system is going to implode."

Straw's admission that 954 offenders released from prisons before March this year had not been found followed the recent publication of a damning report on the murders of two French students in London last June by the 23-year-old paroled criminal Dano Sonnex.

The report, by the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), identified almost 20 failings with the parole system that allowed Sonnex to be released back into society to kill Gabriel Ferez and Laurent Bonomo. Contributing factors including over-worked staff who missed crucial mental health assessments and parole boards which too readily accepted Sonnex's claims that he was rehabilitated.

The NOMS report concluded that action at any of these stages could have prevented the brutal murders of the two young Frenchmen.