Should They Stay Or Should They Go:Parole S1.

Punishment versus rehabilitation. It's a tricky one. Many believe it's fundamentally important that serious, and dangerous, criminals are punished for their crimes. Others consider their rehabilitation to be key. The vast majority of us would surely agree that it's vital that the public is protected from those who may do them harm but how much sway should a victim have when considering what kind of sentence an offender is given?

At the moment, not much. Sentences are handed down by judges acting in accordance with laws set down by governments. The parole board make the ultimate decision when deciding if an offender should be released on probation, moved to a lower category (or open) prison, put on day release, or remain where they are.

It's a difficult decision to make and it surely weights heavily on those that make it. The first series of Parole (BBC2/iPlayer, originally aired in February and March of 2023) follows a few select prisoners and the parole board members they come in to contact with to have a look at how this process plays out. Primarily for the prisoners but also for their families, their victims (or victims families should their actual victims have been killed by said criminal), and even for the parole board members themselves.

We're introduced to 54 year old Colin from Brighton who, following a drunken, and possibly coked up, argument about football twenty-five years ago, committed a brutal murder by filling his sock with pool balls (in the style of Alan Clarke's 1979 borstal film Scum) and hitting his victim in the head with the improvised weapon until he "heard his brain crack". Colin says he's not that person anymore and should be released but he's on his sixth parole hearing and has clearly not impressed the board sufficiently on the previous five.

58 year old David, a former helicopter pilot from Chichester, is doing time for swindling multiple women out of thousands of pounds over a forty year period, one of his victims was a recent amputee. He believes he can change, he says he has changed, and that he's now an honest man but, like many others, he was released on parole once before and both absconded and soon reoffended before illegally entering Russia to meet a woman he'd been speaking to online. She did to David what he had done to many women before and swindled him out of his money. Or at least that's his story. There's no corroborating evidence.

Matthew (35, Stoke-on-Trent) is another murderer (he killed a young woman with a claw hammer, a particularly disturbing crime and one somehow made worse because he did it to steal just £20 off her) and he's fourteen years into a life sentence. Inside, he has become a Christian and wants to move to an open prison.

26 year old Simran from Blackburn is a troubled young man who was born a woman. The turmoil in his head led him to dealing in class A drugs (cocaine and heroin) and he's also been found guilty of arson. He claims he let a fire he'd accidentally started continue to burn in the hope it would kill him. He admits he was past caring about the fact that it could have killed others too.

Jon (45, Nottingham) is a paranoid schizophrenic who hears voices (two of them, he calls them Mum and Dad) and has done nearly twenty years for the violent armed robbery of multiple women and Bethany (the youngest of the prisoners at just 23) is in prison for breaching her Criminal Behaviour Order by repeatedly threatening to jump off motorway bridges and walking into fast moving traffic. Bethany has clearly been suicidal but she also talks about how the severity of the dangerous situations she put herself in offered her a form of relief from the terrible anxiety she has suffered with. A form of self-harm.

Tom's a former bin man who found he could make a lot more money dealing drugs (he did, he made over £1,000,000) but got high on his own supply and ended up an addict himself. His loving mother has retrained as a hypnotherapist to try and help him clean himself up. Ruben (34, Gillingham) bit a man's ear off during one of the many brawls he's been involved in. In the past he's been convicted for manslaughter.

32 year old Mark threatened to kill his ex-girlfriend and, because he didn't actually kill her, doesn't think he should be in prison at all. That attitude doesn't look too promising for his chances of parole and nor does the fact that the threat was anything but an idle one. Nor was it the first time (by any stretch) he'd got himself in serious trouble.

Ben (35, Keighley) robbed a local building society when he was off his head on crack. He's having treatment for testicular cancer but the parole board have to consider if he is likely to offend again and can't allow their decision to be swayed by natural human empathy for a man who doesn't want to die in prison. 39 year old Jin is a drug dealer who has already spent half of his life in prison. He makes it clear he didn't sell heroin and that the drugs he sold were what he calls 'party enhancements' which may suggest to you an insufficient level of remorse to impress those who will make very important decisions that will affect the rest of his life.

We meet these prisoners in Wormwood Scrubs (London), HMP Stocken (East Midlands), HMP Leeds, HMP New Hall (Yorkshire), HMP Styal (Cheshire), and three Kent prisons:- Stanford Hill Open Prison, HMP Elmley and HMP Swaleside. The latter two both on the Isle of Sheppy making it, surely, Britain's prison capital. Who knew?

Interviews with prisoners, their family, sometimes their victims, parole board members, psychologists, solicitors, offender managers, and even a prison chaplain and a PT instructor trace a bleak world of almost constant incarceration and often tragic background stories of how these prisoners fell into lives of crime. 

Many of the offenders have issues with alcohol and/or drug addiction, many have had troubled or abusive childhoods (one speaks about his stepdad trying to drown him in the bath), and often they will show signs or talk quite articulately about their lack of confidence, their low self esteem, their poor mental health, and their inability to control their temper. Many of them share a sense of rejection (from family or society in general) and an uncertainty as regards their identity. At least two of the prisoners have that cliched HATE tattoo across their fingers. One at least has LOVE on the other hand.

Some you warm too, some not so much. But none of that is relevant to the members of the parole board who are tasked with making some very vital decisions. If the prisoner has changed is that a sustained change or just a temporary one? Do they feel remorse? Have they moved on? Broken the pattern? How are they going to be able to cope with an outside world that can often be very hostile to those who have been in prison? If the parole board get it wrong the consequences could be fatal. We don't hear much about the times the parole board get things right but when they make a mistake it's all over the news.

The parole board (as well as the probation service, I'm not well informed enough to know where one's work begins and another's ends although I have a friend I suspect could tell me) are understaffed and overworked but everyone (bar one glaringly hopeless person who's a shame to their profession) we meet come across as professional, polite, and conscientious. I don't think that's just because they know they're on television.

Filmed as we were still coming out of the covid era (there are lots of remote meetings and often people are wearings masks), there are some fairly horrific stories as you might expect and, rather depressingly, lots of accounts of recidivist behaviour as people reoffend on release or relapse into old behaviours and addictions. 

When we watch the parole board interviews (not in their entirety, they go on for hours) we can tell instantly when a prisoner has damaged their chances of parole. Sometimes because what they've said is obviously not going to help their case but also because the makers of Parole show us the disappointed faces of parole board members and, overegging the pudding somewhat, even change the music to reflect the change of mood.

But it's a minor caveat in a show that otherwise shines a light on something that most of us know happens but don't really know how it's played out. There are very emotional moments when the prisoners find out if they've been granted parole or not and they're not as clear cut as you might imagine some of them to be. Parole manages to be sensitive to both prisoners, parole board staff, as well as the small number of those whose lives have been all but destroyed by the crimes committed that have agreed to be filmed. It's not a job I'd like (far too much responsibility) but it's a relief to see that the people doing it are hard-working and conscientious. They even try to be non-judgemental but that's pretty difficult when your job is, essentially, judging people. One thing's for certain though. There are far too many people in prison in the UK today. Those that pose no danger to the public would probably be better served by some form of community service. How that can happen in the current political environment is hard to see.