Fewer life prisoners given parole

12 April 2012

The number of prisoners serving life sentences who have been released on parole has almost halved, new figures show.

The Parole Board said its members were being more stringent in the wake of high-profile cases where freed offenders went on to commit violent crimes including murder.

In the six months from April to September this year there were 901 requests by life sentence prisoners to be released after serving their minimum sentence.

Of these 106 requests were granted, the Parole Board said.

The proportion of life sentence prisoners given parole in the six-month period - 11.8% - has almost halved from the year April 2005 to March 2006, when 21.3% of parole requests for life sentence offenders were accepted.

Figures also showed the proportion of parole requests granted for prisoners serving more than four years and less than a life sentence had dropped from 49% last year to 35.7% for the six months from April.

Tim Morris, of the Parole Board, said: "It's clear that there is a more cautious approach in the wake of one or two high-profile cases where someone who has been released has gone on to commit a serious offence."

He said the lessons learned from those cases, where formal reviews had been held, had been fed back to Parole Board members.

He added that members had taken a "much more stringent approach to the information before them".

"Where previously they may have gone ahead and made a decision based on information that wasn't complete, they are being much more rigorous that the information is complete, and will defer the matter until they have all the information," he said.

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