Dominic Raab earlier this month announced plans to ‘take back control’ of the Parole Board. A ‘source’ told The Daily Telegraph the Justice Secretary planned to introduce ‘a ministerial check’ on the release of prisoners in the most sensitive cases. ‘This is about public protection’, the anonymous briefer said, before adding that the proposal would ‘dovetail’ with post-Brexit plans.
The Parole Board has long been in the government’s sights. In a column for The Telegraph in 2019, Boris Johnson, immediately before he became prime minister, launched a characteristically colourful attack on ‘soft justice’ and, in doing so, dismissed the body as ‘simple slaves to political correctness’. Johnson laid into our ‘cockeyed crook-coddling criminal justice system’ and lambasted ‘the Leftist culture’ of the criminal justice ‘establishment’.
Three years ago at a Justice Gap/Byline event, the former chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick made a gloomy prediction: ‘There is now going to be a lurch to penal populism.’
