John Worboys: Understanding the Parole Board
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How does the Parole Board decide whether to release offenders on licence? Should it be more open, especially since the decision to release serial sex offender John Worboys?
Nick Hardwick, the Chair of the Parole Board for England and Wales wants its workings to be more transparent in order to boost public confidence. And he thinks we can learn from Canada.
David Aaronovitch is joined by a panel of experts to discuss the Parole Board amid public anger over the release of a prominent sex offender. He'll hear, among others, from a former inmate and a current Chair of a Parole Board panel, and will ask whether lifting the lid on the organisation's workings might appease its critics.
CONTRIBUTORS
Danny Shaw, BBC Home Affairs Correspondent
Ben Gunn, former prison inmate
Lucy Gampell, independent member, Parole Board for England and Wales
Mary Campbell, retired Director General, Corrections & Criminal Justice, Department of Public Safety Canada.
Professor Nicky Padfield , Director, Cambridge Centre for Criminal Justice.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:04.0 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich. |
| 0:07.2 | Open the door, clear a space between the maps, charts and position papers, |
| 0:11.6 | sit down and find out what's going on in the world. |
| 0:15.1 | And do please let us know what you think by writing a review |
| 0:17.9 | or rating us on iTunes or your podcast provider. |
| 0:21.6 | And if you'd like, please recommend us to anyone you can think of, really. |
| 0:25.3 | And a thanks to those of you who have recently reviewed us, including Tortuga Dorada, |
| 0:30.1 | George Golop and KP2627. Do please keep them coming. |
| 0:35.3 | If you enjoy this, you might enjoy other editions of the briefing room. |
| 0:39.1 | But in this edition, in the light of the War Boys case, |
| 0:42.0 | I'm getting briefed on how the parole board works and whether it needs reforming. |
| 1:00.7 | Being a black cow driver myself, I find this man to be totally despicable, and I feel that you should never, ever have been released. |
| 1:03.0 | Clearly there are a lot of people who think he should be executed, and I don't think |
| 1:06.4 | that that's necessarily the case, but why not serial sex offenders, who we know for certain, |
| 1:12.2 | are most definitely serial sex offenders, why not have some of them potentially castrated? |
| 1:18.3 | You know, I would have put him in jail and thrown the key away. |
| 1:21.8 | When the parole board announced earlier this month that it was going to release John Warboys, |
| 1:26.6 | convicted in 2009 of a string of |
| 1:29.0 | sex attacks while working as a black cab driver, there was widespread criticism. In an unprecedented |
| 1:35.3 | move, the government is weighing up whether to launch a legal challenge to the parole board's decision, |
| 1:41.3 | and two of his victims are also preparing a judicial review. |
... |
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