19/07/2023
UPDATE: The Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has withdrawn controversial changes made by his predecessor Dominic Raab to the criteria for transferring indeterminate prisoners from closed to open prison conditions.
The new criteria effective from today require that the secretary of state (or an official with delegated responsibility) will accept a recommendation from the Parole Board to approve an ISP for open conditions only where (a) the prisoner has made sufficient progress during the sentence in addressing and reducing risk to a level consistent with protecting the public from harm (in circumstances where the prisoner ion open conditions maybe in the community, unsupervised, under licence temporary release); and (b) the prisoner is assessed as low risk of abscond; and (c) there is a wholly persuasive case for transferring the ISP from closed to open conditions.Crucially, the new test removes the ambiguous requirement that a move to open conditions should be “considered essential”, and the requirement that a move should not undermine public confidence in the criminal justice system.
These criteria resulted in the large majority of Parole Board recommendations for a transfer to open conditions being rejected by the Ministry of Justice…..
Now to tackle those who are still eagerly awaiting their final decision from the Secretary of State following a positive Parole Board recommendation