EDITORIAL COMMENT : Parole system will transform offenders

Zimbabwe is moving ahead into the next stage of prison reform with the establishment of a parole system overseen by a State Parole Board, but needing the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Service to be able to accurately measure just which individual prisoners have met the set parole criteria and to what extent.

The legal framework was approved by Parliament recently with a new Prisons and Correctional Services Act, and now the Ministry of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs and the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Service are converting this outline to a detailed system, a process that is likely to need special training for some staff plus provision of certain facilities.

Properly implemented, a parole system reduces pressure on a prison system, by allowing the better behaved prisoners who have been showing cooperation in their reform to be released early, although those who are reluctant to move towards reform will stay inside for their full term.

There will also be different parole standards for each type of crime, with violent criminals more likely having to wait longer for parole.

Prisoners out on parole are supervised, while they can enjoy a fair amount of freedom and return to their families and a relatively normal world, and will be encouraged to be productive and be earning their living, they will still have to report regularly to a designated officer and keep the authorities posted about where they live and who with, and probably need permission to change their address.

The sentence for a paroled prisoner still stands right to end of the term set by the courts, and is not reduced.

But what parole means is that the prisoner can be released, on set conditions, from prison earlier although still under sentence.

But in all jurisdictions where parole has been set up, the minute a paroled prisoner breaks the conditions, or commits any sort of new crime, back they go behind bars for the rest of the sentence, plus any new sentence that a new crime might bring.

Up to now extreme overcrowding in Zimbabwean prisons has been fixed with periodic blanket amnesties by the President using his prerogative of mercy.

This is in fact a Cabinet decision, almost always on the advice of the Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs.

These blanket amnesties reduce all sentences in the listed categories of offences, regardless of how cooperative or uncooperative a prisoner has been, and how likely they are to commit new offences on release.

The weakness of this approach of one size fits all has been seen with the fact that a significant minority of the early released do return to crime quite quickly, although a majority appear to have learned their lessons and keep themselves clean.

A parole system gets round these problems and many of the dangers by treating each prisoner as an individual, rather than as a member of a batch of convicted criminals.

The standards and the way of measuring how far a prisoner has met those standards must, obviously, be fairly applied and so be common for all. But once the measurements have been done the assessments are of individuals.

In most jurisdictions prison officers have to make many of the initial reports of how a prisoner is behaving and how far they are along the road of reform.

They can be helped by properly skilled others, but generally they are the ones on the spot who see the prisoners every day and so their judgment is usually sound, although they usually need extra training, especially when it comes to measuring the degree of meeting the parole standards.

The State Parole Board itself needs to be formed of independent people with the right sort of background and able to make sensible decisions that fit the facts presented to the board.

This is always a tricky process, since each prisoner is an individual, and often a board has to ask the victims, or families of the victims, of the crimes that led to jail terms what they think.

There will also need to be other measures to make up the system including parole officers or their equivalent, the people that a paroled prisoner must report to at set intervals and who keeps track of the paroled prisoner, raise the alarm if something is going wrong and generally overseeing the paroled person’s reintegration into society.

Zimbabwe is moving further in having community correctional centres, a sort of half-way house between a prison and total freedom.

The State Parole Board will also be able to implement a parole in stages, allowing a prisoner to be released for example during the day, but returning to custody at night, although such a prisoner can obviously be kept in a very low-security environment since they are so unlikely to escape.

Zimbabwe has been moving ahead since independence on changing the whole system of prisons, placing far less stress on punishment, although that is obviously a factor, and placing more stress on reforming a criminal so they do not revert to crime on their release.

We have also been looking at alternatives to prison, at least for non-violent crime, so we have those prison sentences in many cases suspended so long as non-violent thieves and others perform community service and make restitution where property has been damaged or stolen; the double condition is normally required to avoid incarceration.

As we know from what judges and magistrates say when passing sentence, some criminals need to be locked up to protect the rest of us, generally when they have committed so terrible a violent crime or are a multiple repeat offender.

This is why in most countries where the death penalty has been abolished a judge, backed by an appeal court, can hand out a whole life sentence, where there is no possibility of parole. That is rare but the option is needed for exceptionally terrible killings.

Prisoners who reoffend either on parole or after they have moved from prison or parole to normal freedom not only are hit by any suspended sentences for past crime, and the usually longer term for a repeat crime, but are less likely to impress a parole board that they should be released early.

Often parole at this stage relies on the prisoner being too old to commit any sort of crime.

So parole is not a soft option. What it does do is reward prisoners making a determined effort to reform and committed to living a future crime-free life, and decongests prisons by releasing, on condition and under supervision, those who are highly unlikely to reoffend having learned their lesson.