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Frank news
July 1st - headline news!
On Wednesday July 1st, Frank's personal officer told him that he has - at long last - been downgraded from Category A
to Category B. (Read Frank's
own account here.) After 23 years in prison as a Category A prisoner, this is the first real sign that
progress for Frank within the prison system might just be possible. This move has come as something
of a surprise, not least to Frank. After the unpromising recent events - see the list below - it seemed all but
inevitable that another year would go by with Frank and the Prison Service at an impasse. At the turn of
this year, Frank wrote in a blog:
When I am sitting alone in my cell at night, there is the temptation to think that this nightmare will
never end - and then I glance up at the wall. Just a few feet from my face as I sit at my table, held
there by sellotape, is a piece of paper sent to me by Mrs Hilary Hinchliffe MBE a long time ago. The bit
of paper is old and yellowed now, but that does not detract from the message thereon. In the words of Arthur
Clough, as sent to me by Hilary:
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the Main.
Perhaps, at last, the tide is turning after all.
It's certainly fantastic news. All noises coming out of the Ministry of Justice recently suggested no sense of any
need to reappraise the current approach to the sentence planning process for prisoners in Frank's position (i.e. over
tariff and maintaining inncocence). Although our campaign may have helped focus some attention on Frank's individual
case, it seems more than probable that this change of heart on the part of the Category A Review Team was prompted by the failure
of the Secretary of State's appeal against the recent Judicial Review in Frank's favour (see below). Faced with the inconvenience
and expense of having to ensure that Category A Reviews more regularly involve oral hearings, the system has just
sidestepped the issue by removing Frank from the Category A estate. (Read Frank's own views on this here.)
June 24th - Failure of Secretary of State's appeal against the recent Judicial Review finding in Frank's favour
After the finding in Frank's favour at the Administrative Court on March 24th (
see his solicitors' press release for details), the Secretary of State successfully sought leave to appeal that decision and the
appeal went before The Master of the Rolls, Lord Justice Scott Baker, and Lady Justice Smith on Wednesday 24th June 2009.
The result of the hearing was that the Court refused the Secretary of State's application to proceed with an appeal.
June 24th - Category A Review Team reviews Frank's Category A status
This, presumably, took place as scheduled, but there is no news yet of the Director of High Security's report that
should emerge from this process. It should make interesting reading, considering the tenor of the previous three
such reports. Presumably, some form of words will be found to justify Frank's re-categorization in the teeth of all
previous recommendations that he remain Category A.
June 2nd - Local Advisory Panel reviews Frank's Category A status
Frank's latest Category A review was considered at a Local Advisory panel at Long Lartin on June 2nd. Neither Frank
nor his personal officer were involved - in fact, his personal officer had no idea that the review was taking place
at all. The reports gathered for the review seemed pretty perfunctory - for example, the psychologist's report was
written by a trainee who had not interviewed Frank (indeed, had probably never met him) and the security information
report was just terse. It all looked very much as though the motions were being gone through but that those involved
had no real appetite for finding out for themselves the real state of affairs as regards Frank.
June 9th - Frank appears before Sentence Planning Board
This did not go well -
read Frank's own account of proceedings here. Once again, you get the impression of the actors being content to
read from the script with no intention of getting to grips with the drama in which they are involved.
Campaign news
The current focus of the campaign has been to question the risk assessment process of the National Offender Management Service.
In the current system, it is up to prisoners to demonstrate that they have "addressed" their "offending behaviour" by participating
in a number of offending behaviour courses. These are designed to challenge such behaviour and so bring about a change in attitude.
An important aspect of many of these courses is that a prisoner should acknowledge his "index offence" - the crime for which he is
in prison - and so come to terms with the behaviour behind it. It is by going through this process that a prisoner demonstrates
that the risk he presents to society has been reduced sufficiently to warrant release.
Prisoners who maintain their innocence are handicapped in this system because the process does not accept that there can be an
innocent prisoner. Many prisoners who maintain innocence find themselves in a vicious circle in which they cannot make progress
since they cannot demonstrate reduced risk. The inevitable logic of the system dictates that, if you say you are innocent, you are
less likely to make progress than a prisoner who accepts guilt, and more likely to serve over your tariff than that prisoner - and
Frank's experience certainly seems to bear this out.
May 19th - PPMI Training Day
With a view to educating myself a bit more in this area, I attended a training day organized by PPMI (Progressing Prisoners
Maintaining Innocence) at the University of Nottingham. The two speakers were Flo Krause (a barrister) and Robert Forde (a
forensic psychologist). Flo dealt, in general, with the sentence planning process as a whole and how maintaining innocence
affects this; Robert dealt with the Offending Behaviour Programmes that form the backbone of the risk assessment process itself.
From my point of view, this was a very worthwhile day, enabling me to tackle both the Parole Board and the National Offender
Management Service about their over-reliance on such courses to demonstrate reduction in a prisoner's risk.
Correspondence with the Parole Board
In light of the recent disappointing report of the latest Mandatory Lifer Panel conducted by the Parole Board (see Newsletter
Number 4), I felt I had to write to Sir David Latham, Chairman of the Parole Board, about the Board's apparent lack of any
independent approach to the risk assessment of prisoners who come before them. (
You can read the letter here.) The reply (
you can read it here) was pretty anodyne. The news that the Ministry of Justice is to undertake a consultation exercise about
the future of the Parole Board does not sound very promising - especially given that the last such "consultation" exercise culminated
in the introduction (on the very last day of last year) of amendments which, amongst other things, put an end to a prisoner's right to require
an oral hearing.
Correspondence with NOMS
In response to the reply Anne Widdecombe MP received from the Chief Executive of NOMS, Phil Wheatley, I wrote to him about the
apparent limitations of the current risk assessment process (
you can read the letter here). A reply (read it here)
duly came back from Steve Easton of the Category A Review Team. I think such responses help explain why it seemed very unlikely
that Frank's re-categorization would happen any time soon!