You be a Parole Board Member: Public Attitudes and Mock Parole Board Decision-Making

This chapter reports on a project that explored Australian attitudes to parole. Here, we report specifically on follow-up interviews conducted with a subset of survey respondents, examining their views on ‘You be the parole board’ hypothetical scenarios. We see that public attitudes are sceptical towards parole, often driven by emotive responses to serious sexual or violent offending. Media coverage shapes these perceptions. We find that the support for rehabilitation, as opposed to a retributive approach, varies considerably by offence type. We identified an overarching desire for community safety, albeit in a form that was resistant to the potentially beneficial aspects of parole release (involving supervised release on licence and conditions therein). We suggest that there is a need for greater public education as regards parole, as well as noting the benefits of the inclusion of lay members, and greater transparency. We argue that there is scope to increase public support for rehabilitative approaches, but also barriers to achieving this.