Once Rob McKeon had accepted that his decisions would mean some people would die in prison, it made things easier. “My job is not to get people home,” he says. “Once you realise that ‘life’ sometimes does mean life, you can get on with the job.” In the 12 years that McKeon has been a member of the Parole Board, he has made decisions about the futures of more than 5,000 prisoners who have served their minimum term. Lots of them have done horrific things, with the impacts on victims always present, but McKeon, usually alongside other panel members, only has to focus on a simple, but difficult, question: are they a risk to the public?
Get it right and somebody won’t be happy – either the prisoner who remains inside until their next parole hearing in two years, or, if they are released or downgraded to an open prison, the people affected by their crime. Get it wrong, and the consequences can be horrific. The child sex offender who goes on to reoffend. The domestic abuser who then kills a partner. The person convicted of terrorism who, it turns out, hasn’t changed.
Were you to find yourself sitting opposite McKeon, with him in charge of your future, you’d probably find him rigorous and fair, his emotions switched off, but not cold; a direct gaze, but a calming manner. Does McKeon ever lie awake at night and wonder, weeks later, if he made the wrong call? No, he says, when we speak over video call; he’s at home in his study, a room from which even now, post-pandemic, he conducts remote hearings. At the end of a hearing, which can last several hours, “I will be fairly certain as to what I think the right decision is.” Sometimes he has to sleep on it.
It seems to work. In the last year, the Parole Board recommended the release of more than 4,300 prisoners, and that about 11,300 should remain in prison. The number of people released on parole who go on to commit further serious offences is low – about 0.5%. Three prisoners McKeon released were later accused of serious offences; one was convicted. “Those decisions were explored, and you learn from them. It’s whether you could have predicted [what could happen], whether you missed an element of questioning.” (In each of these cases McKeon wasn’t found to be at fault.)
Last year, the then-deputy chair of the Conservative party, Lee Anderson, now a Reform MP, backed the return of the death penalty, reigniting a debate that many hoped was settled. “Sometimes I worry,” says McKeon, “that kneejerk reactions are ‘lock them up and throw away the key’. There are some crimes where life should absolutely mean life, and we see that with whole-life orders. In others, there is the opportunity to change.”
McKeon has written a book, Parole, about his work; he was also one of the handful of Parole Board members, of whom there are more than 300 in England and Wales, who appeared in last year’s BBC Two series, also called Parole. It isn’t, it soon becomes clear, a job for everyone. He will receive a dossier of evidence. For somebody serving a life sentence, it could be 400 or more pages including graphic details of murder, assault or sexual violence. There are common themes in prisoners’ histories – abuse and neglect in childhood, and exposure to drugs and alcohol. Then he will sit opposite people who have done awful things, and try to determine if they have changed or not. Occasionally, though rarely, they will be frightening and volatile; many are expert liars. He has to ask them things few people would like to hear the answers to. To the child sex offender: how often does he masturbate in prison, and what does he think about? Sometimes the decision not to release someone is straightforward, such as the man who admitted to McKeon: “I quite like strangling people.” Most are much more difficult.
McKeon wrote the book for the same reason he took part in the TV series: “transparency, and justice being seen to be done”. It is only in recent years that parole proceedings have become more open. Summaries can now explain decisions, and some hearings are held in public, following the outcry after the 2018 Parole Board decision to release the serial rapist John Worboys, which was then quashed by the high court. Last year, McKeon sat on the panel of the public hearing of notorious prisoner Charles Salvador, better known as Charles Bronson (parole was refused).
McKeon didn’t start out wanting to work with prisoners. At 16, he was a presenter for his local BBC station, Radio Stoke. Then, when he was about 18, he auditioned to be the presenter in the Children’s BBC “broom cupboard” slot – a job that instead went to a young Zoe Ball. He started businesses, then moved to Australia and worked for a healthcare company, where he got involved in its legal side. Back in the UK, he became a magistrate, eventually in the family court, which he found fascinating. “It wasn’t about sending people to prison, it was about trying to bring about a difference to people’s lives, particularly the welfare of children.” That led him to the Parole Board, which he describes as “some of the most rewarding stuff I’ve ever done”.
He grew up in a loving family in Staffordshire, where he still lives with his partner. “I was lucky that I had a family who imposed proper boundaries, but still gave me a chance to explore.” So many of the prisoners he meets have had traumatic childhoods. One case in McKeon’s book is of a young man who had committed a string of offences relating to violence, theft and drugs, before he was convicted of attacking his girlfriend at the age of 16. His offending started after he came home from school one day to find his mother had abandoned him. Rather than go back into care, he ended up homeless and using drugs. “Sometimes you think: ‘There by the grace of God go a lot of us,’” says McKeon.
For all the horrible images he has in his head, McKeon has to believe in rehabilitation. The opportunity to change is “the whole point of parole. People do awful things, but some of those people won’t do it again, and it’s about being able to identify those people.” Does everyone deserve a second chance? He thinks for a moment. “I think everybody deserves an opportunity to show whether they can reform or not. It’s not for me to decide sentencing, and there are some crimes that attract whole-life orders. Even for people who have committed the most awful crimes, some of them will succeed [in changing] and some of them won’t. There are people who don’t have any intention of changing – do they deserve a second chance?” He doesn’t exactly answer himself, seemingly more interested in the practicalities of the process than the philosophical argument. “If you don’t change, you won’t get parole.”
Sometimes he likes the prisoner in front of him, sometimes he doesn’t. It’s irrelevant. No decision is based on instinct, he says. “Go where the evidence tells you, because making decisions based on gut feeling is a terrible way to do things, and you’ll get it wrong,” he says. He has sat across from people who are diagnosed psychopaths. Has he become good at spotting lies? “I think it’s made me good at remembering there are two sides to every story and you always need to have proof. Don’t just take anybody’s word for it.”
Although he is looking for the chain of events that led to the crime, and whether those elements mean someone is at risk of re-offending, he says it’s important not to look for “a narrative that feels comfortable. Prisoners will sometimes tell – and sometimes they convince themselves – a version of events that either they’re comfortable with or they think is what people want to hear. So you’ve got to get an independent account of everything, and then see where the evidence takes you.”
Behaviour in prison is taken into account, but again, it needs to be scrutinised. People who have been in organised criminal gangs, he says, “are usually quite well behaved in prison because they get other people to do their dirty work, and their violence is calculated”. Prison is a controlled environment for those whose crimes are related to risk factors such as alcohol or gambling (though drugs are rife). “Just because somebody’s behaving well, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their risk is reduced.”
Reading McKeon’s book, it’s sometimes hard to understand why those who continue to deny their crimes, and therefore never show remorse or take any steps to address their behaviour, are granted parole. One man had been convicted of abusing his daughter, including rape, over a period of seven years, since she was eight, but continued to deny it. Despite that, he was released, because it was felt he would comply with the conditions, which included not contacting his victim, having his internet use monitored and disclosing new relationships.
“Maintaining innocence is something that’s quite common amongst people who’ve committed sexual offences, particularly against children,” says McKeon. Sometimes the shame is too great, “and the fact of being convicted, in some cases, is enough to stop somebody offending again”. But denial can also be a risk factor, “because they just have no insight [into their crime and its impact] whatsoever”.
In more than 5,000 cases, he has only believed that one person might actually be innocent, “but I still assessed him on the basis that he did what he was convicted of”.
McKeon constantly stresses his objectivity. The man who was convicted of abusing his daughter was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and was allowed to apply for parole after seven, a shockingly light sentence in my view. If McKeon has his own views on sentencing, might he be tempted to deny parole? “Absolutely not, because I do this without fear or favour, and I’m not influenced by the front pages of any newspapers, or what politicians may say, or what government views may be at any particular point, or what the public may be outraged by on social media. I make decisions based on risk.”
Similarly, he can empathise with a prisoner who has had an extremely difficult life, but isn’t tempted to grant parole just because he thinks they have suffered enough. “People have experienced awful trauma that you can’t imagine. I remember a case of a woman whose drug addiction started because, when she was a child, her mother used to give her tranquillisers to keep her quiet – that was her addiction route. A guy that I met was routinely physically and sexually abused by members of his family, and so is it any wonder [he went on to offend]? These things are terrible, but my focus has to be on whether the public would be safe if that person were released.”
The previous Labour government introduced a controversial new sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) – an indeterminate sentence for those who were considered dangerous, but whose crimes did not attract a life sentence – which was used from 2005 until 2012, when it was abolished. Nearly 3,000 people remain in prison without knowing when their sentence may end, some for fairly minor crimes. “Nobody expected, I think, that they would impose as many sentences as they did, and they didn’t expect that people would be in prison for as long as they were,” says McKeon. He has considered parole for prisoners still serving IPP sentences, and some “are very risky people. But I’ve also seen the difficulties that hopelessness and the lack of opportunity to reform brings to people – some people have got worse in prison because of that.” However he feels about the unfairness of IPPs, McKeon says his only focus is on whether those people pose a risk now.
Our prison system is in crisis, with prisons overcrowded, inhumane conditions and demoralised staff. Nick Hardwick, former chief inspector of prisons and former head of the Parole Board, has said that instead of forging ahead with Conservative plans to build huge new jails, money should be put into crime prevention, such as education and mental health. What would McKeon like to see overhauled in the current system? He says there are many prison and probation staff “who really do try and make a difference. There just isn’t the resources in a lot of cases to do that.” Rehabilitation includes courses that could help people change, “and then they find there’s a two-year waiting list, by which time motivation is gone. If you want to overhaul the prison system, and if we believe in this premise of rehabilitation, you’ve got to resource it.”
When public finances are so stretched, is there the will for money to be spent on prisoners? “I think that’s one of the points of writing a book, to give people that insight,” says McKeon. “This isn’t about being soft on crime or thinking that everybody should get a chance to be out of prison. I will see people who, at the very depths of chaos in their life, have done awful things. And sometimes you see people who then have that stability in prison where they’re staying away from drugs and they’re engaging in education, or some kind of structure, and you start to see the person that they can become.” In his 12 years on the Parole Board, he has learned, he says, “that people do awful things to each other, sometimes for little reason or sense, but I’ve learned that people can change”. Some people show no sign of wanting to, but even that doesn’t mean they’ll always feel that way. “I don’t know,” says McKeon. “We’ll find out at their next parole review.”