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.
