Parole applications in breach of Restorative Justice Act

Prisoners' rights NGO Mid-Dlam Ghad-Dawl (MDD) has raised concerns about the Justice Ministry's statement, earlier this week, that a 'substantial number of applications' for parole had already been received from inmates at Corradino prison, within weeks of the introduction of the new law.

In an interview with this newspaper, MDD director George Busuttil said that this indicates the law which introduced parole to the justice system - i.e., the Restorative Justice Act, which came into force late last month - is being bypassed or ignored by the authorities.

"The law clearly stipulates that inmates must be informed of their eligibility for parole four months before they become eligible. Obviously, none of those who applied for parole had been informed four months ago, because the law did not even exist until 27 January, " Busuttil said.

The Restorative Justice Act in fact lays down a very specific procedure to regulate applications for parole. Section 3, paragraph 7 (c) states that the clerk of parole has to "make all the necessary arrangements to inform the prisoner who will be eligible to parole, four months before the date of eligibility, so that if the prisoner wants, he may apply to the Parole Board to be considered for parole".

But when it came to announcing and applying the new system in prison, a notice was stuck up in all divisions of Corradino prison, inviting inmates to apply for parole: despite the evident lack of preparation to handle applications.

"If they are accepting applications now, it means that they are not following the process as laid out in the same law they themselves just passed," Busuttil commented.

The same law also provides for the creation of a number of boards and committees, among others the evaluate eligibility to parole.  The MDD director reiterates that several of these committees remain non-existent, even after the law came into force.

MDD bases its voluntary work with inmates mainly on visits to Corradino prison, and therefore has regular contact with both the inmates themselves, and the prison administrators.

"The day after the law I came into effect, I wrote a letter to the newly appointed Director of Probation Services, who is in charge of the implementation of parole, and told him that inmates will surely be asking us to explain how this will work in practice," Busuttil said. "I told him that we, as MDD, need to know what answers to give. He wrote back saying that the information would come

out a later date from the competent authorities."

However it is far from clear who the competent authorities are, if not the office of probation services. Nor is it clear how or by whom individual applications are to be assessed.

"Ideally, evaluation should be done by correctional officers, who have contact with inmates, and

are in a position to observe them on a day to day basis. However, the correctional officers know nothing when asked about this; and even if they are expected to evaluate inmates, they have been given no training to this end."

Busuttil recalls a comment told to him by one correctional officer, to the effect that he was "almost afraid to tell inmates he didn't know anything when they asked".