WHEN suggestions that Peter Michael Liddy was intending to seek release on parole, the public outcry was instant and deafening. 
In 2001, Liddy had been convicted of sexually abusing young boys and of attempting to bribe a witness, and was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment with a non-parole period of 18 years. 
Notwithstanding that he was eligible to apply for parole in 2019, after serving 18 years of his 25 year sentence, the prospect of him being freed caused turmoil in the community. 
The sentence of 25 years with the opportunity to seek release after 18 years made little sense to many. Family members of his victims described him as “an evil monster” who condemned his victims to “life sentences”. 
There are several reasons why the concept of parole does not meet the demands of our legal system and needs to be abolished. 
First, when judges pass a sentence of imprisonment, they do so after evaluating several factors. The seriousness of the offence, any aggravating features, including the age of the victims, the period and number of times of offending, a previous criminal record and the attitude of the accused. 
In order to set a non-parole period, the judge is required to guess when and if, prior to the expiration of the sentence, the prisoner might be safe to release earlier into the community. 
If the prisoner then applies for parole, the Parole Board is also required to guess whether or not the prisoner is safe to be released into the community. 
In doing so, the board replaces the experienced judge’s assessment of how long the prisoner should serve, with their own. 
The fact that we have constant recidivism is in itself evidence that this guesswork simply doesn’t work. 
The next reason why parole should be abolished is that it rewards the prisoner for doing nothing other than obeying the law and behaving himself while in prison. 
But why should they get any reward for doing what is expected of them, and incidentally, expected of us, on a daily basis? That is, to obey the law. 
The expectation of prisoners should be that they must always behave themselves and, if they don’t, their sentence should be increased by an amount consistent with the seriousness of the offending they commit while in prison. 
Next, the victims of criminal behavior and their families inevitably feel a sense of disillusionment when they learn that the prisoner will not be serving the full sentence for the crimes they committed. 
This produces considerable heartache and a loss of faith and confidence in the workings of our criminal justice system. 
They expect that “truth in sentencing” should mean what it says. 
Finally, in the last prison riots in South Australia, one of the principal grievances of the rioters was that because they could never know how the Parole Board was going to decide, they could never know their precise release date. 
Serving their time as assessed by the judge would remove this as an issue. 
The way to stop the undermining of the judge’s assessment of the appropriate sentence, to remove the guesswork required of the judge and of the Parole Board, to stop rewarding the prisoner for simply obeying the law, to remove disillusionment from victims of crime who see their tormentor walk free often years before the sentence is served and to give prisoners the certainty of their release dates, is to abolish parole.
- Stephen Pallaras