The results can be catastrophic when the parole board makes the wrong decision to grant an offender parole, the head of the Victorian government’s sentencing advisory council says.
Adrian Ernest Bayley, 41, of Coburg, was on parole for other rapes when he raped and murdered Jill Meagher last September, the Victorian Supreme Court was told on Tuesday.
Bayley had also been jailed for three months for recklessly causing serious injury but had lodged an appeal and was on bail awaiting his appeal when he killed Meagher.
Sentencing Advisory Council chair Professor Arie Freiberg said the parole board had an onerous responsibility.
“We take a gamble every time a decision is made by a parole board or by a judge who has to predict what the future behaviour of an offender is,” he told ABC radio on Wednesday.
“The parole board is made up of 21 members, many of them senior judicial officers, community members, police people, victims of crime, they sit in divisions and they have to make these decisions every single week.
“And it’s an onerous responsibility and when they get it wrong and the results are catastrophic, this is what we see.”
Freiberg said the parole board made 10,000 decisions last financial year, including 296 denials for parole.
He said the system did respond to problems, such as introducing new serious sex offender legislation and indefinite sentences for dangerous offenders.
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“We have lots of mechanisms. Every now and then, tragically the system goes wrong,” he said.
Freiberg said more than half of all parole releases were successful and of those who failed, many were simply breaches of conditions.
He said more resources must be invested into the system to reduce the risk of reoffending.
