Eight months ago the then Minister for Justice and Home Affairs, Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, introduced the Restorative Justice Act. The concept of restorative justice is one that focuses on the needs both of the criminal offender and the victim. It aims to achieve a balance between the need to rehabilitate offenders and the duty to protect the public.
The Act focuses on four main areas: a mechanism for mediation between criminals and their victims; new provisions on parole; a review of remission of prison sentences; and victim support measures.
The minister said that the underlying principle behind the Act was to ensure that the Corradino Correctional Facility served its purpose as a rehabilitation centre “to reduce the rate of criminals who return to prison after serving a jail term”.
One of its central features was to improve the system of parole by encouraging better assessments of the individual needs of prisoners through the Offender Assessment Board and a beefed-up Parole Board. However, eight months after the enactment of the Restorative Justice Act, not a single prisoner has been processed for parole. According to prisoner advocacy NGO Mid-Dlam Għad-Dawl: “Everything is in place, but not a single inmate has been processed yet”.
This seems a fairly typical reflection of the justice system in Malta. Laws are passed amid much fanfare and then there appears to be desultory or no follow-up action at all.
The Child Offender’s Register is one recent example of this, and now the parole system under the Restorative Justice Act appears to be another.
According to a Home Affairs spokesman, the boards established by the Act have all been set up and it is claimed the parole system has already started functioning. The spokesman stated that “the boards were currently prioritising cases of inmates approaching their parole date”.
It seems, however, that none of this information has filtered through to the individuals who are meant to be the subject – and the beneficiaries – of the new form of restorative justice.
Those most intimately affected by the new parole system are being kept in the dark about their cases. There seems to be no formal system in place for ensuring that prisoners are told of progress.
According to the Act, prisoners should be informed of their right to apply for parole four months before their eligibility date. Although this appears to have happened, nothing else has been heard by prisoners since.
It would appear that the system may be breaking down at the weakest link in the chain – the Corradino Correctional Facility.
About two years ago, a highly critical report by an independent Board of Inquiry into conditions at Corradino had exposed deficiencies of leadership, management and organisation, coupled with poor human resources and under-funding.
The full report was never published, but the summary exposed a number of deficiencies in the rehabilitation and resettlement of prisoners which needed correction.
It seems that these weaknesses may still be prevalent within the over-crowded Correctional Facility. The lesson is that it is no good introducing a new Act unless the legal and administrative changes being proposed and effected are fully part of a structured and properly funded programme, in this case rehabilitation to enable prisoners to be returned successfully to society.
Parole plays an important role in this process. It needs to be backed up by the necessary structures and human and other resources if the new system is to work successfully.