PhD student Bradley Read is devoting his research to understanding the parole system in England and Wales as it operates today and what, if any, reforms could make it fairer.
Read was originally a senior manager in prisons for 14 years. In this time, he led several departments across several different prisons, from Offender Management Units to Diversity & Inclusion teams. He now works as a Senior Policy Advisor in Policing. He describes himself as “a criminal justice practitioner, first and foremost”.
As Head of Offender Management for many years in a busy local prison, he was involved in leading a large team of Offender Managers working with parolees. Parole dossiers are issued for every eligible prisoner, containing information from risk assessments to internal reports, extending to 450 pages long. They are intended to assess the extent of prisoners’ rehabilitation and risk on release. However, many prisoners had little to no understanding of the impact of their contents due to their size. They also had few opportunities to engage with them properly, with no input in what could be included.
Prisoners were able to have discussions with parole board members in oral hearings. However, Read found that these sessions were not always productive.
“In my experience, the parole process was a very busy, and I think slightly terrifying process for a lot of prisoners,” Read recalls. “There were a lot of unknowns about what it would mean for their future. A lot of the decisions meant sitting with people they'd never met before, outside of the usual circle of assessors that they were used to talking to.”
This frequently led to tensions between prisoners and board members, and growing divisions between them. After Read witnessed prisoners and offender managers emerging from meetings in tears, he decided more research was needed to understand the process.
Differing perspectives
Read decided to join the MSt in Applied Criminology, Penology and Management in 2022, to understand the causes of these issues.
His MSt focused on the parole dossiers, to understand more about how interested parties used the information they are given and the impact of the main oral hearing.
“Prisoners are saying the oral hearing is very important space, where they get to make a case for themselves,” he explains. “But they've also got this huge dossier describing a person that may or may not be who they think they are.”
What he found was that many parole members were more focused on their past criminal history, as detailed in the dossier, than who they were currently.
“What I found was that the dossier itself was having an effect on prisoners’ sense of self,” says Read. “I conducted this research with 15 serving prisoners. What they all told me was that the person in the dossier was not someone they recognised.”
After uncovering these attitudes, he wanted to understand more about how these attitudes arose. This led him to pursue a PhD.
Shifting Priorities
Read’s PhD, which is currently in progress, will be a connected articles thesis on the Parole Board in England and Wales, from its foundation in 1967 to today. It will explore the dossier, the role of Criminologist members, the oral hearing, and decision making.
From the six decades of research papers collated by Read so far, there are already some noticeable patterns. He describes how, despite our much better understanding of prisoner’s welfare, parole has shifted away from a focus on decisions based on the original rehabilitative model of expert care and trust. These two principles were explicitly mentioned in the board’s first annual report, but not in its most recent ones as the Parole Board is now asked to focus solely on the risk a parolee presents to the public.
He attributes this shift to a simultaneous shift in criminal justice practice in England and Wales, where a hardening of attitudes has changed the role experts are being asked to fulfil. He describes the Parole Board in 1967 as “a small group of experts, operating discretionary judgement”. Since then, however, there has been a gradual reduction in the number of criminologists, resulting in a loss of expertise about the causes and treatment of criminality.
Meanwhile, forensic psychologists focused on individualised risk assessment have proliferated, as has the overall size of the Parole Board. Read had noticed this expansion during his time as a prison leader, but he was not aware of the extent. As of 2025, the Parole Board has expanded to 370 people. The result, according to Read, has been a shift in focus away from prisoner’s voice in the process, and towards a more impersonal and bureaucratic approach to the assessment of their risk.
“What I'm arguing isn’t that criminologists have been lost because they were no longer needed,” he says. “They've been lost because the system has changed in ways which undervalue what they offer.”
There has also been a more recent trend of in-person sessions being replaced by online meetings, over 90% of oral hearings are now virtual. For many, this has compounded the sense of distance between the Parole Board, and the system it represents, and prisoners themselves, who greatly value the interaction and chance to make their case for themselves.
Prospects for parole
Read’s PhD research is still ongoing. However, from his findings so far, he believes there are clear areas for improvement.
Read wishes to see parole dossiers reformed, by streamlining the amount of information they contain. His future work will investigate how this can be done.
“One of the things that the psychology literature shows, is that more information doesn’t necessarily lead to better decision-making,” he explains. “In fact, more information can lead to people being overwhelmed and resorting to routinisation and shortcuts.”
He also believes in a need for prisoners to have more agency over the contents of their dossiers, and greater transparency around the process. Most importantly, he argues for a more personal approach, rooted once again in care and trust. He believes that this approach will do more to encourage effective desistance.