Lock Them Up Or Let Them Out

Lock Them Up Or Let Them Out (Monday, BBC2, 9pm) puffs itself as “the first time cameras were allowed access to prisoners up for parole and the people who make the decision”. I feared it might be prying or geared to play on our anxieties, but my fears were groundless.

It gives us three troubled male prisoners – a murderer, an armed thief and an arsonist – all up for parole, whose cases for early release were all in their various ways finely balanced. It is structured excitingly but not manipulatively, so there is tension about the final decisions. Although it consists mostly of interview footage with the prisoners and the panel members, it’s worth watching for some gobsmackingly clear articulation of individual cases.

Take the discussion of Mike, a man who set fire to seven police cars because he was dissatisfied with the police’s search for the murderer of his brother. “He says he’s not going to do it again because he’s had his satisfaction,” explains a panel member, referring to a statement from Mike and his tendency to take up the role of martyr. “If he felt he’d done something wrong or he felt regret that would be different.” We then cut to Mike insisting he won’t apologise and that “if they want to spend £37,000 a year to keep me, that’s up to them”. It’s clear that no matter how lazy or corrupt the police may seem to him Mike has not got the point. Given the panel member has not seen the footage of Mike’s defiance, you realise she has probably put the case in a nutshell.

Neither do they refrain from criticising the system. In a voice that takes creative emphasis to levels I’ve never come across before outside the acting world, one woman says: “In the old days there would also be a report from an independent member of the parole board who would have read the dossier and then gone to see the prisoner who would regard his or her main role as to challenge and draw out the applicant on particularly important areas.” The voiceover then comes in with details of massive cuts in parole-board funding.

But the undoubted star of the show is Barry, the armed robber who has served eight years and is nearly 40. He’s very persuasive on camera about why he will never commit another crime, but also disarmingly frank about what is in front of him. “I’m going to a place I’ve never been. I’ve never worked. I’ve never had a TV licence. I’ve never paid my water rates. I’ve never worried about the phone bill. Or rips in me trainers. I just bought new ones. Now I’ve got all that to come.” By the time the decisions come, you are up to your neck in both the panellists’ dilemmas and the prisoners’ plights. The verdicts managed to surprise me. Fabulous television.

This article: http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1632152006

@=XDC=McQueen wrote:

@To0THBRU5H wrote:

@TurksMeister wrote:

@Lensman wrote:

Is your mum on the parole baord then?

Not only that, but she was one of the parole board members featured… and there was a picture of me on her desk! Im fucking famous!

OMG!!!! can I sleep with u? AND UR MUM!!!

JESUS!!!! WTF ❓

Yeh exactly… surely you should have included McQueen in to the equation… some people aye!

@=xdc= magicker wrote:

i still say the answer is to make prisoners it on exercise bikes / giant hamster wheels and to make electricity we have hundreds of thousands of the useless bastards might as well get them to help cut our carbon emmissions.

You could dangle a bag of coke in front of them… make them run faster!