Baby P’s mother Tracey Connelly released from prison

10 comments
  1. Jailed in 2009 and already had 3 appeals for release and finally got this 4th one granted even after being sent back to prison after breaching parole as well.

  2. She had a sentence of imprisonment for public protection, with no fixed term of imprisonment, with a minimum of five years. That means that she was initially paroled after four years, then recalled, having served a further seven years.

    I’m not going to defend her, because I don’t know exactly what it was that she did: but it makes no sense that her initial crime was both so mild that she could be released after four, and so severe that she could then be re-imprisoned for a further seven years.

    I’d much rather have seen a determinate sentence that reflected the severity of the crime (or a life sentence, if necessary), and this is the kind of case that shows why IPPs (introduced in 2005 and abolished in 2012) were a terrible idea.

  3. I’m glad we have professionals who make parole decisions rather than people like Dominic Raab trying to win public favor by saying she’s “pure evil”.

    I we want to have a modern justice system we have to believe in rehabilitation alongside punishment. Simply dragging up past events and emotions whenever someone is released to garner public rage goes directly against what rehabilitation is about. In this case the events happened 15 years ago. But the media talk as if it happened yesterday, simply for rage clicks.

    Of course you can hold the belief that the punishment isn’t enough, but there is a balance somewhere, and the old fashioned idea “lock em up and throw away the key” is simply archaic and barbaric in the 21st century. Especially when we understand mental illness and criminal psychology more than ever.

    Those who work on the parole board are professionals with families, children. These decisions are not taken lightly, so to attack them from a position of pure ignorance should be heavily criticized, not praised. If you look at the statistics they do a good job as well, the rate of serious reoffending of those released through the parole board is 0.5%

    Edit: Just one last point, saw the argument yesterday that we can’t know 100% if someone released will not just go do the same thing, in this case they said Tracy could just go get pregnant and torture a kid again.

    We live in a society where we at some level have to trust those around us. However we can’t know 100% if anyone will not hurt us, kill us etc. Society can not function if we always assume the worst of all people.

  4. If there was ever an example of a life sentence crime this is surely it?

    I don’t spend ages on the “men suffer in society” because patriarchy is what set it all up. But would a man be released at this stage?

    If the death of your own son from abuse you did is not a cause for rot in a hole what exactly is?

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