Book Review: Diarmuid Griffin, Killing Time. Life Imprisonment and Parole in Ireland
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2066220319895830 |
| Author | Jane Mulcahy |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
https://doi.org/10.1177/2066220319895830
European Journal of Probation
2019, Vol. 11(3) 202 –208
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/2066220319895830
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Book Reviews
Diarmuid Griffin, Killing Time. Life Imprisonment and Parole in Ireland, Palgrave Macmillan: Cham,
2018; 251 pp.: ISBN 978-3-319-72666-3, €119.59 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Jane Mulcahy, University College Cork, Ireland
For parole scholars, Irish policy-makers, penal reform advocates, members of the legal
profession, life sentence prisoners, families of people who were murdered and those
otherwise interested in learning about the inscrutable political decision-making process
governing the release of life sentence prisoners on a small island on the periphery of
Europe, Killing Time, based on PhD research by Diarmuid Griffin conducted between
2007 and 2012, is an illuminating read.
Griffin brings the reader through a history of homicide rates in Ireland, changing
public and political attitudes to crime and violence, the advent of risk technologies and
the upward trend in time served for murder before release on parole. He compares and
contrasts the parole process in various jurisdictions (including the highly punitive United
States and European models that have opted for court-like structures to determine the
appropriateness of release) with the murky Hibernian approach where the release deci-
sion is an entirely political one made by the Minister for Justice of the day, usually
informed by the conservative recommendations of the Parole Board. The Minister’s
power stems from the Criminal Justice Act, 1960, which governs all Temporary Release
decisions.Griffin’s study argues that “a culture of cautiousness” (p. 116) pervades the
Irish parole process, which might partly be explained by his discovery that the appoint-
ment of Parole Board members is itself political and linked to party allegiance. Indeed,
one interviewee who was a former Minister for Justice used the phrase “party hacks” in
reference to appointees of his political persuasion (p. 82). Few members would have had
the confidence, the high profile or “the guts” of T.K. Whitaker, the former Chairman of
the Sentence Review Group that preceded the Parole Board, to even contemplate con-
fronting a Minister about unconscionable foot-dragging and threaten to go public “unless
he made a decision” (see p. 68).
The highlight of the book for me was the rich use of qualitative interview data to shed
much-needed light into the dark, cobwebbed corners of the parole process, revealing the
tangled excuse for thinking that guides the making of timid recommendations by Parole
Board members and the risk-averse, media-obsessed decisions of Ministers. Griffin’s
research difficulties in obtaining access to parole review dossiers and the protracted nego-
tiations with both the Parole Board and Department of Justice officials that ultimately
proved futile speaks volumes about the guarded nature of release decision-making, and
895830EJP0010.1177/2066220319895830European Journal of ProbationBook Reviews
2019
Book Reviews
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