Does the NOMS Risk Assessment Bubble Need to Burst for Prisoners Who May Be Innocent to Make Progress?

This article considers, critically, a new course for prison and probation staff who work with indeterminate sentenced prisoners (ISPs) that has been devised by the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), which allows, for the first time, the possibility that some prisoners maintaining innocence may be innocent. However, whilst on its face this looks like a significant step, a closer analysis shows that the rationale and operations of the NOMS system of risk assessment for prisoners maintaining innocence remains trapped in a bubble which deters meaningful assistance to prisoners who may be innocent. As such, prisoners maintaining innocence continue to be faced with the ‘parole deal’, a situation whereby they claim that they must choose to admit their guilt for crimes that they say that they did not commit in order to make progress through the prison system and obtain their release.