KEY POINTS:
The head of the Parole Board wants to see a separate board established to deal with parole applications from the worst of the worst of New Zealand criminals.
Prisoners serving terms of preventive detention - a long-term sentence that has no set release date - are now seen by the Extended Parole Board, which consists of three judges, three lay members and a forensic psychiatrist.
But the Parole Board chairman, Judge David Carruthers, is considering setting up a new board to save the current board wasting its time hearing requests that will be refused.
Judge Carruthers told the Herald no decisions had been made, but the main impetus behind such a move was that so few preventive detention prisoners were paroled.
"It's not a valuable use of the board," he said. "Preventive detainees are a separate and different set of prisoner. They are very often sexual offenders and often offenders against children."
They were hard to move out of prison and were rarely released. Only one prisoner sentenced to preventive detention had been released in the past five years.
The Extended Parole Board meets four times a year in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
Prisoners do not have to apply for parole - it is a requirement of law they are seen once every 12 months.
Judge Carruthers said 215 prisoners were on preventive detention and about 400 were serving life sentences. Those people would spend the rest of their lives in jail unless the Parole Board decided they weren't a risk to the community.
He said many of those prisoners would never be released and would die in jail.
"We're starting to see some quite elderly prisoners now."
Some had been in jail for 40 years and were nearly into their seventies, but were still considered unsafe to be released.
Last year, the Parole Board held about 9000 hearings and declined to give parole in 72 per cent of them.
* Worst of the worst
Stewart Murray Wilson: Known as the "Beast of Blenheim" for a variety of sex offences including rape and indecent assault.
Jules Pierre Mikus: Abducted, raped and murdered 6-year-old Teresa Cormack.
Roger Tira Kahui: Raped and then kidnapped a Pukekohe woman in July 2006.
Brett Stuart Wellm: Sentenced to preventive detention in July last year after a home invasion attack on an elderly Howick woman.
Malcolm Rewa: Serial rapist who is not due for a parole application until 2018.
