Davis, a tall white man with wispy brown hair and a chest-length gray beard, is serving 31-35 years in North Carolina for a truck accident that killed an elderly couple and severely injured their adult daughter in 2007. Late one evening, Davis’ flatbed Ford F-350 veered off the road and T-boned the family’s smaller Chevy S-10 pickup. Following the crash, Davis registered a 0.09 blood alcohol concentration at the hospital, above the legal limit of 0.08. This led to two consecutive convictions for second-degree murder, which makes up the bulk of his sentence.

Doctors diagnosed Davis with prostate cancer in 2019. Radiation treatment sent him into remission, but in 2022, the cancer returned, spreading to his ribs, collarbone, pelvis and lymph nodes.

“It’s stage four,” Davis said in a dayroom at Neuse Correctional, a medium-custody prison in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Davis also suffers from Type-2 diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis and hypertension. To hear, he has to cup his palm around his ear. To get around, he needs the help of a wheeled walker. His very existence appears labored and excruciating. “At this point, they’re not trying to cure me. I’m beyond that. They’re treating me until I die.”

Davis is just one of about 31,000 North Carolina prisoners who racked up a $357.4 million bill for health care in fiscal year 2021-2022, an expenditure that ballooned 51 percent over the past 10 years, according to NC Health News. Nationally, U.S. prisons spent $8.1 billion on prison health care in 2015 alone, as reported by Pew Trusts.

In an attempt to reduce the cost of prison health care in North Carolina, the GOP-run legislature in 2023 passed changes that make early release for medical reasons less stringent. Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat who just left office at the end of December, signed it into law.

Under North Carolina’s medical release program, prison medical staff or representatives of a prisoner such as a family member or attorney can request that prison officials evaluate someone for medical release. If officials determine that someone meets the criteria, they can refer cases to the state’s governor-appointed parole commission, which makes the final decision. 

The changes lowered the age at which prisoners can be released for medical reasons from 65 to 55. To qualify, the prisoner must be so terminally ill, disabled or geriatric that they are medically incapacitated and determined by officials to pose little to no risk to public safety. People serving time for murder, sex offenses, and other violent crimes still cannot apply.

Because of the second-degree murder convictions that resulted from his truck accident, Davis is not permitted to seek medical release in North Carolina. So he will remain in prison, incurring exorbitant fees for doctors visits and medication at taxpayers’ expense. Despite the disqualifications, Davis wishes he could be considered for medical release. “Because I’m dying,” he said.

Other states have medical release programs, and most codify variations of the same guidelines. All exclude people condemned to death row. On paper, New York allows infirm people convicted of anything besides murder to apply for release if they have served at least half of their sentence, yet prison officials routinely deny hearings for them to make their case. In Wisconsin, people with terminal illness whose sentences allow for parole can seek release after serving 10 years. Florida reserves the right to re-incarcerate someone previously released for medical reasons if doctors determine that their physical condition has improved.

The increase in life sentences that followed a wave of so-called tough-on-crime policies in the 1980s and 1990s has resulted in a graying of the U.S. prison population, leading to swelling medical costs that states are now struggling to address. As reported in the New York Times, the number of people aged 55 or older in state prisons increased by 400 percent between 1993 and 2013. That group will make up one-third of the nation’s prison population by 2030. Since 1976, the Supreme Court has considered the denial of health care to sick prisoners a violation of the 8th Amendment, regardless of whether they are serving six months or condemned to death row. 

In North Carolina, too, around 17 percent of state prisoners are over 55. Those older people already cost the state four times what it spends on younger individuals, according to research published in the National Library of Medicine. 

Sandra Hardee, Secretary of NC-CURE, helped push lawmakers to expand North Carolina’s medical release law in 2023, lobbying alongside other groups like the North Carolina Justice Center and Conservatives for Criminal Justice Reform.

Hardee said the money that lawmakers envisioned saving in the long run by expanding medical release was key to them approving the new measures. “Before the new law passed,” Hardee said, “Health care for some inmates was costing $1 million a year.” 

According to reports from the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction (DAC), the number of people prisons have referred for medical release has dropped significantly in recent years. In 2021, prisons referred 39 cases to the parole commission, which ultimately granted medical release for 29 people. In 2022, prisons only referred 10 people to the parole commission, which granted medical release to just seven people. In 2023, prisons referred only eight people to the parole commission; three were granted medical and one person was denied, while four others died in prison awaiting a decision. 

DAC has yet to release its report covering the first year of expanded eligibility.

Although Hardee is pleased lawmakers expanded who is eligible for medical release, she says there are still barriers to actually releasing terminally ill people who qualify.

As it stands, no individual or board is tasked with identifying eligible prisoners for medical release, meaning people must find a way to apply on their own. If their family cannot afford legal counsel or don’t have other outside help, the prisoner must handwrite the paperwork themselves. Some prisoners may be too sick to physically file a request on their own.

“Right now, there are about 1,000 people that could be qualified by age and crime,” Hardee said. “If they were released, it would be a step in the right direction, but there is no way to identify them.”

Yvette Garcia Missri, executive director of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke University’s law school, helped lead the coalition lobbying for the 2023 changes to medical release. Even with expanded eligibility, Garcia Missri says that doesn’t mean all people who qualify are granted release. She said prison officials have seemed to focus on releasing “terminally ill” people, but not those who fit other categories such as “geriatric or permanently ill.” 

“One of our goals is finding ways we can work with DAC to get full usage of the law so that everyone is included,” Garcia Missri said. Part of this goal means defining key terms within the law, such as “medically incapacitated.” “Currently this term is left for DAC interpretation, which could be exclusionary,” Garcia Missri said. If people are not considered medically incapacitated beyond survival, they may not be released early. She hopes that offering clear definitions of the law’s requirements will make it less limiting, reducing the number of people excluded.

Aside from the challenges of seeking release, the new law will only benefit a fraction of the prison population. Its limitations exclude younger prisoners, even those with enormous medical needs.

In 2015, 22-year-old Michael Helms was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract that causes intense cramping and diarrhea. Convicted as a teenager, Helms was a few years into a 28-year sentence for second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

“[Crohn’s] is not harmless,” Helms said while sitting in the yard at Nash Correctional, a medium-custody prison in Nashville, North Carolina. “I’m lucky they put me on the right meds. If not, bacteria could have escaped my intestine to cause sepsis.”

This year, Fox News labeled sepsis a top killer behind heart disease and cancer, taking the lives of “350,000 American adults each year.” 

Helms is too young, and, by the standards of the new law, still too healthy and his murder conviction too serious to make him eligible for medical release.

For treatment, prison nurses administer Helms one shot of Humira bi-weekly, but it’s not cheap. At nearly $4,000 a month, Helms’ treatment has already cost taxpayers about $600,000 since his diagnosis nine years ago. His treatment will cost another $720,000 before his projected release in 2040, totaling $1.3 million throughout his incarceration. That figure is added to the $133 it costs to incarcerate one person per day in the state, as noted by the DAC.

Now 31, Helms is healthy and focused on positive personal change. If he had been convicted 30 years ago, his clean prison record would have helped him earn parole so he could eventually get out and help pay his own medical bills. But North Carolina eliminated parole in 1994 by implementing the Structured Sentencing Act, a sentencing structure that imposes an 85 percent mandatory minimum on all active prison sentences. 

A report published on JSTOR credits mandatory minimum sentencing as responsible for a spike in the national prison population. Earlier this year, the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission projected that, on average, people imprisoned under the Structured Sentencing Act “will serve 104% of their minimum active sentences,” keeping prisons full of people who will cost more to care for as they age.

James Davis wasn’t sentenced to die in prison. He has a release date. If he were younger and healthier, he’d most likely live to 2039, when he’s eligible for release. Or if the judge had sentenced him concurrently, meaning his sentences would run together and not consecutively, he would be released in 2025 after finishing his longest sentence. Instead, Davis must remain in prison until he dies.

Although Davis is dying from cancer, he knows that he is ineligible for medical release. He won’t sue the state to challenge the new law’s exclusionary rules. His own guilt is partly the reason.

“Two people died, you know, and it’s my fault,” he said, slouching over his walker. “I been here 16 years. I lost my dad, my wife, my brother; I lost a lot of people I loved, so I understand the pain I caused,” he said, lowering his head in thought. When he raised it again, his old eyes glistened with tears. “I wish I had died in the accident. Not them.”

*Correction 1/10: A previous version of this story misstated changes to the medical release law.

The post Terminally Ill People Languish in North Carolina Prisons, Even After Reforms appeared first on Bolts.

In early April, Sarah Moore got the news she was dreading: Her husband, Dennis Jackson Moore, had been denied parole again. It was his fourth rejection in as many years. 

Dennis, who goes by Vega, is 45. He has spent more than half his life in prison in Virginia for a murder and armed robbery he committed as a teenager. At the time, his defense argued that he did not fully understand the charges against him and had been misled by a detective when he gave a recorded confession. Vega was tried in adult court. Prosecutors called him a “cunning seventeen and three-quarters-year-old who committed a violent and senseless act.” When Vega was 18, the jury found him guilty and a judge sentenced him to 53 years in prison. 

Up until four years ago, Vega, like most people in Virginia prisons, was not eligible for parole. But in 2020 state lawmakers extended the possibility of early release to Vega and hundreds of others who carried out crimes as juveniles and have served at least 20 years of their sentence. “We are a nation of second chances,” Senator David W. Marsden, a Democrat who sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said at the time, “and those who are incarcerated for long periods of time when they are juveniles are especially deserving of that look.”

Vega’s 38-page application packet to the parole board makes the case that he is no longer a “misguided seventeen-year-old who made extremely reckless and thoughtless decisions.” He says he has spent more than two decades behind bars working to better himself—getting his GED, teaching himself multiple languages, studying real estate, marrying Sarah, and learning to care for her two daughters and son from afar. Vega says he’s become a rehabilitated and remorseful man worthy of an opportunity to rejoin society. If he ever gets out, he wants to help at-risk youth avoid incarceration. “I’ve grown up in prison,” he writes, “but I will not make prison my life.”  

After repeated denials from the parole board, Sarah says any second chance for her husband only seems good on paper. Like in previous decisions, the parole board’s most recent denial delivered in late March stated that releasing Vega would diminish the seriousness of his crime and he should serve more time. “We’re just so frustrated,” Sarah said after his latest rejection. She’s left wondering: “What more does he have to do?” 

For Vega and others eligible for parole in Virginia, the odds of being released have gone from slim to nearly impossible in recent years under new GOP leadership, according to Mother Jones’ and Bolts’ analysis of monthly parole board decisions. 

Under past Democratic administrations, Virginia already had one of the harshest parole systems in the nation, with single-digit annual approval rates. But parole grants have declined even further since Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin began to overhaul the parole board in 2022, dipping to an approval rate of just 1.6 percent in 2023. So far this year, Youngkin’s parole board has approved only eight of the 628 applications it considered, a grant rate of 1.3 percent, according to Mother Jones’ and Bolts’ analysis. 

In March, the month Vega was denied for a fourth time, the board approved only 2 out of the 117 cases it considered. 

As chances for parole decline across the country, experts say the Commonwealth stands out. “Virginia is paroling basically nobody,” says Wanda Bertram with the Prison Policy Initiative. The blanket denial of conditional release to deserving candidates, supporters of parole argue, ultimately advances blind punishment and undermines incentives toward rehabilitation and positive change.

Vega says he now understands the devastation caused by his actions. “I took a life and I don’t condone that,” he says. “I don’t even understand my thoughts at that time, but I feel for the victim’s family.” (In a 1997 victim impact statement, the mother of Vance Horne, the man he killed, wrote that the loss of her son felt “as though a part of my body, a part of my very being has been taken away without warning or reason.”) In the years since, Vega says he’s become a different person. “I’m not the same guy anymore,” he explains. “Who of us is the same person they were at that age?” 

He also sees how the crime hurt his own family; Darlene Smith, Vega’s mother, says his arrest for the murder felt like “someone reached in my chest and pulled my heart out and just set it on fire.”

With every “no” from the parole board, Vega and his supporters feel like the system is dangling a possibility for release that will never materialize: “What’s the point of having a second chance available,” he wonders, “when you’re not willing to give it?”

Almost two decades ago, during the height of a nationwide wave of tough-on-crime policies, Virginia effectively abolished parole by adopting a “truth-in-sentencing” law. The new rules mandated people serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. Only elderly prisoners, or those convicted before the law was enacted in 1995, were eligible for parole. 

Before parole was gutted, 46 percent of eligible candidates in Virginia were granted early release. By 1998, that figure had dropped to 5 percent. Although the number of people up for parole has grown in recent years as a result of criminal justice reforms expanding eligibility and an aging adult population, their chances of actually getting out have remained low. Only about 6 percent of parole applicants were approved under Terry McAuliffe, the state’s Democratic governor from 2014 to 2018. 

Recognizing a problem, McAuliffe created a state commission to study reinstating parole, questioning whether Virginia kept too many people in prison for too long. In 2019, Democrats seized control of the rest of the state government. Soon after, Virginia extended parole eligibility to juvenile offenders like Vega, as well as to people convicted by juries between 1995 and 2000 because of constitutional issues with how trials were conducted at the time. 

But even with those expansions, parole releases were still a drop in the bucket compared to a state prison population of roughly 24,000. This contributed to Virginia’s crowded prisons and aging incarcerated population—at a high cost to taxpayers. 

“The expectation pre-1995 was that you had a very good chance of receiving parole once you were eligible to be reviewed,” says Allison Weiss, a professor of prison litigation at Washington and Lee University School of Law who teaches a course where students assist parole applicants. “Over time, there’s just been a narrowing of the view of what parole is or should be in the state.” 

By the time McAuliffe ran for governor again in 2021, Youngkin had folded attacks on Virginia’s already-restrictive parole system into a broader GOP campaign that painted Democrats as soft on crime. “Terry McAuliffe’s hand-picked parole board had one mission—cut them loose,” Youngkin posted on X during the race, adding that Virginia wouldn’t be safe under his opponent. 

After taking office the following year, Youngkin swiftly fired his predecessor Ralph Northam’s five-member parole board and installed his own appointees, some of whom had openly opposed releasing people on parole—triggering a political standoff with Democrats who still control the state Senate and must confirm the governor’s nominees. The Senate blocked most of Youngkin’s initial selections, except for Chadwick Dotson, a former judge and prosecutor who was chosen to chair the parole board. 

Even before this battle to reshape it, the agency was already in disarray. In 2010, prisoners who were eligible for parole but denied multiple times sued the parole board, claiming it refused to properly consider their cases; the reason for denial provided in most instances was the seriousness of the original crime. A 2021 report from Washington and Lee University found deficiencies in the board’s decision-making process, including the fact that members don’t meet in person to discuss cases and instead vote electronically. 

Virginia Republicans have also criticized the parole board for failing to give legally required notices to victims and prosecutors when considering releases and for proceeding with some releases without receiving recommendations from local parole officers. As chair, Dotson issued a report to the governor last year calling for “drastic changes” to the board, like opening the hearings to the public and expanding the number of board members. 

Under Youngkin, the board has consistently been missing a fifth member, working at times with as few as three members, which experts say further diminishes chances for parole applicants.

Several advocates for people seeking parole say Dotson seemed to make improvements to the board’s practices. During his tenure, Dotson made visits to parole candidates, sometimes accompanied by other board members. Members also began gathering on a weekly basis to debate cases where there was “reasonable chance” of granting release. 

“I think he did give people a fair chance,” says Lisa Spees, who has advocated on behalf of more than 30 parole candidates in Virginia over the years. “He implemented a lot of changes into the parole system that were much needed.” Having the opportunity to meet with a parole board member, Spees added, “gave the individual a sense of being a part of that decision-making process.” She and others fear that Dotson’s departure last year brought that momentum to a halt. 

Even with those improvements, when Dotson chaired the board, between January 2022 and September 2023, the grant rate was only about 2 percent. 

Last September, Youngkin replaced Dotson as board chair by appointing Patricia West. A one-time judge and former chief deputy attorney general, West also once acted as state director of juvenile justice; decades ago she served on Republican Governor George Allen’s commission that pushed for minors as young as 14 to be automatically tried in adult court when charged with some violent offenses. 

Shawn Weneta, who was until recently a policy strategist with the ACLU of Virginia, calls West “the architect of parole abolition in Virginia.” He points to her role during the Allen administration, which led the charge to eliminate parole. In 1996, Allen picked West as secretary of public safety overseeing Virginia’s prisons and parole. “We have serious concerns with her being in that role [of parole board chair],” Weneta says. 

At first, Senate Democrats tried to remove West from a list of gubernatorial appointments pending confirmation. But, with little explanation, they voted a few days later to confirm her. Between her appointment last September and late March, West has voted on fewer than 50 cases to consider parole, according to state records showing individual board members’ voting history. She approved just three people for release, all of whom were eligible under geriatric release—available for applicants 65 or older after serving at least five years of their sentence and those 60 or more who served a minimum of 10 years. 

Julie McConnell, a law professor at the University of Richmond and director of a defense clinic that works on juvenile parole law cases, says Virginia’s current parole board only seems to be approving such geriatric cases. In past years, McConnell says her legal clinic won parole for seven candidates who committed crimes as juveniles. 

So far in 2024, she says none of the applicants represented by her clinic have been granted parole. 

“I don’t know that there is a silver bullet with this board where you can present the perfect package to them that gets their attention,” McConnell says. She suspects the board focuses more on aspects outside of the applicant’s control like the crime itself or input from the prosecutor and victim’s families. 

“The Parole Board deals with some of the most heinous and violent offenders within the Department of Corrections who are eligible for parole,” Youngkin’s press secretary Christian Martinez said in an email. “Judge West and the Parole Board assess each case with a comprehensive approach, guided by policies that prioritize the voices of victims before any decision is made to release violent offenders back on the street. Parole is not a right, it’s a privilege extended only to those inmates who are eligible for consideration.” West declined to answer questions for this story. 

Advocates for people seeking parole now worry that a recently announced policy change will even further decrease their chances of release. Starting in July, victims of people applying for parole will still be entitled to annual appointments with the board, while meetings with families and advocates for the parole applicants will instead now happen every two years.

“We’ve just become so acculturated to extreme punishment that we don’t even recognize when we’re going too far,” McConnell says. “We could give people an opportunity for a fresh start.”

In late February, Leroy Gilliam III became one of the lucky few to be granted parole in Virginia. 

Gilliam, 51, had already served almost 28 years for first-degree murder by the time he went before the parole board last June. The board had denied him twice in recent years due to the serious nature of his crime. But this time, the board decided Gilliam had shown “excellent institutional adjustment” and didn’t present a threat to public safety. 

Gilliam was both thrilled and perplexed by the decision: “I don’t know what actually changed their minds this time.” 

Parole board decisions could soon at least become less opaque in Virginia. Last year, Youngkin signed a bipartisan transparency bill into law that the ACLU touted as “the biggest reform of Virginia’s parole system since 1994.” Under the new law, which takes effect in July, the board will have to publish more regular detailed reports with individualized reasons on grants and denials, and parole review hearings will be required to include interviews with candidates themselves. The bill also gives parole applicants and their attorneys access to all of the information being considered by the board. 

“We don’t know that it will increase grant rates at all,” Weneta says. “We certainly hope that it helps. But it’s a piece of the puzzle.” He believes insulating the parole board from the influence of any individual politician is the only way to ensure an equitable system. “As long as we continue to have partisan actors setting the mandate and making the appointments, they’re going to achieve the outcomes that they want,” he says, adding that the ultimate goal is to reinstate parole for everyone.  

When Vega’s stepdaughter, Shaelyce, first spoke to Virginia’s parole board two years ago, she told them how he had become the first male role model in her life. Before Vega came into the picture, Shaelyce says her mother had been in a 13-year-long abusive relationship and they were living out of a hotel. Shaelyce, 22, is now studying to become a child psychologist to work with children who have experienced trauma. 

Shaelyce remembers pouring her heart out to the board, but says it didn’t seem to make a difference. “It’s like there’s a tablecloth that we place on the table,” she recalls with tears in her eyes, “and every time we get ready for him to come home, they sweep it right from underneath us.” Her sister Carol, 24, has also come to see Moore as a father figure. “We got all these plans,” she says. “We talk about what it’s going to be like and then to get denied it’s heartbreaking.” 

Darlene Smith, Vega’s mother, says she goes through bouts of depression and shuts down after each denial from the parole board. “He picks me up and he tells me, ‘Mom, I didn’t have this chance when I first went to prison,’” she says. “‘At least now I have a chance.’” But in Virginia, that chance is increasingly unlikely.

Sarah says each denial feels personal, like the support she and her family have given him is insufficient. “You’re telling us, ‘you’re not good enough to get him home,’” she says.

The post Under Glenn Youngkin, Parole in Virginia Has Nearly Vanished appeared first on Bolts.

Editor’s note (Dec. 19): In deciding the case described in this article, the New York Court of Appeals ruled on Dec. 19 that the state does not need to release the Board of Parole training documents.

Anthony Dixon was sure the parole commissioners would give him a “fair shake.” As a young man, Dixon was convicted of robbery, gun possession, and murder. After serving his minimum sentence of 30 years, he had extensive evidence of his transformation to present to the New York State Board of Parole. 

“I came into prison at 20, 21 years old and I went before [the board] as a man in my 50s, as a changed person,” Dixon told Bolts and New York Focus. While incarcerated, he developed anti-violence and anti-drug programs and worked toward a college degree. Prison staff wrote letters commending his character and accomplishments. 

The parole board rejected his application anyway—and Dixon said it barely explained why. The decision’s vague phrases and boilerplate language gave no indication of what he could have done differently, he said, and he had no clue how to prepare for his next hearing. It took him two more years of fighting to secure his release.

Since his release, Dixon has helped organize efforts to make New York’s parole system easier for incarcerated people to navigate and more transparent, assailing the board’s bare-bones justifications for its rulings. Now, he and other advocates want to crack down on the board’s opacity.

“This system is killing hope, and in some instances, it does cause some people to take their lives,” said Dixon. “This is not just death by incarceration. It is specifically death by the parole board.”

Over 10,000 people appear before New York’s parole board each year. Hearings are often rushed, lasting an average of 15 minutes. Commissioners are afforded wide discretion in how they decide cases, with little oversight or review. They decide to keep around 60 percent of parole seekers in prison.

New York Focus and Bolts reviewed dozens of parole board decisions and appeals. The decisions run as short as a single paragraph, providing parole seekers little guidance on how to win their release. Many repeat variations of the same vague phrases when denying release, many lifted directly from the state’s parole statute. Applicants are often informed that their release “is not compatible with the welfare of society” for example, without explaining how the board arrived at that conclusion.

“They’re not giving people any clarity about what they can do to obtain parole the next time,” says Michelle Lewin, executive director of the Parole Preparation Project. “They’re not giving individualized reasons for denials, despite the fact that their own internal regulations demand that they do so.” 

The parole board’s lack of transparency creates difficulties for applicants of all stripes. But it especially burdens parole seekers serving lengthy sentences for violent crimes. Despite decades of incarceration, these individuals face the very real possibility of dying in prison, even if they have demonstrated sincere growth and rehabilitation.  

“I think it’s time that we gave people a chance to be productive citizens,” said Assemblymember David Weprin, a Democrat who has introduced legislation to increase the parole board’s transparency, “especially in the case when they’ve shown that … they’re not the same individuals that they were when they committed the crime 20 years ago, 30 years ago.”

Advocates for reform have sought to strengthen board oversight from every angle: legislation like Weprin’s, direct pressure on Governor Kathy Hochul, and cases before the Court of Appeals. 

Last month, Appellate Advocates, a non-profit organization of public defenders, argued before the state’s highest court that the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision should release the training documents it provides to board members. The documents include hypothetical decisions and sample language—all materials that parole advocates say could help incarcerated individuals understand how the board makes decisions and how to make the strongest case for release.

DOCCS has resisted, and argued in court that it should be allowed to shield the documents, in a dispute that has dragged on for over five years.

Jose Saldaña, the director of the Release Aging People in Prison campaign, described a similar experience with the board. He spent decades incarcerated in New York, in his case for the attempted murder of an NYPD sergeant when he was 27 years old. Though  he had earned his associate degree and led several restorative justice and victim awareness programs, the parole board denied his release four times.

“We discussed these vague reasons … ‘releasing you at the time would so deprecate the nature of the crime as to undermine respect for the law’,” Saldaña said. “What does that really mean?”

“Nobody knows what that means,” Steven Zeidman, director of the CUNY School of Law’s Criminal Defense Clinic, told Bolts and New York Focus. Not even parole commissioners. Zeidman said commissioners apply the same language differently from one another, even when evaluating the same individual. “What’s the message to people inside preparing? How do you prepare?”

New York law requires board members to consider many enumerated factors in their decisions, but the commissioners frequently emphasize the nature of the parole seeker’s offense over their rehabilitation and growth while incarcerated. Their cases are often dismissed with terse lines like “your positive programming to date is noted.” 

Reform-minded lawmakers have long supported Weprin’s bill, the Fair and Timely Parole Act, which would reduce the board’s opacity and limit some of the commissioners’ discretion. The legislation would eliminate the vague statutory language cited in board decisions and require commissioners to explain in “detailed, individualized, and non-conclusory terms” exactly why they decided to deny release. It would also require the board to issue a quarterly report that includes the reasons for each denial, which commissioners were assigned to each case, and how they voted.

The bill would establish a presumption that the board would grant parole once an applicant has served their minimum sentence. To deny release, parole commissioners would have to clearly articulate how a parole seeker threatens public safety.

Weprin, a Democrat, first introduced the bill in 2017. Since then, three separate iterations have died in committee, where the 2023 version now sits. Dixon attributes the icy reception in Albany to upstate conservative legislators — whose constituents disproportionately benefit from employment opportunities in the prison system. “Upstate districts have a vested interest to keep this no-sense institution going,” he said. 

Senator Patrick Gallivan, the chamber’s Republican minority whip, is a former parole commissioner who opposes the Fair and Timely Parole Act. His district encompasses Erie County’s Collins Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison employing hundreds of people. But he said his opposition to the bill has nothing to do with protecting upstate jobs.

Gallivan said the bill would limit the board’s ability to consider negative aspects of the parole seekers’ applications, such as their institutional records. He agrees with reformers that the Board of Parole has too much discretion — but he sees them stretching the rules to grant release, rather than keeping people in prison. Gallivan said that when he was a parole commissioner, he tried to set his biases as a former sheriff and state trooper aside and vote according to the law. He said he wants everyone on the board to do the same. Some commissioners say at their confirmation hearings that they will abide by the law, he said, but “the minute that they got sworn in, they said, ‘I don’t care what the law is. I’m here to release people and I’m going to.’” 

Reform advocates have repeatedly called on Hochul to reform the parole system.  As New York Focus and Bolts have previously reported, the board features zombie commissioners serving long past their terms have expired and a medical parole system that leaves most terminally ill people to die behind bars. The vacancies on the board have long afforded Hochul the opportunity to staff it with reformers. But Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson for the Prison Policy Initiative, said she does not expect Hochul to expend any of her political capital on the issue. Under Republican pressure, she noted, Hochul has supported other rollbacks to criminal justice reforms in recent years.

Hochul has pointed to fluctuations in crime and rearrest rates when backing down from other reforms. But Bertram claims that lenient parole policies don’t undermine public safety. She points to a federal study showing that people who commit violent offenses are the least likely to be rearrested after release. “The safest person you can release from prison is a murderer, especially someone that served 10 to 20 years,” said Bertram. “That’s just what the data shows.”  

Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

Frustrated by New York’s legislative and executive branches, parole reformers have turned to the judiciary. The state’s courts have limited power to modify parole board decisions, but advocates hope they will at least compel the board to be more transparent. 

At a November 15 Court of Appeals hearing, Appellate Advocates argued that the state’s Freedom of Information Law mandates the release of the board’s training documents.

DOCCS revealed the existence of the training materials in 2020 when they told Appellate Advocates they were withholding certain documents in response to a records request. Michael Higgins, assistant director of the University at Buffalo Law School Civil Rights and Transparency Clinic, says that administrative agencies routinely prepare interpretations of the law that govern what they do, but they often keep the interpretations secret. “Basically, they make up rules that are written down in their training documents or in manuals that the public can’t access,” he said. He says FOIL requires the release of those documents upon request.

At the hearing, DOCCS argued that FOIL does not extend to the training materials because a parole board lawyer prepared them, shielding them from disclosure under attorney-client privilege. (DOCCS declined to comment due to ongoing litigation.) Appellate Advocates countered that attorney-client privilege covers legal advice on real-world scenarios, not abstract training documents.

While the Court of Appeals has shown signs of a leftward shift on some criminal legal issues, it’s unclear whether the newly reconfigured court will flex its power on behalf of parole seekers. During oral argument, Associate Judge Shirley Troutman, a Hochul appointee, expressed concerns that ruling for Appellate Advocates would foist an “unreasonable burden upon trial courts” handling future disputes over attorney-client privilege. Even Chief Judge Rowan Wilson, the court’s liberal leader, said Appellate Advocates’ arguments had “frightening” implications for attorneys. The court scarcely touched on how its decision would impact incarcerated individuals.

For advocates like Dixon, obtaining the release of these documents would only be a first step. Achieving a truly transparent parole system would require wholesale changes, from data disclosure to board appointment procedures. 

“The matrix itself needs to be dismantled,” Dixon said. “The system has to change because it is criminal what is happening.”

The post “Nobody Knows What That Means”: The Murky Decisions of New York’s Parole Board appeared first on Bolts.

For more than 25 years, Mike Rose felt alone. After his son Jeremy was arrested at age 17 in 1994, sentenced to life in prison, Mike and his wife had no community with which to share the pain of losing a son to prison. “In the battle to help your loved ones, it feels like you’re by yourself, fighting this battle on your own,” he says. Jeremy was shipped to an out-of-state prison, as New Mexico does with many kids serving long sentences, deepening his parents’ isolation. 

Then, about four years ago, Mike says his world opened up after he stumbled upon a coalition that had assembled in New Mexico to fight extreme sentences imposed on children. 

“It was like a breath of fresh air,” he told Bolts. “I was able to join them and it’s like, I’m not by myself anymore. We’ve got resources, we’ve got people who are in the same situation, we can pull our knowledge and our strengths and start working on the passage of legislation. It was a godsend.” 

The coalition has for years pushed legislation to give every ‘juvenile lifer’ a meaningful chance at release, which faltered in repeated legislative sessions until they finally succeeded this spring: In March, lawmakers adopted Senate Bill 64, a law abolishing sentences of life without parole for children. 

The law also addresses other extreme sentences by making anyone convicted of a crime they committed under the age of 18 eligible for parole hearings—usually after 15 years in prison, though in some cases after 20 or 25 years behind bars. 

“In a moment of pretty extreme political polarization around crime and public safety, our community was able to pass one of the more progressive juvenile parole laws in the country, and we did it with bipartisan support,” said Denali Wilson, an attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico who co-founded this coalition, though she also stresses that 15 years remains too long a time. “For people that went to prison when they were 15-16 years old, we’re talking about a lifetime to wait for just an opportunity—just an opportunity to come home.”

The law does not guarantee release for anyone. It only provides review by a parole board, a shot to showcase one’s rehabilitation inside and ask for a second chance that the governor-appointed board can still deny. Many people newly eligible for review will still likely remain in prison for decades. 

Still, Mike Rose calls himself “eternally optimistic” and says the law’s passage opens the door to having his son home by the end of the year. Jeremy, who was convicted of murder alongside two other minors for the stabbing deaths of two elderly people three decades ago, received a sentence that made him eligible for parole after 30 years in prison, and likely would have had a parole hearing next near even without the new law. But Mike, whose wife died of cancer two years ago without seeing her son have a hearing, is keenly aware of what shaving even just a few years off his sentence could have meant—and now he’s eager to help others besides his son get a second look. 

“He left a boy of 17 and hopefully I get the opportunity to have him here shortly as a man of 47,” Mike said of his son. “There’s a huge push across the country to recognize the fact that we as a society cannot sentence our juveniles to a life behind bars… You’re not doing things to solve the crime problem, what you’re doing is throwing the next generation away.”

So far in 2023, two other states besides New Mexico have adopted similar reforms, making people convicted as children eligible for release after some lengthy term of incarceration: Illinois with House Bill 1064 in February, and Minnesota, which included the reforms in a large public safety package, in May. 

They are just the latest states to adopt such laws over the last decade, ever since the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of decisions in the late 2000s and early 2010s affirming that minors deserve “meaningful opportunities to obtain release.” The laws passed in New Mexico, Illinois and Minnesota mean there will now be 28 states that no longer sentence kids to life without parole.

“Every state that ends the practice of condemning children to die in prison creates pressure for the next state to do so,” said Preston Shipp, a policy counsel with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, a national organization that is helping spread those reforms.

Shipp traveled to Santa Fe and St. Paul this year to lobby lawmakers and share information about the many similar reforms that have already been implemented elsewhere, pointing to the low recidivism rate for people who have been released on parole in other states. He also tries to talk to lawmakers about research in neuroscience and psychology showing developmental differences between adults and youth.

“We know from the science of adolescent brain development that [kids] don’t appreciate all the consequences of their conduct; peer pressure hits differently,” Shipp said. ”In a flash point, this person does something that’s tragic, and it changes people’s lives, but it doesn’t mean that they cannot experience rehabilitation. It doesn’t mean that they’re beyond the hope of redemption.”

More states could soon make reforms. Shipp has traveled to Lansing three times this year to help bills that would end juvenile life without parole in Michigan. Connecticut already adopted similar reforms in 2015 for kids under age 18, but in June lawmakers passed a bill that extends parole eligibility to people with long sentences who were convicted before age 21. (The new Illinois law also applies to people up to age 21.) That measure now goes to Governor Ned Lamont, a Democrat who has blocked other efforts to curtail long sentences for juveniles. 

Despite the similarities, the youth sentencing reforms that three states have passed so far this year will vary widely in actual impact. In Illinois, people already serving extreme sentences for juvenile convictions are still set to spend their lives behind bars without review: The bill that passed this year—just like the 2019 law it builds on—isn’t retroactive. 

In New Mexico and Minnesota, by contrast, dozens of people incarcerated for decades are now suddenly poised to receive parole hearings very soon because of the new laws. “There are just a lot of people who have spent a lot of time in prison being introspective and growing and developing into adults,” State Representative Sandra Feist, a Democrat who helped shape Minnesota’s legislation, told Bolts. “And I’m just excited for them to get a second chance.”

For advocates like Wilson who hope to reduce the prison population and spent years guiding these bills through the state legislatures, that effort was just about setting up the difficult parole processes that are only now starting.  

“It’s the moment that our community has been preparing for,” Wilson said. “We knew that passing the law was only the first step. Making the law mean something, making it mean real opportunity for people to come home, is the next chapter.”

The states that adopted new juvenile sentencing reforms this year significantly limited if not eliminated discretionary parole in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period during which many states toughened sentencing and gutted paths to release throughout the country. That gives advocates a chance to start fresh—after all, established parole boards are typically dysfunctional and punitive—but creating a new process out of virtually nothing is also a daunting task. 

Wilson warns that legal services in New Mexico aren’t trained to counsel the people who are newly eligible for parole, even as their hearings are coming up soon. “The work ahead is happening outside of existing institutions in the state because this is new work,” she said. “This reform was passed without any kind of budget allocation from the state, and so much of the work is around shoring up resources to make sure that people are supported in the way that they deserve.” Wilson has set up an organization, Deserving Life, that’s crowdfunding to help provide people with this support. 

Wilson says she knows of at least 75 people incarcerated in New Mexico who were given decades-long sentences for crimes they committed as minors and will be affected by SB 64. More than half are already eligible for a hearing under the new law because they’ve served more than the minimum period (15 to 25 years, depending on the crime). The actual number is likely higher: ProPublica exposed in March how the state lost track of nearly two dozen people locked up since they were sentenced to life in prison as kids. 

Meanwhile, close to 100 people will be affected by Minnesota’s new law, according to Perry Moriearty, who helps run a law clinic at the University of Minnesota that represents “juvenile lifers” and played a central role in crafting and championing the reforms over the last decade. In Minnesota, like in New Mexico, most people will be eligible after 15 years in prison, though it will be longer for some categories of crimes. Moriearty says nearly half have been in prison long enough that they are already eligible for a hearing.

But the panel that will review these cases doesn’t even exist yet. Minnesota lawmakers this spring created a brand new review board that must still be staffed. For cases that involve people who were sentenced as minors, that five-member board will be supplemented by two additional members who must be experts in neurodevelopmental science.  

Advocates for the law say these two additional members will be critical to remind the rest of the board of what makes youth different. “One of the things that neurodevelopmental experts may be able to speak to is why, with a lot of kids who are incarcerated, the first few years look bumpy,” said Moriearty, the University of Minnesota professor.  “For kids who are told that they’re entering prison and they’re gonna die there, there tend to be more infractions in those early years.”

Avra Anagnostis was 14 when her 16-year-old best friend, Roberto Lopez-Rios, was arrested and sentenced to life in Minnesota in 2001. “Life in prison, obviously, as kids, we couldn’t really comprehend what that meant,” she told Bolts. “It sounded so scary and overwhelming.” 

For more than two decades, Anagnostis has advocated for her friend to get a second look. She and Lopez-Rios co-founded an organization called Juvenile Sentencing Reform MN, paired up with Moriearty to advocate for reform, and reached out to people who have been incarcerated since they were kids. “Some of these guys are really alone,” she said. “Several have never had anyone reach out to them.” 

“For them to know that this group of people was coming together, people that they’ve never met, and advocating for them and saying, you are more than the worst thing you did as a child, that was huge,” she added.

From prison, Lopez-Rios has developed his painting, working with a group called Art from the Inside to have his art sold and shown at exhibitions. In April, this Minnesota-based organization hosted an art workshop in St. Paul alongside Juvenile Sentencing Reform MN that featured Moriearty and other coalition members talking about their bill.

Moriearty says that most kids sentenced to spend their life in prison in Minnesota come from Hennepin and Ramsey counties, which include the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the most diverse area in the state—and that the vast majority, 81 percent, are also Black and Latinx. The prosecutors who represent these population centers—Ramsey County’s John Choi, who has long backed this issue, and Hennepin County’s Mary Moriarty, who was elected in November in a victory for progressives—both supported the reform this year. 

Nevertheless, the statewide association of county attorneys opposed Minnesota’s bill this year. Robert Small, its executive director, told Bolts that the organization agreed with the principle of ending juvenile life without parole but thought that people should wait for longer periods before being eligible, and that the decision should be made by a judge and not by a parole board. Feist says the support her bill received from Choi and Moriarty helped counter the idea that local law enforcement was uniformly hostile to it.

New Mexico’s prosecutors association, which has a long history of torpedoing criminal justice reforms and opposed prior iterations of this bill, remained neutral on the 2023 version after extracting concessions that extended how long kids have to wait before becoming eligible for parole. (An earlier version of the bill made most minors eligible for parole after 10 years.)

Advocates in both New Mexico and Minnesota say they insisted the bills be retroactive, bringing hope to the very people who were championing them. They also pressed lawmakers to cover anyone who was convicted of a crime as a kid, no matter how serious. 

“The reason why we are so adamant that there should not be carve outs is because this whole policy is all about the difference between kids and adults,” Shipp said. “It’s not about the nature of the offense.”

All three bills adopted this year passed Democratic-led legislatures and were then signed by Democratic governors. In each case, the opposition largely came from GOP ranks, even though the bills in Illinois and New Mexico each received Republican support. (Minnesota’s package, which incorporated many other reforms, passed on strict party lines.) Some GOP-run states have adopted similar legislation—most recently, Ohio in 2021. 

In Illinois, a Republican state senator even played a lead role this year in pushing lawmakers to fix the fact that HB 1064 does not apply to past cases. In the same week Governor J.B. Pritzker signed it into law in February, Senator Seth Lewis filed new legislation, SB 2073, to make it retroactive. Lewis’ bill would also apply to an earlier sentencing reform that Illinois adopted in 2019, which curtailed juvenile life without parole but did not eliminate it. If it passes, it would make hundreds of people incarcerated since they were kids eligible for parole, according to Lindsey Hammond, policy director of the Chicago-based Restore Justice. 

SB 2073 drew numerous Democratic co-sponsors but it received no vote by the end of the legislative session in May. Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, a Democrat, did not respond to a request for comment on her plans for next year.

While the sentencing reforms in Illinois are limited to only new convictions, the state has still gone further than most others (including New Mexico and Minnesota) in another dimension: age. 

Reforms that take a more rehabilitative approach to youth are traditionally written to apply to people who committed a crime before age 18, but the laws Illinois passed in 2019 and 2023 instead both draw the line at 21. Hammond says the usual arguments for treating kids differently apply to young adults too. “Eighteen isn’t a line that you magically become an adult,” she told Bolts. “The emerging brain science shows that our brains continue to develop till the mid-20s.” 

Hammond says there was interest in the Illinois legislature to set the age of eligibility at 25: “Why are we stopping?”

Back in 2021, Washington, D.C., became the first jurisdiction to eliminate life without the possibility of parole for anyone convicted of a crime committed under age 25. Bolts reported last year that the reform sparked releases but at a slower pace than its proponents hoped for because of pandemic delays and recalcitrant prosecutors. Other states, like Massachusetts and Vermont, have also raised the age until which someone can be treated as a juvenile past 18. Connecticut could join that roster if its governor, Lamont, signs SB 952, the bill that ends life without parole for youth under 21. 

People in other states are watching these developments closely. In Minnesota, Moriearty says they didn’t press raising the age of adult criminal liability in this year’s session but hopes to revisit it in the future. “We didn’t necessarily feel like we had time,” she says.

Some advocates also hope to build on these new laws to make a broader case: They wonder if re-opening the door to parole for juveniles may make people more receptive to the idea that we shouldn’t throw anyone away for life. They’re pushing for reforms to cap prison terms, expand parole hearings for the elderly, or guarantee everyone some form of “second look.”

“If we allow ourselves to believe or to entertain the possibility that a child is more than the worst thing that they’ve ever done,” Wilson says, “it’s really not that far of a leap for people to wonder if that may be true for everybody.”

The post “Just an Opportunity to Come Home” appeared first on Bolts.

For four years, Kelly Savage-Rodriguez helped women die in prison. As a volunteer comfort care worker at the Central California Women’s Facility, informally known as Chowchilla, Savage-Rodriguez played a hybrid role: somewhere between a hospice nurse and a proxy for patients’ family members. She brushed their hair, played cards with them, helped them write letters to their loved ones outside prison.

California has a program called compassionate release that allows the courts to grant people who are dying in prison their freedom, but a system of arbitrary delays and denials means that it rarely happens in practice. “The hold-up is so extreme,” recalled Savage-Rodriguez, who was released in 2019 and is now the Drop LWOP coordinator for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP). “We would sit there watching day after day—family members calling, fighting to try to get information and hearing nothing—only to be told that [the request] never even left the institution.”

The California legislature passed a bill on Tuesday that aims to improve the compassionate release process, and it’s now awaiting signature by Governor Gavin Newsom. Assembly Bill 960 would expand eligibility for compassionate release, streamline the approval process, and automatically provide legal counsel. The bill is sponsored by Assemblymember Phil Ting and a broad coalition of organizations, including CCWP, UnCommon Law, and Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM). 

“When I think about somebody dying in there, it hurts,” said Savage-Rodriguez. This bill, she said, “could give them just that moment of peace with their family.” 

Some California organizers hope that this new bill clears the way for a broader reconsideration of how the state treats its aging, ill, and medically vulnerable prisoners. In a particularly dark legacy of the harsh sentencing laws of the 1980s and 1990s, the very same people sentenced under mandatory minimum guidelines and handed lengthy enhancements in their teens and twenties are now growing old and sick in prison. Unless something changes, many of them will die there.

There are two standard routes for someone to be released from prison for medical reasons in California: compassionate release and medical parole. The initial version of AB960, introduced by now-state Attorney General Rob Bonta in 2021, focused on improving the latter: Medical parole is decided by the parole board, not the courts, and funnels people into licensed skilled nursing facilities across the state rather than releasing them into the community. But issues with the system kept surfacing. “It’s not only that people on medical parole aren’t really released, they can be sent back to prison for virtually anything,” said Leah Daoud, a policy manager for the legal and policy advocacy organization UnCommon Law. Then, in late 2021, federal health regulators found that California’s medical parole system violated federal standards for patient rights. Rather than change its practices to comply, California started sending almost all of its medical parole patients to a decertified facility where some patients were handcuffed to their own beds or neglected for hours on end. The state also began limiting future eligibility for the program to people on ventilators. 

From the sponsors’ perspective, the desired outcome of medical parole was no longer viable or desirable, so reforming the process seemed futile. They recalibrated their legislative push to focus on compassionate release. “Compassionate release in California has never been seriously studied,” said Daoud. “There really hasn’t been—up until now, with this bill—anyone looking at this process and saying, why is it that this happened or this didn’t happen?” They discovered that the existing process wasn’t working. In 2020, the legislature had amended the penal code to open up compassionate release to anyone who qualified for medical parole because of permanent medical incapacitation, but in practice, Daoud told Bolts, many people in that category still weren’t being considered. 

And those who did manage to register a request faced roadblocks throughout the process. Between January 2015 and April 2021, according to an analysis by FAMM, 304 people sought compassionate release. 290 of them were found medically eligible, but only 53 were released in time to pass away at home. 91 people died in prison, waiting. 

When you’re terminally ill, the importance of each passing second becomes agonizingly heightened. But that critical element—how much time you have—is often impossible to predict. “There’s no science to when somebody’s going to pass,” said Savage-Rodriguez. Rather than trying to attach eligibility to the number of months that someone has left, as the state currently does, AB 960 proposes a broader definition: anyone with an incurable condition or an “end-of-life” trajectory is eligible to apply. 

Moreover, the bill would accelerate the timeline for compassionate release, requiring the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR)to refer a case to the courts no more than 45 days after the patient’s physician triggers the compassionate release process. It would also tweak the standard for the courts in favor of release, unless the patient can be deemed a risk to public safety. (Recidivism among elderly incarcerated people is extremely low. One study found that only 11% of people aged 65 and older reentered prisons after release.) 

Crucially, the new bill would remove the CDCR Secretary, an office that FAMM found to be the most likely source of denials, from the process entirely. Currently, the secretary must sign off on an application before it goes to the courts, an extra step that advocates argue is superfluous and produces inexplicable denials. “It was really clear that the secretary doesn’t play a medical expertise role in the process, they’re obviously not a trained medical professional—but they’re also not a public safety role either, that’s the role the courts play,” said Daoud. “All we’re doing here is giving medical professionals more ownership and power over this process, which is just what they should have had in the beginning.” (CDCR did not respond to a request to clarify the secretary’s role in this process). 

Before his retirement last year, Peter Eisenberg was a longtime medical oncologist at Marin Cancer Care. Eisenberg and his colleagues treated people incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison for cancer and a variety of blood diseases, and he saw firsthand how bureaucratic inefficiency prevented his dying patients from going home to their families. “I was kind of surprised that if I predict that the guy is sick enough to die of his, for instance, metastatic prostate cancer, that it would take so much effort and so long to get the paperwork, for crying out loud, to accommodate his death outside of prison,” he told Bolts. “I’d write in my notes that this person is likely to die within the next six months, and I’d write it over and over again.”

Eisenberg recalled a rare instance where one of his patients was released on parole; later he thanked his former physician for treating him with dignity and respect. “That’s nice to hear, but it’s my job,” Eisenberg said. “And I think it’s the state’s job to do the humane thing for people who have limited time on earth who are incarcerated for one thing or another…Weighing the appropriateness of an early release from prison because of their health issues shouldn’t be a bureaucratic battle. It should be a pretty simple thing to figure out.”

Thus far, AB 960 has encountered little pushback. Only one group—the California District Attorney’s Association, which tends to take issue with any reforms that aim to get people out of prison—has registered its opposition. Daoud said she’s hopeful that Newsom will sign, though the governor has not indicated his final intention. 

Proponents of AB 960 recognize that its adoption would still leave a lot of work. The bill can’t fix the United States’ broken healthcare system, for one. A particularly cruel irony is that some people may have better access to care in jail than on the outside. The lack of a solid post-release plan—strong family support, or a skilled nursing facility that has agreed to take on a patient—is the second most common reason that people who are medically eligible get denied from compassionate release, and AB 960 won’t address that. 

There’s also the issue of carve-outs. People serving a sentence of life without parole have never been eligible for compassionate release, along with those serving a death penalty sentence and anyone convicted of killing a police officer. That group includes women Savage-Rodriguez knew at Chowchilla who require regular care owing to unmanaged diabetes and a medication-induced stroke.

It also includes the woman who started the hospice program at Chowchilla back in 2000, after a spree of deaths in the prison left people stunned and grieving and spurred her to act. Judi, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her family’s privacy, had no reason to believe she was ever getting out of prison. “I wanted to do something for the woman who were dying,” she told Bolts. “And actually for myself, because I didn’t want to die alone.” 

Thanks to Judi’s efforts, comfort care has been operational at Chowchilla for over two decades. She looked after dozens of women in the last days of their lives. “It was like that movie ‘Groundhog Day,’” she told Bolts. “It happened over and over.” For the ones who were eligible for compassionate release, she said, “It was almost universal that they died before they could get out.” 

Against all odds, Judi’s life without parole sentence was commuted several years ago. “Every day I wake up and I go: really?” she said. “I’ve been out three years and I still do that.” But a sentence commutation is like winning the lottery, and there are many more people growing old and sick in prison whom compassionate release doesn’t cover. 

“Statistics show that the recidivism rate [for aging people] is so minute,” said Amber-Rose Howard, the executive director of CURB, a coalition that aims to reduce incarceration and close prisons across California. Howard highlighted the need for elder parole expansion. But she also called for the state of California to change the policies that have people aging while incarcerated in the first place. “We have to think about the 25-to-life sentences. We have to think about these things that give people extra time in prison, and we have to reverse those policies. I think that’s the only way we’re actually going to see real change.” 

The post California Passes Bill to Expand Prison Releases for Terminally Ill People appeared first on Bolts.

On the campaign trail, Governor Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares stroked fears about releasing people from prison and attacked Virginia’s parole system for being too lax, even though it is among the nation’s harshest. Democrats, who still control the state Senate, blocked most of the governor’s appointees to the parole board in March, in part because they were hostile to parole; two of the new GOP appointees had appeared in a campaign ad for Youngkin warning that Democrats would be overly lenient. But the governor has since doubled down with similar nominations.

The showdown has diminished hopes for Virginia advocates who have worked to expand parole, and  who are now also fighting attempts to further narrow the path for release for people who are already eligible.

“The more that I got to dig into Virginia’s criminal justice system, the more I discovered how flawed and unjust it is,” says Paulettra James, whose advocacy efforts on behalf of her husband and son, who are both incarcerated in Virginia, led her to help start the group Sistas in Prison Reform.

When James met and fell in love with her now-husband in 2017, he was serving a 38-year sentence at a Virginia Department of Corrections facility. Almost two decades earlier, Jerry L. James, who has struggled with mental health issues and substance use, had been convicted of robbery and use of firearms. During his decades-long incarceration, James graduated as valedictorian of his G.E.D. class and pursued an associate’s degree in Biblical Studies. But, his chances of getting out before his projected release date in 2033 are slim at best. 

Like most of Virginia’s incarcerated population, James is ineligible to apply for parole and have a shot at early release. In 1995, the state abolished parole and adopted a so-called truth-in sentencing statute that mandates that people serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. (People convicted before the law passed remained eligible for parole.) Upon taking control of the state government in 2019, Democrats abolished sentences of life without parole for children, which expanded the eligibility to apply for parole to anyone convicted for a crime they committed while a minor after 20 years of incarceration. Another law made anyone convicted by jury between 1995 and 2000 eligible for parole, due to a constitutional issue with how jury trials were conducted in that period. 

While these reforms have made more people eligible for parole, the odds are still heavily stacked against incarcerated Virginians who are allowed to apply. 

The state’s five-member parole board rejects nearly all of the applications it receives, with an annual grant rate of only 5 percent in 2010—far below neighboring states. The low rate persisted under the Democratic administrations of Terry McAuliffe (who was governor between 2014 and 2017) and Ralph Northam (between 2018 and 2021). It has fallen to near nil so far in Youngkin’s administration. 

A 2021 report from Washington and Lee University called parole in Virginia a “system designed to justify the routine denial of parole, not to promote rehabilitation and successful reentry.” The authors faulted deficiencies in the decision making-process of the board, including the fact that members don’t meet in person to discuss the cases, voting electronically instead. 

In 2010, eleven prisoners serving long sentences for violent offenses who had been denied parole dozens of times filed a class action lawsuit against the board alleging a violation of their constitutional rights and demanding proper consideration of their cases, but they were unsuccessful. In most instances, the reason provided for the denial was the seriousness of the original crime. “Many individuals have gone before the parole board … and been [repeatedly] denied for the nature of their offense, but even if that person served 99 percent of their sentence, the nature of their offense is never going to change,” James told Bolts. “What you’re saying in essence is you’re never going to let that person out.”

Over the past five years, the number of people released on discretionary parole each year has remained well under 300, a drop in the bucket of a prison population of roughly 24,000. Virginia’s incarceration rate is the 16th highest in the nation. Parole in Virginia, as a report released by the Justice Policy Institute concluded, constitutes a “blocked exit.” 

Republicans nevertheless made parole grants into a campaign issue in 2021. One of Youngkin’s ads painting Democrats as soft on crime featured a Republican sheriff attacking McAuliffe, who was running to return to the governor’s mansion, over the parole board he appointed during his first term as governor. Despite parole grants of about 6 percent during most of McAuliffe’s administration, Montgomery County Sheriff Hank Partin claims in the ad that board members appointed by the former governor had only one mission:“cut them loose.” 

Miyares, who defeated Democratic incumbent Mark Herring last year, has called for a constitutional amendment abolishing parole for anyone convicted of a violent offense. During the race, he also falsely accused Herring of signing off on the release of a handful of people convicted for murder, even though the attorney general doesn’t have control over the decisions of the parole board. 

Both Miyares and Youngkin singled out the release of Vincent Martin, a 64-year-old man who had been sentenced to life in prison for killing a police officer in 1979. He was granted parole in April 2020 after spending decades behind bars without a single disciplinary infraction. Martin’s release had the support of correctional officers, who described him as “a trusted leader, peacemaker, mediator and mentor.” Nevertheless, Youngkin blamed Martin’s release on the “scandalous agenda” of a “lawless parole board.” He also seized on findings that the parole board had failed to give legally required notices of releases to victims and prosecutors when considering applications, and that it had proceeded without recommendations from local parole officers. 

“Republicans are trying to use and exploit that issue for political gain, but what they’re not telling you is that most people are just summarily denied, and in order to get parole, you have to basically be a saint while in prison,” said Brad Haywood, a public defender and executive director of Justice Forward Virginia, which advocates for criminal justice reform. “Almost everybody who’s coming up for parole is 50 years of age or older and poses almost no risk to community safety.” 

After beating McAuliffe in November, Yougkin immediately fired the entire parole board and installed five new members. Haywood says some of these appointees were “handpicked” to deny parole across the board, and other advocates felt the same. In fact, at least two of Youngkin’s appointments had starred in his campaign ads to promise the new governor would be stricter on parole than his opponent.

One was Partin, the Montgomery sheriff. The other was Cheryl Nici-O’Connell, a former Richmond police officer who was shot in the head while working in uniform in 1984. A vocal advocate against parole, Nici talks about wanting to keep the person who shot her behind bars in an ad she recorded for Youngkin last year. “I’m terrified because McAuliffe puts politics over the safety of Virginians and victims’ rights,” Nici said in the ad. (Virginia’s parole board twice denied the parole application of the man who shot Nici during McAuliffe’s first term as governor.) 

Youngkin’s appointments triggered a standoff with Democrats. In March, the slim Democratic majority in the Senate rejected all but one of his five nominations to the board; only Chadwick Dotson, the chair of the board, remained. The move immediately removed the four appointees whose confirmation was denied, including Nici and Partin. (Youngkin has since appointed Nici as policy advisor in the Department of Corrections.) Democrats said the rejection was retribution for an earlier move by House Republicans to remove Northam’s appointees from several boards. “That was an important violation of decorum and tradition that motivated members to give Youngkin’s more scrutiny than they normally would get,” Senator Scott Surovell told Bolts over the phone. 

But Surovell says he also took issue with some of the appointees’ views on incarceration. “It was clear they were anti-parole activists and weren’t going to approach the job with an open mindset,” he said, naming Nici and Partin. 

Dotson, who is a former prosecutor and judge, told Bolts that in rejecting his former colleagues, Democrats chose to “play partisan games.” But he also acknowledges that board members’ priors on sentencing and prison shape how they decide applications. “Of course all of our beliefs in criminal justice are going to play into our votes,” he said. “It can’t be completely divorced from politics, it just can’t.” 

In the few weeks in which Youngkin’s initial board was in place, it denied all 177 parole requests it considered, according to the Richmond-Times Dispatch.  

The governor responded to Democrats’ vote by appointing a new set of board members, who joined the board in an interim capacity in early April. Once again, his slate is made up heavily of people with backgrounds in prosecution and law enforcement. Michelle Dermyer, the widow of a state police trooper killed in the line of duty, has publicly opposed eliminating the death penalty and helped push legislation setting a minimum sentence of life in prison for people convicted of capital murder of a law enforcement officer. 

Surovell told Bolts the new members appeared to have a similar orientation to the previous slate, but he did not indicate whether Democrats intended to block the appointments again. 

Senate Democrats are not likely to take up the appointments until their next regular session, which is in  2023. That would leave Youngkin’s appointees on the board until at least then.

James also expresses skepticism towards the latest picks. “I don’t see that even being remotely possible for them to not be personally biased towards someone particularly if that person comes before them having committed a crime against a fellow police officer or law enforcement,” she said.

Despite these clashes over the parole board, very large bipartisan majorities of Virginia’s legislature agreed earlier this year to adopt a bill, which Youngkin signed into law, that requires more transparency in the board’s proceedings. Its decisions will need to be more thoroughly part of public records. “Previous boards have kind of operated in the shadows and nobody really knew what they were doing a lot of the time,” Dotson told Bolts. “It doesn’t give me any heartburn to think that people should know what my decisions are on this parole board. Whether it will have an impact on how people vote I can’t say that I know the answer to that.” 

But proponents of criminal justice reform warn that this could serve to open board members to the sort of backlash Youngkin unleashed in his ads last fall. 

Surovell, who voted against the bill, said that making board members’ votes public could have the effect of chilling their ability to make decisions without fear of repercussion. Haywood agrees. “I don’t think individual parole votes should be public,” he told Bolts. “All that will do is make it less likely a parole board member will vote to grant parole, due to fear of retribution.”

Most other efforts to change the process faltered in the past legislative session, which ended in March, though they did highlight  competing views of the future of parole in Virginia. The GOP-run House passed a bill that would have made parole grants even more unlikely than they are now, though the Democratic Senate did not take up the bill. Mirayes’s call for a constitutional amendment that would further restrict parole also did not move forward.

Meanwhile, some reform-minded Democrats reintroduced a bill that would repeal the 1995 statute that abolished parole, but the legislation stalled in the Senate. Advocates for sentencing reform also championed a bill known as Second Look, which would have allowed incarcerated people to petition a court for resentencing after ten to 15 years in prison, depending on the circumstances; the bill had bipartisan support, but it recently died in a House subcommittee. 

“I thought we were getting closer to repealing the abolition of parole but now it seems we’re going in the other way, a different direction than the rest of the country,” David Bruck, a professor of law at Washington and Lee University and co-author of the “Parole in Virginia 2021” report, told Bolts.

Surovell is also not optimistic about expanding parole. The current political environment that will make “change difficult for the next two or three years,” he says. 

Advocates in Virginia are worried that this will leave thousands of people without recourse for years to come. “People who are going to prison now, the only method of relief they have other than serving 85 percent of their time is seeking relief from the governor,” says Shawn Weneta, a policy strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. Weneta received a pardon from Northam in 2020 after serving 16 years in prison for embezzling $60,000 from his employer, and he has championed reforms ever since.

Jerry L. James was denied clemency by Northam’s office in late 2021. His wife Paulettra James, alongside her Sistas in Reform organization, was one of the chief proponents of the Second Look bill this year. It would have applied to Jerry and given him a chance at an earlier release. 

“We need to find better ways of dealing with the problem and not just think that we can lock them up and throw away the keys and forget that they are there,” Paulettra James said.   

The post Chances for Parole Go from Bad to Worse Under Virginia’s New GOP Leadership appeared first on Bolts.

If anyone were too sick for prison, Jose Medina thought, it would be him.

Medina was 27 years old when he entered New York’s prison system. Four decades later, at 68, he’s still behind bars—and afraid that he may die there.   

In 2005, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, which necessitated a complete removal of his left lung and a partial removal of his right lung. He survived the cancer, but was left with chronic respiratory disease and severe emphysema. He now depends on inhalers and, at times, a breathing machine. The following year, he applied for medical parole.

His request was denied. 

In 2014, doctors diagnosed Medina with prostate cancer. He now needs a catheter and multiple medications. Five years later, in 2019, the Defenders Clinic Second Look Project at the City University of New York submitted an application for clemency, or a request to the governor to shorten his 50-to-life sentence, on Medina’s behalf.

He never received a response, not even an acknowledgement of receipt. His legal team, headed by Steve Zeidman, sent a follow-up letter on March 16, 2020, two days after the first Covid death in New York—of a woman who, like Medina, had emphysema.  

“There’s every indication that he’s the exact sort of person to be most terrified about Covid. He told us he wouldn’t even leave his cell, he was just that terrified,” Zeidman said.

Four days later, the legal team sent another letter, this time requesting medical parole. 

On May 15, the prison agency denied the request. “It has been deemed that he is not an appropriate candidate for Medical Parole,” stated the letter, signed by the Department of Correction and Community Supervision (DOCCS)’s chief medical officer John Morley. The letter did not say why Medina was deemed ineligible.

Incarcerated New Yorkers applying for medical parole go through a lengthy process bookended by a medical evaluation at the outset and a final review by the parole board. How decisions are made at these two stages is opaque, but what’s in between is even more of a black box. Two officials within the prison agency—its chief medical officer, Morley, and its head, Acting Commissioner Anthony Annucci—reject many applications after they’ve passed their medical evaluations and before they’ve reached the board, typically with little explanation.

Their refusals have frustrated legal advocates, who question the murky criteria that prevent their clients from at least obtaining a board hearing where they can press their case. Annucci is already under heavy fire for conditions in New York prisons and the approximately 1,000 deaths that have occurred on his watch.

Medina is one of the people whose application got caught in this middle stage. Last November, he was diagnosed with glaucoma in his left eye, causing him pain and blurry vision, which makes moving around difficult. The CUNY legal team is currently gathering records for an independent medical review in preparation for a third medical parole request on his behalf.

Still locked up, afraid he will lose his eyesight completely, afraid he will never meet his daughter outside prison walls, Medina describes “the sad and painful reality of dying alone in a cold dark prison cell.”

“It is an unfortunate reality for all aging prisoners, especially those living with chronic medical conditions,” he told Bolts and New York Focus over email. “I only want to enjoy a moment at the beach with family, go to a movie theater, and experience a nice meal at an upscale restaurant before my departure.”

Most medical parole applications never make it to the parole board

Under New York law, the state parole board can grant medical parole to an incarcerated patient certified by the prison agency as suffering from a malady that renders them “so debilitated or incapacitated as to create a reasonable probability that he or she is physically or cognitively incapable of presenting any danger to society.”

In 2020, as Covid-19 exploded in the prison system, DOCCS received an enormous increase in medical parole requests—1,049 in total. It approved 18. 

In a statement to Bolts and New York Focus, a DOCCS spokesperson suggested that many of those applicants may not have been medically eligible. “As the law is currently written, concern that an individual with pre-existing conditions may contract COVID and be at an increased risk for a severe and possibly fatal outcome, is not a basis for medical parole,” the spokesperson said.

In 2021, the number of medical parole applications dropped dramatically, to 82. Of those, 10 people were released.

Applying for medical parole involves many steps. After an incarcerated person or someone on their behalf (such as a family member, attorney, or prison staff member) files an initial request, it must pass four distinct reviews: first by prison clinical staff, who conduct a medical evaluation; then by the DOCCS chief medical officer, who assesses the medical evaluation and the applicant’s risk to public safety; then by DOCCS acting commissioner Annucci; and finally, if the request has made it this far, by the state’s parole board.

If the application makes it to this final stage, the board holds a “medical parole hearing,” with an opportunity for the prosecutor, defense attorneys, sentencing court and the Office of Victim Assistance to provide input. From 2013 to 2017, records obtained by the Vera Institute of Justice show, the board granted medical parole about two-thirds of the time, well over its overall parole approval rate of 23 percent in 2015. 

But the vast majority of applications never make it that far.

According to Vera’s report, 476 requests for medical parole were filed between 2013 and 2017. Only 240 were approved by prison staff. Even then, only about half of the remaining pool made it to the parole board. Either the chief medical officer or the commissioner rejected many of those cases, though in some the applicant died while waiting, was released on another form of parole, or completed their sentence. 

Applications that are denied by the DOCCS leadership are typically issued form letters signed by the chief medical officer, currently Morley. (The chief medical officer is hired by DOCCS and supervised by its commissioner.) The letters give no reason for the denial—just that “it has been deemed that you are not an appropriate candidate for Medical Parole.” 

Zeidman shared a letter sent to one applicant that was originally addressed to another person. That name had been crossed out and his hand-written in. The man died three weeks later.

Last year, a state judge required Morley to explain why he denied the application of Wilfredo Lopez. Lopez had been diagnosed with amyloidosis, and a prison physician had identified the condition as terminal, giving him one to two years to live. 

Morley explained to the court why he didn’t consider that grounds for medical parole: “‘Terminal’ suggests a life expectancy of 6 months or less. Mr. Lopez is alive and continues to ambulate with a cane around Greene Correctional Facility.” 

Asked what factors go into Morley and Annucci’s decision to deny medical parole applications advanced by others, a DOCCS spokesperson referred New York Focus and Bolts to their directive, which mentions that the medical officer advises the commissioner about the applicant’s medical status. They also said the commissioner looks “to ensure that the law is being adhered to and that a medical parole release would not put public safety at risk.” Prison staff are directed only to conduct a medical evaluation, and not assess public safety, the spokesperson said. The parole board, to which Annucci forwards applications, is also meant to consider safety, though. The department declined to comment on the decision to deny Medina’s medical parole application, stating that it cannot comment on an individual’s health record.

Annucci has led DOCCS since 2013, when then-Governor Andrew Cuomo appointed him, but—even though the position is subject to legislative oversight—he has never been confirmed by the legislature. Governor Kathy Hochul nominated Annucci for the permanent position, but the acting commissioner is now facing significant resistance. Last month, the relatives of ten men who have died in prison issued a joint statement slamming Annucci for, among other things, “the regressive policies that he has promulgated, the scourge of racism and brutality he has sought to sweep under the rug.”

Sometimes, the prison agency’s delays mean that even the few who are granted release still die behind bars. In 2019, the parole board granted medical parole to 75-year-old Edgardo Carlos Gonzalez, who had served 36 years of a 50-to-life sentence. Gonzalez had liver failure, dropping from 175 to 112 pounds, and had been placed in the prison’s hospice ward.

Gonzalez never made it home. Instead, he remained in prison waiting for DOCCS to approve his placement in his family’s home. He was rushed to the hospital, diagnosed with end-stage cancer and—three months after filing a request for medical parole—died in custody. 

Dying in prison is the outcome Medina is desperate to avoid.

In August 2020, Medina thought that might happen after he contracted Covid. His condition was so severe that he needed breathing treatments at the infirmary. “I felt as if I was going to die during that devastating experience,” he said.

He recovered, but his health continued to decline. The following August, he was rushed to the hospital. “My heart beat was so fast, over 100, that when I got to the hospital they had no knowledge as to what was wrong with me,” he said. Medical staff found that he had a lung infection and a blood infection. He was given a series of steroids and IV treatments and remained hospitalized for three days. 

Last month, on March 24, Medina began experiencing stomach pains, nausea, and heart pains. He said  that a prison nurse took his blood pressure and found he had an alarmingly high systolic pressure of 224, which required immediate emergency medical care. He was sent to a hospital and given an IV, hypertension medications, and a CAT scan. Medical staff diagnosed him with prostate and urine infections and determined that he would need gallbladder surgery. Once his blood pressure dropped to 150/80, Medina was sent back to prison. 

The next day, he said, his systolic blood pressure again soared to 220, and he was sent to a different hospital. He was treated and, once his blood pressure dropped, returned to the prison. 

The following morning, his blood pressure yet again rose to 207. He was rushed to a third hospital, Albany Medical Center, where he spent four days. He spent a fifth night in the prison’s infirmary before returning to his housing unit. He is still experiencing nausea and discomfort in his abdomen.

“My one and last chance to know my father” 

Medina signs his emails “Tony the Fighter.” That refers to his numerous illnesses and near-brushes with death, not the fighting of his younger years. 

“I’ve spent my majority of my life trying to be a better man,” he told Bolts and New York Focus in one email. He recognizes that, as a 26-year-old in 1980, he was angry, prone to violence, and struggling with heroin addiction, a fatal combination that led him to set fire to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend and stepson. Both died in the fire. 

“Not a day goes by in 43 years where I don’t wish the events that took place did not take place and that Laura and Richard were here today living beautiful lives as God intended,” he wrote.

In prison, Medina taught himself to read and write in both English and Spanish. He converted to Christianity, which he describes as a major turning point in his life. He now spends his time creating art and mentoring younger men—which he plans to continue if he’s released. “Being able to enter society now with the lessons I’ve learned would allow me to help other youth from ending up in the same position,” he said.

Studies show that the risk that people released from prison will commit new crimes dramatically declines with age. In New York, just one percent of people released from prison over the age of 65 were sent back to prison on a new conviction, nine times lower than the overall rate. 

In 2019, Medina connected with his only daughter, Elizabeth, then 47, who had been born while Medina had been incarcerated a previous time. That October, she visited him in prison, the first time the two had ever met. “We ate and took pictures and when it was time to say goodbye, the tears began to rain from my eyes,” Medina recalled. The following day, Elizabeth visited again, this time bringing a food package. 

Now, Elizabeth says that she wants to care for her father during his final years.  “We never had time, me and my father,” she said in a video plea to Governor Hochul. “He’s very sick. I need every minute…. This is my one and last chance to get to know my father.”

The post Prison Officials Routinely Deny Hearings to Terminally Ill New Yorkers appeared first on Bolts.

Five years ago, a social worker who believed in rehabilitation joined the New York State Board of Parole. During her time on the board, she voted to grant parole at a higher rate than the other members — but found herself repeatedly isolated on panels and outvoted. 

“I wanted to look at who the person was today, and what their transformation has been, rather than just focusing again at the crime that they were already convicted for, which they can never change,” Carol Shapiro told Bolts and New York Focus.

Shapiro resigned in 2019, worn down and discouraged by the difficulty of shifting the board’s approach. The board, which considers thousands of parole applications each year, has for decades been dominated by a philosophy of presumptive detention, helping drive New York prisons’ exploding population of elderly long-term detainees.

Shapiro’s appointment came as part of a broader attempt to reorient the board away from that philosophy. The parole release rate nearly doubled by the next year—helping thousands more gain release—though it has since receded and the number of cases heard has dropped.

Now, New York reformers have another chance to transform the Board of Parole. In her inaugural State of the State address last month, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced that she will nominate four more members, bringing the board—chronically understaffed in recent years because former Governor Andrew Cuomo declined to fill vacancies—to its full complement of 19 commissioners. 

The announcement was received with cautious optimism by proponents of parole reform, who have complained for years that the board’s understaffing leads to unsustainable caseloads and hurried parole reviews. Almost nothing is known about the governor’s process for identifying candidates, and her office did not respond to questions for this story. But if Hochul picks commissioners with perspectives and backgrounds similar to Shapiro, it could presage a new, more decarceral era for the board.

“If you’re starting from scratch, trying to figure out who should be a parole commissioner,” said Steve Zeidman, director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at CUNY School of Law, “you’d say this has to be someone with experience in therapeutic and rehabilitative services, someone with experience with people who are trying to address past mistakes and problems.”

But Shapiro’s tenure and a review of how the board functions shows that, even if Hochul does choose to appoint reform-minded commissioners, they will likely face massive obstacles: political pressures, antiquated technology, minimal training, and an entrenched culture, operating under a vague statutory mandate—dynamics that some lawmakers are pushing to reform through legislation this year. They will also likely face tensions with their colleagues; a new analysis, shared with Bolts and New York Focus, shows for the first time how some commissioners have remained more resistant to release than others.  

“If you’re going to change parole in New York, there’s no question that having different people on the board is a necessary part of that,” said Jennifer Scaife, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, an organization that monitors the state’s prison system. “At the same time, putting different people in the seats isn’t going to be sufficient on its own to make real change.”

—

For decades, a seat on New York’s parole board was regarded as a patronage position, with nominations subject to the impenetrable legislative horse-trading that characterizes much of Albany politics. The result was a board that largely reflected the white, conservative, upstate legislators who controlled the New York State Senate, and shared that group’s tough-on-crime approach.

“People might say, ‘Oh, you have to let ’em out, you have to let them out, that’s the only thing that matters,’” James Ferguson, who was appointed to the board by Governor George Pataki, told a New Yorker documentary crew last year. “No, it’s not. I have members of the public who feel that the component of retribution has not been satisfied.”

After a 2016 New York Times analysis that found stark racial disparities in the decisions of the then-overwhelmingly white board, and under pressure from parole-reform advocates, Cuomo appointed new classes of commissioners, more diverse in race and professional background than their predecessors, in 2017 and 2019.

The new appointments, along with minor regulatory changes, helped increase the release rate. Rates leapt from 30 percent of decided hearings in May of 2017 to 54 percent a year later, according to data from the Parole Preparation Project, a non-profit group that helps incarcerated people serving life sentences apply for parole. But the rate dipped to 38 percent last November and 45 percent in December, the last two months for which statistics are available. The board decides many hundreds of hearings a month, so that fragile increase has outsized effects on New York’s prison population.

And racial disparities persist. Between 2018 and 2020, the board granted parole for 46 percent of white people who sought it, and only 39 percent for people of color, a report from the advocacy group FWD.us found. From 2017 to 2019, an incarcerated person from Schuyler County, in New York’s Finger Lakes region, was twice as likely to receive parole as someone from the Bronx. 

In an email to New York Focus and Bolts, Thomas Mailey, a spokesperson for the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, within which the Board of Parole is housed, did not address questions about racially skewed parole outcomes. He has in the past criticized similar findings for failing to account for more detailed factors such as applicants’ disciplinary records. But any effort to evaluate that claim, or anything else about who receives parole in New York, is hampered by the board’s extreme opacity. The board’s last report on its activities was published in 2017. It publishes a monthly schedule of hearings and decisions, but nothing that would allow an analysis of patterns in parole outcomes or in the decisions of individual parole commissioners.

But a previously unreported analysis commissioned by the Parole Preparation Project and shared with Bolts and New York Focus sheds rare light on these internal dynamics. It combines published parole decisions with parole hearing schedules, tying specific commissioners to specific outcomes. The data covers the period between January 2018 to January 2020, and nearly 20,000 parole hearings. The data is inevitably limited: It can only track the aggregate decisions of the three-person or two-person panels, not the votes of the individual commissioners themselves. Nevertheless, the report shows that parole rates vary significantly depending on who hears the application. 

Shapiro sat on panels that granted release in more than 61 percent of hearings decided; this corresponds to more than 1,200 incarcerated applicants granted parole. She was the only commissioner whose panels granted applications significantly more than half the time.

A lifelong prison reform advocate with a background in social work, Shapiro was an atypical appointee who says she approached her work on the parole board as a reformer. (The Parole Preparation Project’s statistics likely understate Shapiro’s propensity to support parole applications since the study was only able to measure a panel’s aggregate decisions. In hearings where Shapiro supported release but was outvoted, the study counts that as a denial.)

Joseph Crangle, Charles Davis, and former commissioner William Smith Jr. sat on boards with just over 50 percent release rates.

At the other end of the spectrum, panels that included Ellen Evans Alexander, a former prosecutor and Rhode Island prison administrator appointed to the board in 2012, released fewer than 41 percent of parole applicants. Commissioner Marc Coppola, a former Republican state senator, is only slightly more lenient, sitting on panels with a release rate below 44 percent. Advocates have tried to remove Coppola from the board for years over conduct they describe as unprofessional.

The gap between an approval rate of 41 and 61 percent may seem marginal, but projected onto the board’s decisions over the period studied, it would mean the difference between release and incarceration for more than 3,000 incarcerated New Yorkers.

Still, Shapiro says she wanted to see more change. Reflecting on her tenure, which ended in 2019 when she quit in frustration, Shapiro says a host of factors, from hurried schedules to an absence of training, all hindered her efforts to persuade fellow commissioners. She struggled to get them to see beyond someone’s underlying offense. Shapiro also suspects, though she is careful to be clear that she cannot prove it, that in some instances the board’s particular commissioners are cherry-picked for a panel in order to achieve a desired outcome. “With the really heinous high-profile cases, I think there is some thought given to the composition of the board,” Shapiro said. “There were a couple times when I wasn’t supposed to be on a board and then all of a sudden I was.” 

Mailey, the DOCCS spokesperson, flatly denies that panel composition is ever deliberate. “The Panels are selected at random,” he wrote in response to questions. “To insinuate that an attempt to manipulate the process or a decision is insulting.”

Shapiro isn’t so sure. She suspects she was sometimes put on panels because the board’s leadership was confident the other two commissioners would vote to deny parole, saying, “I was the token liberal to show the advocacy community that this person got a fair shot.” 

—

Vacancies are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the parole board’s bizarre staffing issues. Seven of the 15 current commissioners have exceeded the duration of their appointments without being renominated or going through another legislative confirmation process. They exist in a sort of bureaucratic gray-zone, continuing to draw salaries and performing the official work of commissioners, even as their official mandate for doing so has lapsed. They have collectively worked for thirteen years beyond the limited mandate they were given by the people’s representatives. Tina Stanford, the board’s chairperson, has been leading the body for three years past the expiration of her term.

This peculiar state of affairs is possible because nothing automatically triggers new hearings for parole commissioners when their term expires. Nobody but the governor can call such hearings. Nothing prevents zombie commissioners from carrying on without a legislative mandate for as long as they please unless the governor intervenes—which Cuomo chose not to do. 

When lawmakers get a say, it has historically served to empower legislators allied with law enforcement associations who press nominees for assurances that they will be cautious about granting parole, giving most weight to the gravity of the original offense and the wishes of crime victims. 

Commissioners seeking reappointment have personally canvassed support from these legislators. Some go so far as to contribute to their campaigns. Coppola, for instance, has given $550 to the election campaigns of Patrick Gallivan, a Republican state senator who holds the fate of commissioner candidates in his hands as a member of the Senate Committee on Crime Victims, Crime and Correction. Gallivan told Bolts and New York Focus that Coppola’s donations had no influence on his support.

Gallivan is vocal about what he wants from the board. He says it is inappropriate for commissioners to serve with an avowed decarceral mission. In 2018, he issued a press release calling a panel’s decision to grant parole to a 70-year-old man who served 45 years in prison for killing a police officer “indefensible and an affront to law-abiding citizens.”

But in recent years, public opinion on mass incarceration has shifted, and decades-long prison sentences have become a campaign issue that reform candidates are willing to run against. Confirmation hearings for parole board members have also presented an opportunity for reform-minded legislators and advocates to challenge the presumption of perpetual incarceration.

In 2019, parole reform advocates had enough allies on key legislative committees to scuttle the nomination of Richard Kratzenberg,  who had a long career in corrections and community supervision. During Kratzenberg’s confirmation hearing, he emphasized the significance of the original crime in deciding who should be granted parole. Kratzenberg’s nomination never made it out of the corrections committee, and Governor Cuomo later withdrew his name. Cuomo never nominated or renominated another parole commissioner.

“The governor’s office doesn’t want to be publicly humiliated by having one of their nominees not be reappointed,” said Michelle Lewin of the Parole Preparation Project, one of the groups that lobbied against Kratzenberg’s nomination. “They don’t want to deal with that process of having their commissioners be questioned by the legislature and have to be recertified for a position that many of us are questioning whether they’re qualified for to begin with.”

—

This year, advocates for reform are pushing to change the rules that govern the Board of Parole and guide commissioners, arguing that even reform-minded commissioners will struggle to make significant changes in the absence of structural changes. 

The Fair and Timely Parole Act would eliminate parts of the current statute, often cited in denial decisions, that emphasize the severity of the crime for which applicants were sentenced, and it would add language forcing commissioners to consider “evidence of rehabilitation and reform” in their decisions. The legislation faces long odds this session, though Brian Benjamin, now Hochul’s lieutenant governor, was a co-sponsor of the bill when he was still in the legislature last year, giving proponents some cause for optimism. The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Legislative clarity would help nudge the board towards a presumption of release for incarcerated people who are eligible for parole and a low risk for recidivism, but it’s unlikely to revolutionize parole in New York on its own. Increasing the maximum size of the board beyond 19—the New York State Bar Association has recommended a 30-person board—would give commissioners more time to actually consider each case. So would upgrading the board’s antediluvian technology, which relies almost entirely on paper records and fax machines. Commissioners currently receive parole applications, which often fill several file boxes, only a day before interviewing applicants. Professional training for commissioners would help, too, as would greater transparency from the board, reform advocates say. 

Hochul’s commitment to fill the four vacant seats on the Board of Parole is already a departure from her predecessor. But her willingness to embrace broader parole reform remains uncertain. 

The first test may well be who she appoints to the board. It’s currently unclear who or what will guide those decisions. The governor’s office did not respond to questions about what experience she is looking for, what process she is using to identify candidates, and who she is consulting. 

Parole reform advocates hope for new commissioners who shift the board’s focus from the crimes that landed people in prison to the changes and growth they’ve experienced by the end of their sentence.

“There are so many factors that contribute to parole being the broken system that it is in New York today,” Lewin said. “But there’s no question: Getting people on the board who understand how to actually talk to people, who understand that the 70-year old sitting in front of them is more than just the crime he was convicted of as a teenager, who aren’t guided by pressure from politicians or police lobbyists—that’s a huge piece of this.”

The post Vacancies and Zombie Commissioners Leave Opening for Parole Reform in New York appeared first on Bolts.

The opposition campaign against Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, fueled heavily by the local police union and a group of former officers, has intensified in the lead-up to Tuesday’s primary election. “Our officers have given us carte blanche to spend whatever we need to spend to be able to remove this cancer from the District Attorney’s Office,” local Fraternal Order of Police president John McNesby told the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Billboards along I-95 call for Krasner to be fired, and earlier this month an FOP-sponsored ice cream truck stationed outside the DA’s office offered soft-serve as a reminder to voters of Krasner’s “soft on crime” policies. An accompanying truck was adorned with an anti-Krasner poster. 

“The FOP is spending a lot of money and throwing their weight around,” said Reuben Jones, a prominent Philadelphia activist who is formerly incarcerated. “The ice cream thing sounds so ridiculous but that’s the stuff that gets people’s attention.”

Since taking office in 2018, Krasner—a firebrand not shy of the spotlight—has become a national darling for criminal justice reform. One term isn’t enough time to completely overturn a deeply entrenched system, but Krasner has made strides. As a result of his policies, the size of the court-supervised population shrank by more than a third, the number of people who spent at least one night in jail declined by 22 percent over the first year of his cash bail reform, some immigrants have more protections from ICE, and his conviction integrity unit exonerated 20 wrongly convicted prisoners.

This is a sharp turn away from prior administrations. David Rudovsky, a longtime civil and criminal defense lawyer in Philadelphia, said in an email that a succession of Philadelphia chief prosecutors’ policies over decades  “led to mass incarceration, an insistence on the death penalty in a wide range of cases, a war on drugs that was counter-productive and resulted in high racial disparities of those prosecuted and sentenced, and a pattern of defending almost every conviction regardless of evidence of innocence or violations of the rights of the person convicted.”

On Tuesday, Philadelphia voters will decide if they want to continue on the new trajectory that Krasner initiated—primaries in this deeply blue city are typically de facto elections. And the pressure is high; this election is widely seen as a referendum on progressive prosecutors in Philadelphia and nationwide. 

The outcome is “critically important” to the national movement for criminal justice reform, says Jamila Hodge, director of the Reshaping Prosecution Program at the Vera Institute of Justice. “DA Krasner is probably one of the most well-known names when it comes to the progressive prosecutorial movement,” she said. Should he lose, “It could have a chilling effect on whether or not a person in another jurisdiction decides to run, to challenge the status quo.” Essentially, Krasner is so recognizable that his defeat could slow the momentum of the progressive prosecutor movement. 

Locally, though, activists are emphasizing the issues at stake over the symbolism of Krasner’s campaign.

“As much as it’s about Larry, it’s not about Larry,” said Sean West Damon, an organizer with Free the Ballot, a social justice alliance that supports Krasner. “It’s a referendum on the politics of mass incarceration that have led Philadelphia to being one of the most incarcerated cities in the country.”

Krasner’s bid for re-election comes at a time when the decades-long decline in violent crime in America has been upended by a confluence of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, that defies simple explanation. Murder rates spiked in cities across the country. Last year in Philadelphia, 499 people were murdered, a number 40 percent higher than the year before and the highest since 1990. The number of people shot rose by 53 percent in a single year according to the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting, and are up 83 percent since 2017, the year before Krasner took office. There is no evidence that Krasner’s policies caused the spike in violence, but that may not stop some voters from retreating to the status quo of a punitive, tough-on-crime approach.

During his campaign, Vega has expressed general support for criminal justice reform while asserting that Krasner’s policies have harmed public safety. In a debate this month, Vega blamed the bloodshed in recent years on Krasner’s low conviction rates for gun cases and his cash bail policies that have led to fewer people in jail. 

But he told the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board: “I’m not going to reverse any policies.” Later, in a tweet, Vega said “that does not mean I don’t have my own policies in plans.”

The Appeal has reported on policies of Krasner’s office that Vega said he would reverse. In an interview with The Appeal: Political Report, he said he would resume charging for drug possession, except marijuana, and rely on traditional diversion courts, whereas Krasner’s policy is to drop possession charges if a person attends just one addiction treatment meeting. And Vega said he would not cap probation and parole sentences, a Krasner policy that has drastically reduced the number of people under supervision. 

Vega spent most of his career as a prosecutor under the administration of Lynne Abraham, whose hardline tactics and penchant for seeking the death penalty earned her the moniker the “Deadliest DA.” Abraham served from 1991 to 2010.

Recently, he has come under fire for his involvement in the civil case for exoneree Anthony Wright, who spent 25 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit. Vega was one of two assistant DAs who retried Wright even after DNA evidence cleared him. Throughout his campaign, Vega has distanced himself from the case, saying that he came in at the 11th hour. The Innocence Project rebuked Vega’s claim that he had minor involvement.

Rudovsky, who was part of the team that handled the case, said he believes that Vega’s participation in the Wright retrial is “reflective of what you would get if he was DA. … Which is, I think, a return to the old regime.”

Many decarceral advocates share that view and are campaigning for Krasner to make sure that their hard-fought progress isn’t rolled back. Krasner has faced criticism from the left for not going further to reduce the use of cash bail and for continuing to charge some teens as adults—though he does this less frequently than his predecessors.

 “I don’t want to pretend like everything worked out the way we envisioned,” said Jones. “But the one thing I know is that without Krasner in office, we wouldn’t have made the progress that we made … the only way we can continue to work is to get him re-elected.”

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Maryland has banned life without the possibility of parole for people convicted of crimes that occurred when they were children. On Saturday, the Democratic-run legislature overrode Republican Governor Larry Hogan’s veto of the legislation.

Maryland is the 25th state, in addition to Washington, D.C., to bar these sentences. With the vote, hundreds of people will have an opportunity for earlier release. 

“I had anticipated that Governor Larry Hogan would veto the bill but had full confidence that the Maryland General Assembly would do the right thing,” said Fatima Razi, co-founder and executive director of the Maryland Juvenile Justice Coalition. “This body of legislators has brought me closer to restoring my faith in Maryland’s justice system.”

The legislation, Senate Bill 494, known as the Juvenile Restoration Act, applies retroactively. It allows anyone who has served at least 20 years for a crime that occured when they were a minor to petition the court for a sentence reduction, including if they were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. The court then must hold a hearing where a judge should consider a number of factors, including the offense, evidence of rehabilitation, childhood trauma, and victim statements. A person whose petition is denied can request a hearing two more times, three years apart.

In Maryland, nearly 50 people were serving a juvenile life without the possibility of parole sentence as of December, but the law’s impact extends to hundreds of others who were sentenced to lengthy prison terms or life with parole. More than 300 people, who were not sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, will be immediately eligible for resentencing because they have already served more than 20 years for offenses that occurred when they were children, according to the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. 

Of the more than 400 people immediately eligible for resentencing, over 85 percent are Black, according to the campaign. 

In Maryland, the overwhelming majority of children tried as adults are Black, according to the state’s racial impact analysis of SB 494. From July to December 2019, more than 80 percent of the 459 children charged as adults were Black. 

The growing movement against police violence and white supremacy in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis helped spur the passing of SB 494, say its supporters.

“As instances of police brutality have come to the fore of mainstream consciousness, the nation is reckoning with a reality that impacted communities have known all along—there is a throughline from slavery to our current-day criminal justice system,” said Erica Suter, a post-conviction appellate attorney and first vice president of the Maryland Criminal Defense Attorneys’ Association. “I think we have reached a boiling point where none of us have the luxury of looking away any longer.”

A diverse coalition, including victims’ family members and State’s Attorneys Marilyn Mosby and Aisha Braveboy, supported SB 494, which passed with bipartisan support. But their colleagues were some of its most vocal opponents. Hogan’s veto message listed 14 state’s attorneys, including Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger, who urged him to veto SB 494. He did not mention Mosby or Braveboy, who represent two of the state’s most populous regions, Baltimore City and Prince George’s County. 

But those who petition for sentence reductions could still spend the rest of their lives in prison, said Suter. The bill does not guarantee release for people convicted of crimes that occurred when they were under the age of 18. 

“[SB 494] gives hope and an opportunity to a huge population in our prisons,” said Suter. The bill, she said, does not go far enough. 

“Unfortunately there are some judges in some jurisdictions who are not, who I’m afraid will not, be persuaded,” she said, “no matter how many good things someone has done.”  

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The United States is the only known country that sentences children to life without the possibility of parole, according to the Sentencing Project. At the start of 2020, approximately 1,400 people were serving life without the possibility of parole for crimes that occurred when they were children. But more states are rejecting this practice. 

“We’ve fortunately seen this dramatic national trend away from life without the possibility of parole for kids and other very extreme sentences,” said Preston Shipp, a former prosecutor who is now senior policy counsel with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. “This is not a partisan issue, it’s a moral issue.” 

In 2012, the Supreme Court banned mandatory juvenile life without the possibility of parole sentences. About four years later, the court made that decision apply retroactively, which meant about 2,000 people who had been automatically sentenced to life without the possibility of parole could receive resentencing or parole hearings.

Since then, many states have chosen to abolish these sentences altogether. In January, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, signed legislation that provides an opportunity for parole after a certain number of years served for those convicted of crimes that occurred when they were children. Similar legislation passed last year in Democratic-run Virginia. 

On Thursday, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, issued an executive order that establishes a clemency board to review petitions from those who have served at least 20 years for crimes committed when they were minors. 

But more work is needed to ensure children, as well as young adults, do not spend decades in prison, say youth justice advocates. 

The Supreme Court’s 2012 decision was based, in part, on research that shows the adolescent brain is “not yet fully mature in regions and systems related to … impulse control, planning ahead, and risk avoidance,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority, quoting from an amicus brief filed by the American Psychological Association.

These traits do not end on a person’s 18th birthday. Research has shown the brain keeps developing until a person is in their mid-20s. Recognizing this, Washington, D.C., approved a law in January that will allow people serving life sentences to file for a sentence reduction for offenses that occurred before they were 25. Previously, this consideration was only extended to people convicted as minors. (Congress has the power to block laws passed by D.C., so the law will not be enacted until later this spring after a waiting period passes; Congress is not expected to intervene.) 

Other states, including Illinois and Washington, have also created pathways for the early release of people who were convicted as young adults. The Maryland Court of Appeals is now considering a rules change to permit some people who were under 25 at the time of the crime to petition for a sentence modification after serving 15 years. 

“There’s really no reason to draw the line arbitrarily at 18,” said Riya Saha Shah, managing director of Juvenile Law Center.

Warren Hynson, who spent more than 25 years incarcerated in Maryland, told The Appeal he was held with other men who, like him, arrived in prison in their mid to late teens. They should be given a chance, like he was, to return home and succeed, he said. “It’s devastating for a human being to feel that he or she has no hope,” said Hynson. Suter represented Hynson during his parole process. 

In 1992, when Hynson was 17, he was sentenced to natural life, with the possibility of parole, for felony murder. When the judge sentenced him, he assumed he would be home in five years. Hynson only began to understand his sentence when he got to prison. 

“I felt, man, this is where I’m going to die.” he said. “I started meeting dudes, that’s older, with gray hair, gray in their beards. And they said they’ve been locked up since they were 15, 16 years old.”

While incarcerated, Hynson said he was a youth mentor, attended classes, and worked on his art, even having his pieces exhibited at a local college. In 2001, he was resentenced to life suspended and 43 years. In 2016, the parole commission recommended him for parole, but Governor Hogan denied it. Hynson went home in 2019, when he was 45 years old. 

Hynson and his fiance now live minutes from his mother’s home in Maryland. After he gets home from work, he creates art, and intends to exhibit at future shows. 

“People do change, people do grow, people do evolve into better human beings,” said Hynson. “Don’t throw us in prison and throw away the key. Don’t throw us in prison and not give us any tools to grow.”

Disclosure: Juvenile Law Center and the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth were sponsors of Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg’s interview-based play on juvenile life without parole, “Life, Death, Life Again: Children Sentenced to Die in Prison.”

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