After appearing before the South Carolina Board of Paroles and Pardons more than 500 times in the past 35 years, lawyer Douglas Jennings announced last year that he had participated in his final hearing. It had become routine for the board to reject his clients, regardless of how much he showed that they’d changed since their crime. “I just couldn’t justify taking somebody’s money as a fee to appear before the parole board when I didn’t feel good about being able to produce the right results for them,” he told Bolts.

The panel, which Jennings has nicknamed “the rejection board”, has made it increasingly difficult for prisoners to win parole in South Carolina. In 2018, it released roughly four out every 10 people who applied. The odds of release have declined since then: By 2022, the board only approved one out of every 10 petitions. Last year, the board’s grant rate was seven percent.

This downward trend has continued into 2024. In the first four months of this year, the board approved only 5 percent of more than 900 parole applications, according to data provided by the board.

Declining parole rates in South Carolina are part of a national trend. Parole, which permits early release for eligible prisoners who exhibit good behavior and have a low risk of committing another crime, has fallen across the country in recent years as parole boards have succumbed to political pressure and media narratives that stoke fears about crime. Between 2019 and 2022, grant rates plummeted in 18 out of 27 states surveyed by the the Prison Policy Initiative, a criminal justice reform research organization. Often, this decline has directly stemmed from state officials’ desire to crack down on release, and to the professional and ideological backgrounds of the people they appoint to parole boards, as Bolts has reported recently about the parole boards in Alabama and Virginia.

The same political dynamic is at play in South Carolina. Governor Henry McMaster, a Republican who in 2016 proposed abolishing parole when he was attorney general, is in charge of appointing the board’s seven members, pending Senate approval, and can remove them at his discretion. Under his tenure, the members he’s put in place have operated a system that places an emphasis on past crimes rather than rehabilitative efforts. 

They’ve also kept crucial details about their operations secret, Bolts learned from interviews with people who’ve experienced the process and from analyses of past cases. In some cases they’ve denied parole based on incorrect information, ignoring applicants’ efforts to correct their files.

As chances for parole shrank in South Carolina, Jennings grew tired of trying to convince board members that his clients had worked on bettering themselves in prison and would be productive members of society, only for the board to routinely reject their applications because of their past crimes. “The board seems to have adopted some sort of super conservative approach of not really giving a fair opportunity of parole to many inmates who would pose no risk to the community,” he said.

In South Carolina, parole has long already been an unfair process. The University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change published a study this month finding that Black people in the state were denied parole at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts from 2006 to 2016. More than 60 percent of the state’s prison population is Black compared to 27 percent of the statewide population. 

People hoping to get paroled in South Carolina must navigate a complicated and adversarial system. Those who committed nonviolent offenses have to win unanimous approval from a panel of three board members or a majority of the full seven-member board. Prisoners convicted of a violent crime go before the full board and must win a two-thirds majority, or at least five members. Historically, the board has granted parole to people convicted of nonviolent offenses much more frequently than those convicted of a violent crime. 

This year, though, board members have rarely voted in favor of parole regardless of the nature of the crime. 

The board declined to answer Bolts’ questions about the falling grant rates; board spokesperson Anita Dantzler wrote in an email that it “does not participate in public interviews.” 

Critics of the parole board say many of its members are skeptical of parole across the board, with little regard for individual circumstances; they also worry that, for some members, this has to do with careers far removed from the criminal legal system. Kim Frederick, the board’s chair since 2019 who has a background in victims services, granted just 41 of the 849 parole applications she reviewed this year, an approval rate of 4.8 percent, according to data obtained by Bolts showing members’ voting record from January through April of this year. 

Frank Wideman, a philanthropist who has served on the board since 2021, granted parole to just 3.8 percent of prisoners, the lowest grant rate among the board members so far this year. Reno Boyd, a high school math teacher, paroled 6.3 percent of applicants. Molly DuPriest Taylor, a family lawyer, approved 6.5 percent of applications, while Henry Eldridge, who formerly worked in pharmaceuticals, approved 8 percent. Geraldine Miro, an interim board member since 2022 who formerly worked in corrections, granted the most petitions this year, with 9 percent. 

“A majority of the members do not believe in parole,” said John Blume, a Cornell University law professor who has represented prisoners sentenced to life without parole as children in front of the parole board.

Though supporters are allowed to speak in favor of parole during hearings, board members heavily rely on a file that’s weighted toward prisoners’ prior offenses. The file includes, among other things, a summary of the crime, law enforcement statements, and victim statements. Prisoners and their lawyers don’t have access to the victim statements.

Parole lawyers say that since last year, prisoners have only been allowed to submit 20 pages of supporting documentation such as letters, yet there’s no limit to what goes into law enforcement’s and victims’ accounts. 

It’s mandatory for prisoners to sign a form acknowledging that it’s their responsibility to notify the board if something in the packet is inaccurate. But prior to this spring, prisoners weren’t even permitted to review their files—a change that was forced by a court order. Even now, prisoners and their lawyers can’t access the file until the morning of their hearings. If they find mistakes within the file, any corrections they want to make have to be backed up with an official record, making it nearly impossible to ensure the parole board receives accurate information. 

“Obviously, there’s no way to substantiate with the official record when you’re at the prison at nine o’clock in the morning and your hearing is in 30 minutes,” said Allison Elder, executive director of Time Served, an organization that provides free representation for parole hearings to people incarcerated in South Carolina. 

Elder said she has seen files that list prior offenses that never occurred and don’t include mitigating details about a crime that may be helpful for the board to understand. But because the hearings are so short, sometimes lasting just five minutes, and she wants to focus on making the case for parole instead of debating inaccuracies, it’s difficult to make sure her clients are getting a fair hearing. The lack of a mechanism to correct the record during a hearing is “entirely problematic,” she said. 

Board members are supposed to consider a risk assessment tool that predicts prisoners’ probability of re-offending. Defense lawyers told Bolts that the board is ignoring those evaluations. Elder said she’s reviewed files that show her clients were scored a low risk yet the board has repeatedly denied them parole. 

Prisoners trying to convince the board they’re fit for release also haven’t been able to personally appear before board members deciding their fate since the pandemic and can only make their case by video, making their plea even more impersonal. “We say all of the time, if the board members could just come and sit with our clients for 30 minutes, we would get more votes,” Elder said.

The dwindling chances at parole have taken a toll on prisoners. Elder recalled a recent conversation with one of her clients, who told her, “There is no hope here.” 

“It causes depression, devastation,” Elder said. “I’ve seen psych notes about my clients where they go to mental health after having lost out on an opportunity for parole for the umpteenth time.”

Larry Blackwell, who has been serving a life sentence for murder since 1992, was a model inmate for more than a decade before going up for parole in 2014. He had gotten sober, was living in a character-based unit focused on rehabilitation, and had gone 15 years without being disciplined by prison staff.

Despite his successes, a false allegation that made it into Blackwell’s file a decade ago has blocked him from winning his freedom.

In spring 2014, Barry Barnette, the solicitor for Spartanburg County who helped prosecute Blackwell, received a letter from a prisoner using a fake name who accused Blackwell of making inflammatory comments about the prosecutor. “Larry has spoke so nasty of you,” according to a copy of the letter filed in court. “Said he wish he could get you wife drunk, have sex, and video it and sent it to you.” The letter suggested that Barnette tell the local sheriff and senator, and said, “perhaps yourself can oppose Larry’s parole attempt.”

The prosecutor immediately contacted the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) about the letter. While they investigated, Barnette sent his own letter to the parole board asking members to deny Blackwell’s release—erroneously claiming that “fellow inmates” had informed him of death threats by Blackwell. “Mr. Blackwell has recently threatened to kill me and my wife,” Barnette wrote to the board, which denied Blackwell parole.

Blackwell told state police investigators that he suspected the letter had come from Alan Yates, a prisoner who had sent similar letters trying to implicate other prisoners in the past. When questioned by investigators, Yates eventually confessed to writing the letter but maintained Blackwell had bragged about assaulting Barnette’s wife. According to the SLED report, Yates asked to be moved to another prison as a reward for informing on Blackwell. Instead, he faced disciplinary action for sending the letter under a false name. Investigators concluded their probe following Yates’ confession and sent their findings to the attorney general, who declined to prosecute Blackwell for any wrongdoing in the matter.

Despite the SLED report that did not find any wrongdoing by Blackwell, Barnette still sent letters to the parole board three more times over the following years, falsely informing them that Blackwell had threatened to kill him and his wife. The board continued to deny Blackwell parole. 

Blackwell’s lawyer, Jon Ozmint, tried to make the board aware of the SLED report documenting the ordeal prior to his hearing in 2021 but the general counsel refused, saying that he had conducted his own investigation into the allegations, which included talking to Barnette. The board’s general counsel concluded that the report didn’t clear Blackwell.

During the hearing, Ozmint still told the board that Barnette’s letter contained false information and that SLED had cleared Blackwell. After board member Taylor asked for the report, the board’s general counsel gave it to the panel but reiterated that he didn’t think it was exonerating. “I spoke with Solicitor Barnette about this, he stands by his statements to the board,” said the general counsel, according to a court filing.

Board director Valerie Suber meanwhile questioned the validity of the SLED report, reminding members that it was given to them by Blackwell’s lawyer, not an official from SLED. “This is simply something that his attorney supplied to us in order to refute a statement of [opposition] and we don’t investigate or legitimize statements of opposition,” she said, according to a court filing. 

Blackwell’s team has alleged that those actions violate this due process rights but have struggled to find someone in power who agrees. 
He challenged the board’s decision in the court responsible for overseeing state agencies, but the court ruled that it didn’t have jurisdiction over a “routine parole denial.” His legal team took the case to the South Carolina Court of Appeals, protesting that the Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services allowed the board to present false information and blocked efforts to correct it. The court heard oral arguments in April and has not yet issued a decision.

With parole declining, the vast majority of people who are now released from South Carolina’s prisons are freed because they served the entirety of their sentence. In 2019, 16 percent of people released from prison were on parole. Last year, that figure was just 3 percent. 

At the same time, state prisons are operating at close to capacity in the midst of continued staffing shortages, creating conditions of unrest that contributed to a 2018 uprising at Lee Correctional Institution that left seven people dead; from 2001 to 2019, South Carolina had the highest rate of prison homicide in the country. 

Unlike many states, the South Carolina parole board operates separately from the corrections department. “They have no financial incentive to parole some of these people who clearly pose no danger to anyone,” Blume, the Cornell professor who has represented parole applicants, told Bolts. “The Department of Corrections would like these people to be released, because they have overcrowding problems and it doesn’t do them any good to continue to warehouse people who pose no danger and who have long served the retributive portion of their sentence.”

A report last year from the parole agency showed that the vast majority of people released on parole in South Carolina don’t pose a threat to public safety, with 83 percent of people on parole successfully completing their supervision period.

One of Douglas Jennings’ last clients was Jason Matthews, 55, who has been incarcerated since 1989 for the murder of Jerry Shelton, a local police chief who had been under state investigation for allegations of abusing his position. Matthews has long maintained that Shelton sexually assaulted his girlfriend and threatened them with a gun, spurring a gunfight. Though there was no evidence showing whether Matthews or his girlfriend fired the fatal shot, Matthews accepted a plea deal to avoid the death penalty. A jury acquitted his girlfriend after she took her case to trial. A federal judge in 1994 wrote a letter recommending that Matthews’ sentence be vacated because the case against him was so flimsy. 

Like Blackwell, Matthews got clean during his time in prison. He has never committed a disciplinary infraction, regularly participated in prison programming, and amassed a long list of certificates for sewing, custodial services, and plumbing.

“I’m asking for the privilege of parole, to turn my life around, to be able to move forward in life, to where I can go forward, and do even greater good that I’ve done while I’ve been in SCDC,” Matthews told the board, according to a recording of the hearing obtained by Bolts. “I’ve been a model inmate for nearly 35 years. Now I want to be a model citizen, law abiding, surrounding myself with good people.”

If released, Matthews told the board that he planned to take care of his ailing father and work as a volunteer in his local prosecutor’s office helping people addicted to drugs. He also has a job cleaning building exteriors waiting for him if he gets out. State Senator Gerald Malloy spoke in support of Matthews’ release, telling the board, “I have not had a case that is more recommended for parole than this.”

Miro, the interim parole board member who has approved more applicants than any other member this year, asked Matthews whether he’d reached out to the victim’s family, and he responded by telling her about letters he’d written to them expressing his remorse. 

During deliberations among the board, Miro explained that she supported parole for Matthews. “I am reminded of what I think I was charged to do when we came here,” she said.

Miro then felt she needed to further justify her decision to the other members. 

“I don’t know that I feel good about doing this,” she added. “But I think that’s what I think I may have to do. I just needed you all to hear me say that.”

The board denied Matthews parole by a vote of 3–2. 

Jennings called the decision “so damn disappointing.” 

“It just speaks volumes,” he said. “If this guy can’t make it, I don’t see how anybody can.”

The post Parole Plunges in South Carolina as Governor-Appointed Board Issues Denial After Denial 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.

In late July, Treina Kinder traveled about 200 miles from her home in Huntsville, Alabama, to Montgomery to ask the state’s parole board to release her husband, Richard Kinder. He was 17 when he was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to spend his life in prison for his role in the killing of Birmingham teenager Kathy Bedsole. By the time of his parole hearing this summer, Richard had been incarcerated for nearly 40 years. 

Walking into the hearing in Montgomery, Treina was optimistic. Accompanying Richard’s application was a long list of achievements like college degrees and 40 certificates, including for the completion of drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs. He’d lived in a faith based honors dorm since 2005 and had only one minor disciplinary infraction during his incarceration at St. Clair Correctional Facility, which has at times been the most violent prison in Alabama, a state that in recent years has had one of the country’s highest prison homicide rates. Richard’s furniture and refinishing instructor at the prison supported his release, writing in an affidavit, “I am 1000% convinced that if Richard Kinder were released, he will not violate the law and will become a productive member of our society.”

Importantly, Richard’s application also included a letter from the former lawyer for his co-defendant, David Duren, who said Duren had admitted the plan to kill Bedsole was his alone and that Richard had no idea he was going to shoot her (Duren received the death penalty and was executed in 2000). 

Richard was initially sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, but in 2017, after a pair of U.S. Supreme Court decisions ruled that imposing mandatory sentences of life without parole on minors was unconstitutional, an Alabama judge reduced Richard’s sentence to life with the possibility of parole. The judge wrote there was “uncontradicted evidence” of Richard’s rehabilitation. Even so, the board denied Richard parole in July 2018, his first hearing after he became eligible.

But Treina hoped this summer would be different. “I thought … that we had a really good chance,” Treina told me of the latest hearing. “There’s nothing else he could have done. I mean nothing.” 

At the hearing, which took place at the parole board’s office, each person was given two minutes to speak in support or opposition of Richard’s release. Treina spoke about Richard’s accomplishments and his plan to live with her and find work in Huntsville. Richard’s brother and one of his lawyers also spoke in favor of his parole application. Bedsole’s sister and father opposed his release, as did a representative from Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office. 

Unlike other states, prisoners aren’t allowed to attend their parole hearings, so Richard sent a letter for board members to review ahead of time. “I realize the severity and seriousness of my offenses, and I understand that granting parole to me may be a difficult decision for you,” he wrote. “My hope is that my record will adequately reflect to you the effort I have put into my personal growth and change I have made in my life during the 40 years of my incarceration.”

His lawyer, Richard Jaffe, said the board conferenced for just “a couple minutes” before denying Richard Kinder parole and telling him he’d have to wait five more years to petition them again. A sheet explaining the reasons for denial shows the board decided against his freedom because of the severity of his offense and opposition from Bedsole’s family and the attorney general’s office.  

Treina says she broke down crying in the parking lot. “I was devastated,” she said. “I really thought he was going to get out.”

Jaffe said every piece of evidence his team gave the board showed that Richard had been rehabilitated and reformed, and that there was no plausible reason for the denial. “To say it was disheartening would not come close to describing this injustice,” Jaffe wrote in an email.

Since Richard’s first hearing in 2018, it has become even more difficult for people to get out on parole in Alabama, a privilege reserved for prisoners who meet a certain set of guidelines, such as showing they’re unlikely to commit another crime. State parole data shows that people who meet that criteria have been denied release at much higher rates over the past five years, blocking an important mechanism for release from the state’s dangerous and overcrowded prisons. Alabama’s parole board, which years ago released more than half of people who applied, approved just 10 percent of applicants last year. Richard was one of 245 people the parole board denied release from prison in July; the board granted freedom to just 11 people that month, a parole grant rate of four percent. 

In many cases, the board points to opposition from the attorney general’s office and a victim’s rights group to support its decision to deny release. Legislative efforts to add oversight and stricter guidelines for the board to follow have failed, even as the board appears to flout constitutional requirements by discriminating against Black applicants.  

State Representative Chris England, a Democrat who represents Tuscaloosa and who has introduced bills to reform the board in the past two legislative sessions, told me the board is not following its own guidelines. “What you see, in my opinion, is an out-of-control board,” England said.

Right around the time Richard Kinder first became eligible for release, politics and policies around Alabama’s parole board started to change.

Four days before Richard’s first parole hearing in 2018, a man on parole killed three people. As criticism grew over the board’s decision to grant him parole, Lyn Head, who was chair from 2016 to 2019, says Governor Kay Ivey pressured board members to stop releasing people. Head recounted a meeting in October 2018 led by Ivey and Marshall, who are both Republicans, that set the tone for how the board was expected to vote for people convicted of violent crimes—a category that’s broadly defined in Alabama law to include drug trafficking and third degree burglary and covers approximately 80 percent of people in Alabama prisons. 

According to Head, Ivey was puzzled as to why board members would vote to release people who had committed such crimes. “Why would you even consider letting someone convicted of a violent crime go free?” Ivey asked, according to Head.

Head says she explained to the governor that the parole board is required by the legislature to use a risk assessment tool that helps predict whether someone is likely to reoffend, and that people convicted of violent crimes were often considered low risk based on that available data. According to Head, Ivey “banged her hand on the table and said, ‘But don’t you think these people need to pay a price?’”

Head says she started changing the way she voted on cases because of pressure from Ivey and Marshall. “There were cases where I did not vote to parole even though I knew I needed to because I was afraid of losing my job,” she told me, explaining that she had two children in school at the time. 

A spokesperson for the governor’s office did not return requests for comment on Head’s account. Amanda Priest, a spokesperson for Marshall, declined to comment. 

The legislature passed a bill the next year that gave Ivey even more control over the board. Previously, the governor selected board members from a list provided by a five-person nominating commission that was chaired by the chief justice of the state supreme court; the commission also included the presiding judge of the court of criminal appeals, the house speaker, senate president and lieutenant governor. The 2019 law eliminated the judges from that commission and narrowed it to just the three other leaders of the state legislature. It also gave Ivey power to directly appoint the parole board’s director and added the requirement that at least one member have at least 10 years of experience in law enforcement and “the investigation of violent crimes or the apprehension, arrest, or supervision of the perpetrators thereof.” 

Head resigned in the fall of 2019 and Ivey replaced her with Leigh Gwathney, who was a senior prosecutor in charge of violent crimes and assistant attorney general under Marshall in the AG’s office. 

After Gwathney’s appointment, parole releases began to plummet, from a grant rate of 53 percent in 2018 to 20 percent in 2020. Last year, the grant rate was 10 percent. 

Head attributes the low grant rate partly to Gwathney’s unwillingness to seek training on a risk assessment tool. Under the board’s rules, members are supposed to consider information from a risk assessment as well as an evaluation from a parole officer who looks into people with upcoming hearings. In August, the most recent month with data available, the system found that roughly 80 percent of people met the parole requirements, yet the board granted parole to just five percent of applicants that month. 

The board declined to comment on a list of questions about the low grant rates. 

Kim Davidson, who served on the board from March to June, told me in a text message that those guidelines “have no teeth” because the board doesn’t have to follow them. She recommended that officials make the guidelines for release presumptive rather than advisory, and introduce an appeals process. Davidson, a lawyer, was appointed to fill in for board member Dwayne Spurlock, who retired before the end of his term. During her short tenure, she voted in favor of parole more often than her fellow board members. 

Ivey did not appoint Davidson to another term, however, a snub Davidson blames on Marshall, who she says did not want people to be released on parole. “I could have played the long game and voted more in line with denials and odd set dates,” wrote Davidson. “But, that just isn’t me.” Davidson claimed the attorney general’s influence looms large over the board because of Gwathney, whom she found to mistakenly apply the law at times. “The only thing he needs to do is keep Leigh on the Board,” Davidson said. 

Head says the board’s refusal to release people who have worked to change themselves does not improve public safety. She’d like to see more focus on re-entry programs that support people leaving prison and have been proven to reduce recidivism rates. “They want to show or demonstrate to the public that we’re keeping you safe because we’re keeping these people locked up better than anybody has before us,” she told me. “But the problem is, they’re lying to the public. Because if they would explain to the public, this is how you reduce recidivism.” 

After I interviewed Head, she reviewed an article I wrote in The Appeal in 2019 chronicling Richard’s case after his first parole hearing. She said she did not remember his case and was puzzled as to why she voted against his parole. “Don’t understand and surprised,” she wrote in a text message. Asked whether she regretted voting that way, she replied that she couldn’t say without looking at his file. “But if there is nothing in the file that indicates his record is other than all that you found, yes,” she said. 

When researchers from the ACLU of Alabama observed around 260 parole hearings this summer, they found that Gwathney granted parole less frequently than the other two parole board members. She also maintained an allegiance to her old employer, denying parole in every case that the attorney general’s office opposed, according to their final report.

“I think that any parole hearing that the attorney general’s office opposes, Gwathney should recuse herself. She has a conflict of interest,” said Alison Mollman, senior legal counsel for the ACLU of Alabama. “But that has not been her practice. She continues to sit and vote with her former employer in all these cases.”

The researchers discovered another troubling finding. Since Ivey took over control of the board, Black people were far less likely to be granted parole than white applicants. In 2019, Black and white prisoners were granted parole at similar rates, with 34 percent of Black people granted parole compared to 36 percent of white applicants. But that disparity grew by 2020, with 16 percent of Black applicants receiving parole compared to 29 percent of white people, according to their report. 

In the hearings observed by the ACLU of Alabama this summer, white people were granted parole 11.8 percent of the time. Black people had a grant rate of 4.7 percent despite being similarly situated. 

Black people incarcerated in Alabama’s prisons also receive sentences that are on average nine years longer than for white people, and spend significantly longer behind bars before receiving parole. A recent analysis of state court data by AL.com found that nearly half of Black men granted parole over a two month period this year had already served at least 75 percent of their court-ordered sentence. White people granted parole during that same period had served, on average, less than a quarter of their sentence. 

Shrinking parole has also become a barrier to alleviating overcrowding inside a prison system so dangerous that the U.S. Department of Justice has sued the state and the Alabama Department of Corrections after an investigation showed excessive force by correctional officers and “serious risk of death, physical violence, and sexual abuse at the hands of other prisoners.” There were roughly 19,800 people in the state’s men’s prisons at the end of September yet the facilities are designed to hold just around 11,700. 

“I think that when we see how violence has just skyrocketed in Alabama’s prisons, it’s directly related to the lack of hope that people have,” Mollman told me.

Despite these problems, there’s been little movement from the legislature and Ivey’s office to make it easier for people to get out on parole. For the past two years, England, the Tuscaloosa lawmaker, has introduced legislation that would create a panel to oversee the board and create guidelines for members to follow. It would also require the board to issue a written decision when deviating from those guidelines and create an appeals process for prisoners. “They don’t have to follow guidelines and it’s completely discretionary,” England said. “So when you don’t have any oversight, you get systems that are clearly abusing the discretion that they have.”

England’s bill failed to gain traction among other legislators, some of whom deny there are any problems with the parole board. “I’ve spent 25 years with Pardons and Paroles and I just want to say that it’s a hoax that the parole board is not releasing folks,” Representative Jerry Starnes, a Republican who represents Prattville, said in a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the bill earlier this year, according to the Alabama Political Reporter. 

As chances for parole shrink in Alabama, people inside its prisons are confused about what they can do to earn their freedom. 

In a telephone call from St. Clair Correctional Facility, where Richard is incarcerated, he talked about the board’s focus on the crime he was a part of 40 years ago. “Look at the reasons why they turned me down for parole and they’re reasons that I can do nothing about. Capital murder is always going to be a severe offense, I can’t change that,” he said.

He’d followed the parole board since his last hearing and knew it had become much harder to get out, he said. Going into his hearing this summer, Richard said he was hopeful but not optimistic about the board voting in favor of him. “They would have to be willing to really look at our record, you know, what we’ve done in here, and say, ‘Hey, this warrants a chance.’”

Still, he expressed remorse for his role in Bedsole’s death. “I mean, how much time is enough?” he asked. “I don’t know… When I look at myself, personally, I think about a 16-year-old girl that’s lost her life. I don’t know how long she would have lived. You know, she may have lived way older than me. I don’t know how much time is fair for her life. How much time is fair for me to do regardless of who I am in here and how I changed or anything?”

The post In Alabama, an “Out of Control Board” Cuts Chances for Parole appeared first on Bolts.

Loretta Pierre’s first five murder trials ended in mistrials. She was just 20 years old when she shot and killed an ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend who had threatened her with a knife. For the sixth trial, Mississippi prosecutors got the judge to change the venue from her hometown of Gulfport to Vicksburg. Pierre felt confident after the series of mistrials, which included several hung juries and one in which the state’s medical examiner failed to appear. She had even assured her son she’d be going home when the latest trial ended. But her heart dropped in February 1989, the day before her son’s third birthday, when a Warren County jury convicted and sentenced her to life in prison. 

Pierre says she was devastated but held on tightly to the possibility of someday getting out on parole—a chance that her sentence might not really condemn her to ultimately die behind bars. 

“I felt like my life was over, but I knew, in the midst of all that, I would go up for parole in 1997,” Pierre told Bolts. “I was hopeful. I had seen so many women make parole their first time.”

More than a dozen rejections from the parole board and nearly two decades of attending perfunctory and fruitless hearings have eroded that confidence. Now 58, Pierre says she allowed herself to start hoping again in recent years, as Mississippi officials worked to expand parole and the state parole board began granting an increasing number of applications for release. 

By October 2019, the parole board was approving roughly four out of every five people who applied for release. In 2021, one of Pierre’s friends at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility (CMCF) who was also serving a life sentence was finally granted parole after 30 years in prison and 11 parole denials.   

Then Mississippi parole rates started plummeting last year. The board, entirely revamped by appointments made by Governor Tate Reeves since he entered office in 2020, approved about 40 percent of people who were eligible throughout 2022. The board members have defended those lower release rates, accusing previous members of not reviewing cases thoroughly enough and promising increased scrutiny of applicants. 

It’s unclear what scrutiny the parole board gave Pierre when she appeared before them in January 2022. She recalled that they asked standard questions during her minutes-long hearing—about her crime, the programs and classes she’d taken in prison, and her plans for release. Then, they denied Pierre’s application. It was her fourteenth rejection. 

By effectively cutting the board’s approval rate in half, its new members threatened the most frequent pathway out of prison in Mississippi and helped trigger a rise in the state’s prison population after years of steady declines. While Mississippi’s incarceration rate consistently leads the country, reforms and greater use of parole had reduced its prison population from a height of about 22,500 in September 2013 down to 16,499 by the start of 2022. 

Then last year, prison admissions started to outnumber releases as the board dialed back parole. Mississippi’s prison population grew nine percent between mid-2021 and the fall of 2022, one of only a handful of states that saw substantial growth in incarceration during that time period. As of July 16, 2023, the state imprisoned 19,252 people.

Some GOP lawmakers in Mississippi have joined local advocates in questioning the wisdom of reducing parole as the prison population again starts to rise and adds stress to an already overburdened system. A U.S. Department of Justice investigation last year determined that “gross understaffing” had contributed to deadly conditions. To avoid overcrowding, Mississippi officials scrambled to create hundreds of new prison beds, including re-opening the Delta Correctional Facility, a former men’s prison that the state had shuttered in 2012. 

Pierre and hundreds of other women incarcerated at CMCF, which is just outside Jackson, where many of them have families, were shipped more than 100 miles to the newly-reopened prison in the state’s rural Delta region to make more space. 

“I don’t ever want to give up hope,” Pierre told Bolts. “But sometimes hope can be your worst enemy.” 

Mississippi established its parole board in 1972, composed of five governor-appointed members whose terms last “at the will and pleasure of the governor.” 

Pierre and others convicted in the 1970s and 1980s became eligible for parole after serving at least a quarter of their prison sentences, or, for life sentences, at least ten years. (Pierre had been arrested in 1985, but officials counted her time in pretrial detention towards her prison term.) But then in 1995, the state dramatically restricted parole, requiring those with felony convictions to serve 85 percent of their sentence before becoming eligible. People sentenced to life after that had to spend at least 10 years in prison and also wait until they turned 65 before being allowed to petition a sentencing judge for a parole hearing; judges could then permit or dismiss the request for a hearing at their discretion. (The law was not retroactive and didn’t apply to Pierre.)

Under those new parole restrictions, Mississippi’s prison population nearly doubled from 12,292 in 1995 to more than 23,000 by the end of 2008.

But parole releases started to increase in 2009 after lawmakers allowed it for people convicted of nonviolent offenses and certain drug crimes after serving a quarter of their sentences. In 2014, Mississippi again expanded parole eligibility when then-Governor Phil Bryant signed House Bill 585, which restored the 25 percent time-served threshold for all offenses. 

The 2014 law also created a process called presumptive parole for people with convictions for nonviolent offenses, in order to release them without a formal board hearing once they meet all conditions of their case plan, have no major violations in the past six months, and no objection from law enforcement or their victim. 

Case plans for presumptive parole require the participation of the state prison system, the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC). For anyone who could qualify for presumptive parole entering prison, a prison case manager is supposed to help them start creating a release plan within 90 days of their arrival, and inform the new arrivals of their parole eligibility date. The parole board can suggest changes but ultimately must approve the case plan. 

Case managers are also supposed to meet with incarcerated people to review their progress at least once every eight weeks and send updates to the board every four months. In the months ahead of their first parole hearing, prison officials are also supposed to help people create a discharge plan, notify the board whether the person has completed it, and ultimately submit the plan to the board for approval. The parole board is then allowed to release people who follow that process without a formal hearing. 

The first year the new law that included presumptive parole was enacted, parole releases in Mississippi nearly doubled, from 2,015 in 2013 to 3,906 in 2014. 

By 2019, parole had become the principal way people were released from prison in Mississippi, with parole approvals making up 63.4 percent of all releases from prison. Reeves signed legislation in 2021 aimed at even further expansion. That year, the parole board held a monthly average of 870 hearings and granted parole to nearly three-quarters of applicants.

Some of these releases garnered outrage from both victims and lawmakers. In May, the decision to grant parole may have sparked one member’s resignation (the board remains short one member as of this writing).

Parole releases began a steep decline to a rate of about 40 percent in 2022. Jeffery Belk, a former Chevron manager who was appointed to chair the parole board at the start of the year, faced questions last November in a hearing with state lawmakers who were concerned by the growing prison population.

During his testimony to lawmakers, Belk pointed to a scathing 2021 audit of the board and its operations by a legislative watchdog agency, the Joint Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER). The audit reported spotty attendance by members (auditors who reviewed hearings during one week in 2020 found none where all five members attended), shoddy documentation of parole decisions (the board stopped keeping minutes of hearings in 2009 when a new chairman took over) and unauthorized travel expenses (one was reimbursed more $20,000 in 2020 for commuting to work at the parole board offices in Jackson). 

Belk, who didn’t respond to questions for this story, told the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting last year that the governor had tapped him to reform a board that he claimed was in “disarray.” Reeves has remade the board, replacing all five members since taking office, according to Mississippi Free Press. Julia Norman, who was formerly in charge of government affairs for the city of Meridian and whom Reeves appointed to the parole board last year, told lawmakers during her confirmation hearing this past February that members may deny parole if they feel the sentence approved by the judge on the case was too low.

“If it’s a violent crime and you got a short sentence, this parole board may like to see you finish that sentence off,” Norman said during the hearing. (Norman also didn’t respond to questions for this story.) 

The PEER audit also concluded that “presumptive parole is not being implemented as required by the provisions of H.B. 585,” finding that in 2019 the board conducted at least 274 unnecessary hearings where the applicant already met all the criteria to qualify for release. When questioned by lawmakers last year about changes under the new parole board, Belk said he intended to “dramatically streamline the [presumptive parole] process.” 

Mississippi state public defender André De Gruy told Bolts that MDOC officials never thoroughly implemented case plans for people becoming eligible for presumptive parole, in part because of broader turmoil and turnover in the prison system after then-Commissioner Christopher Epps resigned amid accusations of taking $1.4 million in bribes. (Epps was subsequently convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.) 

“If they would implement case plans, it would relieve the burden on the number of cases the board has to review. If they’re not bogged down on hearings they don’t need to do, they can spend more time on each case and make better decisions,” De Gruy, who also serves on the state’s Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force created by the 2014 reforms, told Bolts. “This doesn’t require a change in the law. It just requires them to implement the law that was passed nine years ago.”

A follow-up audit on the board that PEER released last month concluded the board still has not adopted an effective process for presumptive parole and continues to hold hearings for people who qualify for it. The board also still does not keep minutes for hearings. 

Linda Ross was hopeful when she saw “presumptive parole” stamped on her paperwork the last time she went before the parole board in May 2022. In 1989, Ross was 27 and had been engaged in sex work when she says a man from whom she demanded payment attacked her. She fought back, strangling him to death. She pled guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. Her lawyer told her that she would be eligible for parole in 13 years.

In prison, Ross earned her high school equivalency and completed at least 25 educational, vocational, religious and therapeutic programs. She enrolled in college classes and earned 14 credits. But Ross and others with convictions for violent offenses don’t qualify for presumptive parole, regardless of whatever progress she’s made behind bars, even with those words stamped on her parole packet. 

When Ross appeared before the board earlier last year, members rejected her application for release and told her to come back in three years, the maximum amount of time they can set before her case can be reconsidered. It was her seventh denial.

“I don’t see any justice in this system,” Ross told Bolts in a phone call from Delta. “They don’t look at your certification or programs or nothing like that.” Ross knows that her actions caused a man’s death, but also says she cannot undo the past. “I should’ve, would’ve, could’ve, but I can’t now.” 

Overcrowding Mississippi prisons come with a steep cost, not just in terms of the trauma that reverberates from dangerous and understaffed facilities. This year, Mississippi lawmakers budgeted nearly $434 million on prison spending, an 11 percent increase from last year. One estimate predicts the state could spend up to $111 million more each year on prisons than it did in 2020 if the population behind bars continues to rise. 

Overcrowding could eventually force the state’s hand. Under Mississippi’s Prison Overcrowding Emergency Act, officials must act to either reduce the number of people behind bars or expand the state’s carceral footprint if the prison population remains above 95 percent capacity for at least 30 days. The emergency act would also direct the state parole board to review people who are incarcerated for parole revocations and re-evaluating those who had previously been denied parole. 

De Gruy, who has been working in Mississippi’s criminal legal system since the late 1980s, says he can’t remember any time a release has happened under that act, in part because, in previous decades, the state responded by opening new prisons. 

He points to the most recent report by the Corrections and Criminal Justice Oversight Task Force, which showed that prison releases more than halved since 2019 while prison admissions remained roughly the same. “If the number of people making parole drops, then the prison population goes up. The same number of people are coming in and a lower number of people are going out. It’s that simple,” De Gruy told Bolts. “The dropping releases is what’s driving the prison numbers up and what’s keeping them up.”

The parole board could again be changing course. According to a follow-up report PEER released last month, parole release rates rose in the first three months of 2023 after last year’s nosedive, with an average of 63 percent of applicants approved for release during that period. 

Still, the prison population has continued to rise, from 19,181 in January to 19,306 by July 1, nearing 88 percent of state prison capacity. The women’s prison population–currently hovering around 1,800—is the highest it’s ever been, a fact noted during the November legislative hearings.  

To handle the increase, officials have converted CMCF into a largely men’s prison after re-opening the shuttered prison in the Delta region, where they transferred several hundred women late last year. 

Pierre recalls how guards roused her and other women from sleep early one morning last December, ordering them to pack everything they owned before shackling their wrists and legs and loading them onto buses for transfer. 

Pierre says she managed to pack all her belongings into seven bags, but only three made it to Delta. Instead of sharing an individual cell with one person as she did at CMCF, guards put her in a dorm-style pod with nearly four dozen other women, where she describes now living in “an orchestra of coughs, snorts and sneezes.” She says the previously mothballed prison didn’t seem prepared for the new arrivals, telling Bolts, “They didn’t have any clothes—no panties, no bras, no boxer shorts.”

Educational options were even slimmer at Delta. Pierre took numerous community college classes while at CMCF, earning 36 credits towards an associates degree, but says she has been bumped back to beginner coursework at Delta because it’s the only option. Pierre says incarcerated people help facilitate much of what programming remains available. At one point, according to Pierre, prison staff asked her to help with a parenting class behind bars, but she balked, saying she hasn’t lived with her son since he was a toddler. “How am I going to teach someone to parent from prison?” she said. 

Pierre says she’s changed since in the nearly four decades since the confrontation that led to her imprisonment. She says she wouldn’t handle the situation the same way today and would try to flee instead of engaging with anyone threatening her. But that doesn’t seem to matter to the parole board. “Nobody’s the same person at twenty as they are at 58,” she reflected. 

Pierre says she tries to keep up hope for a life after prison. She is continuing her college education and participates in Study and Struggle, a political education and mutual aid collective supporting incarcerated Mississippians, which will offer her a reentry stipend and a transition to part-time work if the parole board ever lets her out. “It’s hard to plan a future because I’m so uncertain about it,” Pierre said in a recent phone call from her new prison. “Every time I go up for parole, we [my family and I] can’t help but make plans. Then all of our hopes and plans get crushed. Repeatedly.” 

Sometimes it feels like she has no future. “Some days, I lay here in my bed and pray to die because then it would all be over,” Pierre recalled telling her sister during a recent conversation, before hastily adding, “I would never do anything to hurt myself, but sometimes I ask the Lord to just take me in my sleep.”

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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.   

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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.”

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