Deep dive into parole history and modern parole practice in California

The New York Times Magazine has this very long new piece on parole under this full headline "Can You Talk Your Way Out of a Life Sentence?: California is giving a second chance to thousands of inmates who had no hope of parole. But first they have to prove to a panel of strangers that they’ve truly changed." The lengthy piece merits a full read, and here is a snippet from its early sections:

The modern idea of basing a prisoner’s release on evidence of his or her rehabilitated character can be traced to 1870, when the inaugural meeting of the newly formed American Prison Association took place in Cincinnati. There, representatives from 25 states, Washington, D.C., and Canada adopted a declaration of principles, among them that prisoners should be rewarded for good conduct and that a “prisoner’s destiny should be placed, measurably, in his own hands.” To achieve this, they argued, “sentences limited only by satisfactory proof of reformation should be substituted for those measured by mere lapse of time.”

By 1922, nearly every state in the union had adopted indeterminate sentencing, in which judges hand out sentences that are formulated as a range of years — a minimum and a maximum amount of time to be served. The responsibility for deciding exactly when in this range an inmate had been rehabilitated enough to be released was vested in state parole boards. (The federal penal system has its own early-release process.)

Over the next half century, it became clear that there was an intrinsic tension between the high-minded notion that inmates should be in control of their own destinies, by deciding whether or not to reform, and the practical difficulty of determining whether they had actually done so. By the 1970s, the discretionary parole system was under attack. Liberals argued that a parole board’s broad leeway allowed racial and class biases to rule unchecked. Conservatives argued that parole boards were releasing dangerous felons who then went on to commit more crimes. A rising national crime rate made the public increasingly dubious of the paternalistic promises of a rehabilitative system.

Over time, some states got rid of parole entirely, while others drastically increased the minimum amount of time an inmate would need to serve before becoming eligible to go before a board. In Georgia, for example, inmates who received a life sentence for a serious crime committed before January 1995 became eligible for parole after seven years. Those who have received a life sentence for a crime committed after June 2006 don’t become eligible for parole until they’ve served 30 years.

But discretionary parole continues to exist in most states, even if it’s often limited to a small pool of longtime inmates whose lengthy periods of incarceration have consigned them to near-oblivion. Conducted by panels of political appointees with varying levels of professional expertise, little accountability and almost unlimited discretion, parole hearings rarely garner attention except when a high-profile inmate comes up for parole.

The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that inmates who have been sent to prison for life have no due-process right to be released unless the wording of their state’s parole statute created one. In the absence of such rights, parole decisions can be remarkably arbitrary. A 2017 survey of paroling authorities by the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Minnesota Law School found that 41 percent of parole boards never make public the logic behind a parole denial, and at least seven states don’t require their parole boards to provide a written explanation for their denial to the parole-seeking inmate. Prisoners are often unable to see the file that the parole board bases its decisions on — in Alabama and North Carolina, inmates are not even allowed to be present for the hearing. While every state except Kentucky and New Mexico allows inmates to have a lawyer at their hearing, very few states will pay for one, which means only a tiny minority of inmates have a lawyer with them at their hearings. “You have about 3 percent of the procedural rights before a parole board as you would in a courtroom,” says Kevin Reitz, the Robina Institute’s former co-director.

All of this makes discretionary parole a far cry from the equation proposed in 1870, in which demonstrated behaviors would result in predictable outcomes. Instead, Reitz has found that parole commissioners are dominated by fears of releasing an inmate who goes on to commit a terrible crime. That’s exactly what happened on March 19, 2013, when a parolee, Evan Ebel, murdered Tom Clements, the executive director of Colorado’s Department of Corrections. When he interviewed parole board members in Colorado, Reitz says, he found the specter of that murder loomed over every decision they made: “Board members told me, ‘If I let someone out and he does something horrible, that’s on me.’ ” So parole-board members have little motivation to release inmates, no matter how deserving they seem.