Can the Parole Process Make Prison Sentences More Just?

The New York Times, November 6, 2023: Can the Parole Process Make Prison Sentences More Just?

“One morning in late September, around the time I was finishing Ben Austen’s ‘Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change,’ I was walking the perimeter of a prison yard in upstate New York with a fellow inmate, 68-year-old Kasiem Chaves. We call him ‘Old God.’ Gray and gangly, he was about to go before the parole board for the third time, having served nearly 41 years. By the time I finished writing this review, I would know whether Old God would go free.

“When Austen, a former editor at Harper’s Magazine, was researching his last book, ‘High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing’ (2018), he learned about the 1970 shooting deaths of two police officers at Cabrini-Green, the infamous Chicago housing project. Yet no one mentioned that the 17-year-old convicted of the killings was ‘still sitting in a prison cell’ decades later. The man was Johnnie Veal, one of two inmates whose stories Austen tells in ‘Correction.’ The other is Michael Henderson, who in 1971, when he was 18, shot another teenager inside his car in a tavern parking lot.

“Sentenced to more than 100 years apiece, Veal and Henderson entered prison when Richard Nixon was president and the United States was beginning a vast social experiment with laws and policies that drastically increased the number of people behind bars. Over the next four decades, both men would periodically go before a parole board and be denied release. Their trajectories track the peg for Austen’s book: the 50th anniversary of mass incarceration.

“‘By studying the parole process,’ Austen writes, ‘we can see how the United States created the crisis of mass incarceration, and how we might find a way out.’ In this country, the concept of parole dates to 1870, to a paper delivered at a conference of the National Prison Association by Zebulon Brockway, the superintendent of Detroit’s city jail. If prison was intended as both punishment and rehabilitation, Brockway argued, then sentences needed to be flexible, and jailers needed a way to (as Austen puts it) ‘continually evaluate people in prison, to encourage their pro-social behavior.’ A prisoner’s release date should ultimately be decided by a panel of ‘guardians,’ who would ‘look beyond the crime, and with dispassion assess an individual’s growth in the intervening years.’

“Over the next 50 years, nearly every state adopted a parole system using ‘indeterminate sentences’ (meaning, handed down as a range — say, three to nine years). The makeup and procedures of parole boards varied widely: In some states board members went to prisons to interview applicants for parole; in others, investigators interviewed prisoners and reported back to the board.”

Additional reading:

Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change by Ben Austen on bookshop.org

Chicago Review of Books, November 16, 2023: The Potential and Promise of Parole: An Interview with Ben Austen About “Correction”

Dui Hua: Dialogue – Issue 37: Parole in the United States: People & Policies in Transition