Only 6 states we surveyed saw an increase in parole approval rates.

Prison Policy Initiative updates for October 16, 2023 Exposing how mass incarceration harms communities and our national welfare

No Release: Parole grant rates have plummeted in most states since the pandemic started [[link removed]] Among the 26 states we surveyed, only 6 saw an increase in parole approval rate, and almost every state held substantially fewer hearings than in years past. [[link removed]]

by Emmett Sanders

Earlier this year, Alabama’s Board of Pardons and Paroles made headlines when it denied parole to someone who had died [[link removed]] ten days prior to their parole hearing. This is just one of many threads in the Alabama parole board’s tapestry of dysfunction. For months, their three-person parole board operated with just two members despite requiring a majority vote to grant parole. It is no wonder that Alabama is on track to have a parole grant rate — the percent of parole petitions approved — 0f just 7% for 2023. This also comes as studies show racial disparities in parole grant rates are widening: for example [[link removed]], non-white people in NY were released at a rate almost 29% less than their white counterparts in 2022 (up from a difference of around 19% between 2016 and 2021).

With parole board practices so much in the news, we thought it was important to look around the country and evaluate the direction in which state parole boards are moving. We filed dozens of records requests and curated the best research to explore whether state parole boards are helping reduce mass incarceration or whether they are disregarding [[link removed]] the hard-learned lessons of the pandemic, when they released even fewer people than before the crisis as people died behind prison walls.

The state of parole

In the 28 states for which we collected 2022 parole approval data, only 7 had grant rates above 50% - Connecticut, Idaho, Nevada, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming. Wyoming had the highest grant rate of 78%. At the other end of justice’s sliding scale, Alabama (10%) and South Carolina (7%) have the lowest parole approval grant rates in the nation.

To see full information about parole grant rates by year in each state from 2019-2022, see the appendix. [[link removed]]

With few exceptions, parole grant rates dropped significantly from 2019 to 2022

In the 26 states for which Prison Policy Initiative was able to track changes in parole approval rates from 2019-2022, only 6 — Connecticut (+29%), Georgia (+17%), Texas (+11%), Hawai’i (+8%), South Dakota (+6%), and Nevada (+1%) — have seen any increase since 2019. In the remaining 20 states from which we received data, parole grant rates have seen either no change or have seen a marked decline, with South Carolina (-80%) and Alabama (-67%) seeing the biggest drop offs in grant rates.

But state parole boards did not only choose to release fewer people. They heard fewer cases as well. With the exceptions of Oklahoma and South Dakota, parole boards continued to hear significantly fewer total cases in 2022 than they did in 2019. The result is that since 2019, the number of people released through discretionary parole has decreased across the board.

To see full information about the number of parole hearings by year in each state from 2019-2022, see the appendix. [[link removed]]

Ironically, South Carolina’s Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services’ website is quick to highlight [[link removed]] the money the state has saved by reducing the number of parole revocations over the past decade. Of course, it would be difficult to have more revocations, given that they released 84% fewer people via discretionary parole in 2022 than they did in 2019. South Carolina is far from alone, however. Alaska has reduced the number of people released through discretionary parole by 79% since 2019; Alabama 70% and Maryland by 66%. In fact, with the exception of South Dakota, every state for which data was provided released fewer people through discretionary parole in 2022 than in 2019, with an average overall decline of around 41% fewer people released per state. South Dakota’s increase is also extremely modest - the state released just 62 more people in 2022 than in 2019.

To see full information about the number of people released on parole by year in each state from 2019-2022, see the appendix. [[link removed]]

Why are parole boards releasing so few people?

Denial is often effectively [[link removed]] the default disposition for parole boards, and the burden of proof [[link removed]] is usually on the person who is incarcerated to justify their release. This is problematic, as the board often considers factors that are beyond the applicant’s control, such as the availability of programming or education in the prison, or factors that cannot be changed, such as the nature [[link removed]] of the offense for which they were incarcerated. When release rests on these factors, there is very little a person can do to influence the outcome.

Another issue is the general outlook some politicians and parole board members have toward people who are up for parole. State Representative Matt Simpson defended Alabama’s abysmal grant rates, saying [[link removed]] “We’ve gotten to a point where the people up for parole are the ones that don’t need to be out; it’s not like it used to be where we had a number of non-violent offenders.” While recent reports [[link removed]] have cast doubt on this claim, it still begs the question: how can those with this viewpoint provide a fair hearing to those who come before them? There is nothing fair about a body that decides people’s fates before they ever appear. It’s important to note that the seriousness of an offense is taken into account when a judge first sets a prison sentence. When parole boards solely or exclusively make their release decisions based on the underlying charge, they are continually punishing incarcerated people for a factor they cannot change. Moreover, policies [[link removed]] that provide relief only for those with non-violent offenses are simply not impactful enough to address the juggernaut of mass incarceration. And although parole boards are charged with looking at a person’s likelihood of rearrest, they often seem to ignore the fact that people sent to prison for violent charges have the lowest rearrest rate [[link removed]] of any group.

Parole Boards are influenced by politics

In 2019, Mississippi had a grant rate of 74% — one of the highest rates in the nation. However, that same year, the parole board made the ethical but unpopular [[link removed]] decision to parole a person who had been incarcerated for 30 years. That person had their death sentence commuted on the basis of intellectual disability but the board determined them not to be a threat to public safety. In the aftermath of this decision, Mississippi saw its grant rates freefall 42 percent by 2022. The political outrage at the decision led to increased scrutiny and political pressure which has undermined Mississippi’s presumptive parole system.

Though parole boards are typically thought of as serving a judicial function (i.e., weighing evidence and rendering a judgment that results in freedom or continued incarceration), they are still bureaucratic bodies beholden to political good will. Parole board members are usually appointed by governors and confirmed by legislative hearings, which often makes their selection fundamentally political. More than a third of states with parole boards in the US mandate no qualifications [[link removed]] to sit on the board, meaning no actual knowledge of law, prison, the judicial system, mental health, or even basic social dynamics are required to sit on boards that can prevent a person from ever again experiencing life outside prison walls.

Policy efforts to increase release rates are often stalled or undermined

Efforts to restore discretionary parole in Maine [[link removed]], Virginia [[link removed]], and Illinois [[link removed]] led by groups like Parole4ME [[link removed]] and Parole Illinois [[link removed]] have come achingly close to success in recent years. Some states with discretionary parole have begun to implement presumptive parole [[link removed]] in an effort to increase fairness and remove subjectivity and political pressure. While presumptive parole is a key strategy to reduce incarceration, in states that have implemented it, the efficacy of this policy is limited by carveouts [[link removed]] — exceptions in policies that exclude certain categories of people from relief. Most states with some form of presumptive parole will not apply the presumption to people with certain offenses, those who have received recent disciplinary infractions, or those who haven’t completed relevant rehabilitative programming. As we noted, offense-based carveouts do not have a strong basis in policy, and programming-related carveouts are problematic because programming is neither universal nor guaranteed [[link removed]] and can vary immensely from prison to prison. Reports have also shown [[link removed]] that Black and Brown people who are incarcerated are more likely to receive disciplinary infractions than their white counterparts, meaning they are more likely to be denied presumptive parole based on this carveout.

Conclusion

Despite the dangers of incarceration in a post-pandemic world and the efforts of many to make the parole system more just, fewer people are receiving parole hearings, and fewer still are released through discretionary parole. In fact, discretionary parole accounted for only a small fraction of total [[link removed]] releases from prison in 2021.

Expanding access to discretionary parole won’t by itself end mass incarceration; however, expanding its usage in conjunction with presumptive parole while eliminating undermining carveouts could be a powerful tool for decarceration. Hopefully, a review of parole in 2023 will see incarcerated people given a greater chance to be paroled.

***

For more information, including a data appendix showing parole grant rates for 26 states [[link removed]], and detailed footnotes, see the full version of this briefing on our website [[link removed]].

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