By Edward E. Rhine, Kelly Lyn Mitchell, and Kevin R. Reitz

Paroling authorities play an important, if often unrecognized role, in American prison policies. Discretionary parole processes decide the actual release dates for most individuals subject to confinement in 34 states. Additional leverage over time served is exercised through parole boards’ revocation and re-release authority. The degree of discretion these back-end officials exert over the dosage of incarceration is vast, sometimes more than that held by sentencing courts.

Any comprehensive program to change American prison policy must focus to a significant degree on prison-release discretion, where it exists, and its relationship to time served. During the buildup to mass incarceration, many parole boards became increasingly reluctant to grant release to eligible prisoners. Today, if it were possible to reverse this upward driver of prison populations, parole boards could be important contributors to a new evidence-based status quo of lower prison rates in many states. Reasonable objectives of reform include policy-driven increases in the likelihood of parole release, and more rational decision making overall about time served.

This report describes twelve “levers of change,” each associated with potential reforms in the realm of discretionary parole release. The reforms are called “change levers” because, once a lever is pulled, it is designed to impact prison populations by altering parole grant rates and durations of time served. The report identifies 12 areas of innovation that, to some degree, have already been tried by a number of states. In most cases, from a distance, it is impossible to evaluate the quality of each state’s implementation of one or more change levers, or the results that have been achieved. But the fact that states have begun to experiment in specific areas shows that there is an appetite for reform. In addition, actual experimentation indicates that some of the groundwork has been laid for evaluation, improvement, and dissemination of promising ideas to many additional states.

Some levers have become embedded in the decision protocols of parole boards over the past 20 years and more, while others have emerged only recently. One of the goals of this report is to demonstrate how combining the levers is key to reform. This report maps the terrain of the 12 identified change levers, to the degree permitted by available information. The map shows a huge amount of state-by-state variation, even without hands-on study of each system. The report further classifies individual levers based on the number of jurisdictions in which they have been identified, and their potential impact on states’ prison populations.

St. Paul, MN: Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 2022. 36p.

By Caitlin Curry

Scholars have sought to understand the problem of racial disproportionality in U.S. imprisonment rates for over four decades, but current research has yet to identify the specific correctional mechanisms that exacerbate racial differences in incarceration (Garland, 2013). The rate of parole revocations increased markedly in the 1990s and 2000s, contributing to the growth in imprisonment in the US. Likewise, some research also finds that the likelihood of parole revocation varies by race, but we know little about the effect of parole revocations on imprisonment disparity (Huebner and Bynum, 2008). This study uses a sample of 24 states over a twenty year period (1990-2009) to test the hypothesis that parole revocation admissions contribute to disparity in imprisonment by race. Specifically, this study employs multilevel modeling to assess the extent to which parole revocations account for race differences in prisons admissions, when controlling for individual characteristics as well as state structural factors and policies

Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, 2016. 76p.

By The Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform

Over the past few years, New York City has significantly lowered the number of people held in its jails. Recent legislative reforms to pretrial laws promise further reductions. But one population in City jails has resisted these trends and poses a major barrier to closing the jails on Rikers Island: people accused of violations of community supervision, commonly referred to as parole. On any given day, 20 percent of the New York City jail population is made up of people accused of parole violations. 89 percent are people of color. Approximately 600 people are accused of non-criminal “technical” parole violations, such as being late for curfew, testing positive for drugs, or missing an appointment with a parole officer. Another 900 people are charged with new criminal offenses but are ineligible for bail or pretrial release, no matter how low-level the offense, because parole authorities have also issued a warrant. Jailing so many people on parole warrants does little for public safety and is counterproductive to the success of people who are reentering society from prison. It is also incredibly expensive: applying figures from the New York City Comptroller, the City spends more than $400 million per year to incarcerate people accused of parole violations. These problems are not limited to Rikers. On any given day, more than 1,000 people are held in other jails across the state solely because they are accused of technical parole violations. And almost 40 percent of the people sent to state prison each year in New York are not incarcerated for new criminal convictions, but rather for these technical parole violations.

Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, 2019. 22p.

By Vincent Schiraldi and Jennifer Arzu

As state and city leaders agree that the jail complex on Rikers Island should be closed, efforts have increased at the state and city level to reduce the New York City jail population (New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice 2017a; Cuomo 2018). The population of New York City’s jails dipped below 9,000 recently for the first time in 35 years, even as crime in the city has continued to decline, allowing the City to announce the closure of one of Rikers Island’s nine jails (New York City Office of the Mayor 2017; Schiraldi 2018). But as the number of persons incarcerated pretrial for misdemeanors, non-violent and violent felonies, as well as the city sentenced population, have declined by double-digits over the past four years, only one population in the jail has increased, also by double digits: persons held in city jails for state parole violations (New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice 2017b; New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services 2018). This brief will examine this issue in greater detail, focusing primarily on the impact it is having on the New York City jail population at this critical time. We will conclude with recommendations to reduce unnecessary incarceration of persons on parole and to shrink the overall parole population by incentivizing good behavior on parole, referring whenever possible to other jurisdictions that have successfully enacted parole reforms.

New York: Columbia University, Justice Lab, 2018. 14p.

By Erin Jacobs Valentine, Louisa Treskon and Cindy Redcross

Despite an increasing emphasis on reentry services for individuals leaving prison, recidivism rates remain high, and policymakers are searching for ways to help parolees make more successful transitions from prison. One strategy is to incorporate interventions into the parole supervision process. This paper presents findings from the Changing Attitudes and Motivation in Parolees (CHAMPS) study, which examined the implementation of a pilot of one parole-based intervention, known as the Next Generation of Parole Supervision (NG).

NG is intended to improve parolee outcomes by enhancing parole officers’ knowledge and the strategies they use during their regular supervision meetings with parolees. Building on existing literature about best practices in parole supervision, the NG curriculum focuses on desistance — a process through which individuals who have been involved in crime change their self-perceived identity and cease participating in crime — and helps parole officers to use parolee-centered conversations to identify and reinforce a parolee’s strengths and to identify potential stabilizing and destabilizing influences in the individual’s life..

New York: MDRC, 2018. 45p.