By Kevin R. Reitz and Edward F. Rhine

Decisions tied to parole release, supervision, and revocation are major determinants of the ebb and flow of prison populations across two-thirds of US states. We argue that parole release, as an institution, has been an underacknowledged force in American incarceration and reincarceration policy and an important contributor to the nation's buildup to mass incarceration. In paroling states, no court or state agency holds greater power than parole boards over time actually served by the majority of offenders sent to prison. We examine the leverage exercised by parole boards through their discretionary release decisions and their powers to sanction violators of parole conditions. We note the state-by-state diversity and complexity associated with parole-release decisions and the absence of successful state systems that might serve as a model for other jurisdictions. We highlight the procedural shortfalls universally associated with parole decision-making. We discuss the long reach of parole supervision and the pains it imposes on those subject to its jurisdiction, including the substantial financial burdens levied on parolees. We then turn to the prospects for parole reform and outline a comprehensive blueprint for improving parole release in America.

Annual Review of CriminologyVol. 3:281-29, 2020.

By Kevin R. Reitz and Edward F. Rhine

Decisions tied to parole release, supervision, and revocation are major determinants of the ebb and flow of prison populations across two-thirds of US states. We argue that parole release, as an institution, has been an underacknowledged force in American incarceration and reincarceration policy and an important contributor to the nation's buildup to mass incarceration. In paroling states, no court or state agency holds greater power than parole boards over time actually served by the majority of offenders sent to prison. We examine the leverage exercised by parole boards through their discretionary release decisions and their powers to sanction violators of parole conditions. We note the state-by-state diversity and complexity associated with parole-release decisions and the absence of successful state systems that might serve as a model for other jurisdictions. We highlight the procedural shortfalls universally associated with parole decision-making. We discuss the long reach of parole supervision and the pains it imposes on those subject to its jurisdiction, including the substantial financial burdens levied on parolees. We then turn to the prospects for parole reform and outline a comprehensive blueprint for improving parole release in America.

Annual Review of CriminologyVol. 3:281-29, 2020.

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 The Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform and Columbia University Justice Lab

New York State sends more people to prison for parole rules violations than any other state in the country. In 2019, 40 percent of the people sent to New York prisons were incarcerated not for a new felony conviction, but for parole violations such as not reporting to a parole officer, living at an unapproved residence, missing curfew, or failing drug or alcohol tests. Black and Latinx people are significantly more likely than white people to be incarcerated for parole violations. The fiscal impact on New York state and local taxpayers is enormous. In 2019, New York’s state and local governments collectively spent $683 million to incarcerate people on parole for rules violations, without evidence that this massive expenditure of resources meaningfully contributed to public safety. New York State spent $319 million in 2019 to incarcerate people for parole rule violations in state prisons. New York counties—excluding the five counties in New York City—collectively spent more than $91 million to jail people who were accused of technical violations ƒ New York City spent $273 million to jail people accused of technical violations

New York: Columbia University, Justice Lab, 2021. 23p.

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.

By Gerald G. Gaes and Julia Laskorunsky

For most individuals who receive a prison sentence, the amount of time they will serve in prison is somewhat unpredictable because of officials’ discretionary capacity to exercise “back-end” release powers, including parole and good time and earned time credit. These back-end decisions influence how long someone ultimately spends in prison and, over time, can have a substantial impact on prison population size (Gaes and Laskorunsky, 2022). This project examines how back-end powers of prison release discretion operate within the Colorado prison system. Reitz, Griffith, and Rhine (2022) categorize the Colorado prison release system as one of high indeterminacy; meaning that for almost all incarcerated individuals, back-end authorities such as the Colorado State Board of Parole and the Department of Corrections (DOC) are given substantially more discretion over total time served than the front-end judicial authorities who issue prison sentences. To determine how these powers of discretion interact to govern prison stay length, we assessed temporal patterns in the release decisions of the Colorado State Board of Parole and the decisions of the DOC in awarding and withholding good-time and earned-time credits.

Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University; Minneapolis, MN: and Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, University of Minnesota, 2022. 50p.

Edited by Madeline M. Carter

The manner in which jurisdictions respond to parole and probation violations should be thoughtful and deliberate. Although each case requires individual decision-making, the response to a given violation should be consistent with policy developed by that jurisdiction. Agency violation policies should be built around such considerations as assessment of risk posed by the offender, case processing requirements, local resource availability, and outcomes desired by the agency for certain types of violations. Agency violation policies guide line staff in making supervisory decisions and assist decision-makers in reaching consistent and equitable dispositions. During the past decade, the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) helped 29 jurisdictions address violation issues by providing onsite technical assistance. Many other jurisdictions have expressed interest in receiving such support. Among the lessons learned is that goals, resources, and values differ from one place to another. It is vital that jurisdictions work through a process leading to informed policy options that meet their particular needs. This handbook is built around what we have learned about how agencies effectively address violations policy. Expanding on information and examples from the 29 jurisdictions, this document is designed to lead agency policy teams through a series of activities to help them develop their own set of violation policies. This is a difficult initiative for agencies to take on; however, it is important and essential work, and the resulting agency policy is worth the commitment. I urge agency administrators to use the materials in this handbook to develop probation and parole violation policies that best conform to the needs and resources of their jurisdictions.

Silver Spring, MD: Center for Effective Public Policy, 2001. 105p.

By Peggy B. Burke

For probation and parole to be effective sanctions, reasonable controls must be placed on offenders. They take the form of either general or special conditions of supervision. Probation and parole officers, courts, and parole boards have always responded to violation of conditions of supervision in good faith, but the responses were often inconsistent and not guided by agency policy or sanctioning philosophy. The typical decision was either to return the offender to supervision with little or no change or to revoke supervision and incarcerate the offender--and nothing in between. In some jurisdictions, more admissions to prisons annually are for probation and parole violations than for all new offenses committed. The National Institute of Corrections has for several years assisted agencies in developing a system of explicit, policy-driven responses to violations of probation and parole. Each jurisdiction has taken a somewhat different approach to problems it identified. This report shares some of what was learned concerning the violation process, potential impact of changes, and some of the tools developed to introduce more policy-driven consistency in responses.

Silver Spring, MD: Center for Effective Public Policy 1997. 53p.