Parole Evidence – Can People Change?

There’s no question that our criminal justice system is a complete failure. We have too many inmates serving time for too many crimes under some of the longest sentences in the world. Whether you call prisons “anger factories,” “crime schools” or failures unable to deal effectively with mental illness or rehabilitate drug and alcohol addicts, the system no longer serves our general society. Drug and alcohol addicts need rehab, not prison. The 30% of inmates with serious mental illness need serious professional treatment, not incarceration with pills. We also scar convicts with criminal records that materially impair their ability to find meaningful, post-incarceration employment. Recidivism rates are high, and the cost of maintaining prisons and inmates long gone way above absurdly unaffordable.

Getting inmates out of prison has become a national priority, among conservatives tired of shelling out billions for failed systems to liberals who find the entire criminal justice system a massive failure of human rights values, rising for many to constitutionally proscribed “cruel and unusual punishment.”

So today, I want to talk about our notion of “parole,” a system that looks at inmates before their sentences run their course to decide which prisoners should be considered for an earlier supervised released. The federal government and more than a few “tough on crime” states don’t even have a parole system. Sentence reduction in these venues is only a factor of a change in the judgment (rare) or reductions in time based on good behavior formulae.

More parole boards are political appointees, few with any specialized training. It is almost uniformly the practice of these administrative bodies, whose decisions are generally not subject to review or appeal, to focus primarily on the severity of the crime far more than any notion of personal change in the inmate. Their fear: releasing an inmate before their sentence is complete only to read the headlines of a serious crime committed by the released individual. This notion holds a whole lot of prisoners in stir long after they have ceased to be a material threat to society. Expensive. Wasteful. Cruel.

New York State passed law in 2011 that mandated that parole boards focus on “risk to society” above all else. The law changed nothing, and the basic psychology of parole decisions remained unchanged. But New York has been testing and using a computer-generated modeling system – COMPAS – in its probation determinations (which are part of original sentencing parameters vs. parole, which is an after-the-fact release system) that inputs “19 base risk/need scales were generally highest for high-risk/need individuals. The five scales most strongly correlated with the likelihood of ANY rearrest included (beginning with the most strongly correlated scale): History of Non-Compliance (with conditions of pretrial release or sentence), Educational/Vocational Problems, Criminal Associates/Peers, Anger and Impulsivity.” COMPAS-Probation Risk and Needs Assessment Study, Sharon Lansing, PhD (“COMPAS Study).

Simple factors like age, for example, have a significant impact on success after release. Probability for rearrest results for those in the lower years, 16 through 18 in particular, are nasty, but as inmates hit their 40s, the rearrest rates fall significantly.

As the COMPAS study spits out the more objective criteria focused on societal risk, its accuracy rates rise. The system divides inmates as to level of security risk, and the associated recidivism numbers sustain the accuracy of the system. For example, according to the COMPAS Study, recommended minimum supervision cases generate a fairly low 17.5% rearrest rate, scaling upwards as supervision-level recommendations rise, to 57.3% for high supervision-recommendations.

It would seem that the gross unfairness, the unprofessionalism of most parole boards and the fear-of-releasing-a-dangerous-inmate factor could easily be mitigated and efficiently replaced with a comparable COMPAS system applied not just to probation, but to parole.

“Unfortunately, New York’s parole board clings stubbornly to the past, routinely denying parole to long-serving inmates based on subjective, often unreviewable judgments. If they explain their reasoning, board members almost always point to the seriousness of the crime, regardless of how much progress an inmate may have made…

“But the board resists [COMPAS] use… That’s no surprise, since parole board members are often political appointees, not psychologists. Their time with a candidate generally consists of a short interview with boilerplate questions… The New York board’s intransigence is all the more exasperating because inmates who are paroled — and thus get supervision outside — may have a lower risk of reoffending than those who serve their full terms.” New York Times Editorial Board, September 4^th.

Nevertheless, there are stirrings in the courts. A very rare judicial review of a New York parole board decision was heard In The Matter of Linares vs. Evans, and the case has pushed its way up to the New York Court of Appeals (their highest court), which is taking a good hard look at the way New York parole boards operate. Perhaps our judicial system will do what our legislatures are either loathe or slow to implement: create a fair system to move inmates out of prison when their threat to society falls sufficiently. We just can no longer afford to keep writing big check for failed values.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s time to shred expensive and ineffective slogan-driven governmental operations into the effective tools they need to be.