— This story first appeared in New York Focus, a non-profit news publication investigating New York state politics. Sign up for their stories at nysfocus.com/newsletter.
Does anyone care how long people stay in prison? That’s what Carol Shapiro wants to know.
In 2017, the longtime criminal justice reform advocate was appointed to New York state’s Board of Parole, which decides whether people who’ve served their minimum prison sentences should be released. She was eager to join the board because she wanted to reconfigure the gears of its “conveyor belt justice” — her term for the rapid, impersonal churn of cases in which a person’s freedom can be decided in mere minutes.
Shapiro ultimately found the task impossible. The ideology behind the board’s decision-making was too entrenched for one person to change. She left in 2019.
Little has changed since then. A roughly two-year political window of criminal justice reform in New York — characterized by bail, prosecution, and police transparency legislation, as well as mass protests against policing — has come and gone, with the parole system left mostly untouched. Reformers’ flagship parole bill hasn’t passed the legislature in the eight years it’s been introduced.
Understaffed
What’s more, the parole board has been understaffed by several commissioners for at least a decade. Two and a half years ago, soon after Governor Kathy Hochul took office, she promised to fill the parole board’s 19 slots.
Reformers have pushed Hochul to nominate parole board commissioners who will facilitate more prison releases. But the governor, whose criminal justice initiatives have mostly focused on putting more people behind bars, has been reluctant to do so, mostly tapping institutionalists whom progressives worry will perpetuate the status quo. The board is still down three commissioners, and 11 of the board’s 16 filled seats are filled by members whose terms are expired — so-called zombie commissioners.
As New York Focus reported last week, the impasse has ended poorly for the governor. Two of the seven candidates she’s tapped for parole commissioner jobs were rejected by reform-minded senators. A third Hochul nominee made it through Senate confirmation, only to be ousted before he completed training for allegedly skipping and falling asleep at hearings.
Shapiro, who sat down for two phone interviews with New York Focus, has an idea of what’s going on.
The parole board has no clear mission
The parole board doesn’t have a clear mission, Shapiro said.
“The real problem is that there is not a clear sense of what the purpose of parole is in New York state. … and if you don’t have a clear sense of the purpose of parole, which the board does not, it makes it very difficult to figure out who’s a good choice [for a commissioner role]. and it becomes political, which is unfortunate.”
Long before her time on the board, parole commissioner appointments would function as political favors, Shapiro said. They may still, at least occasionally. One of the governor’s recent nominees, a local Long Island legislator, failed because senators saw his nomination as an attempt by Hochul to curry favor with Democrats in Suffolk County, a critical constituency in November elections, New York Focus revealed last week.
When Shapiro was a commissioner, she knew where she stood on the purpose of parole and parole board hearings.
“It is to assess the person’s readiness to go home. and it’s not to resentence them based on the heinousness of their original offense. … We should be looking at who people are today, not the worst thing they ever did in their life. The idea has always been that you do the best you can while you’re incarcerated to improve yourself, to take responsibility, and to become a valued member of our communities.”
Other commissioners use different logic.
Parole board decisions are too discretionary
State regulations offer some guidance on what parole commissioners are supposed to consider when they make their decisions. But the guidelines are broad, and commissioners have wide discretion in how they apply them.
Many rely heavily on a clause that allows them to vote to deny a person parole if they think that granting it would “deprecate the seriousness” of their crime. For many commissioners, that’s the “default position” for deciding cases that involve someone with a high-level conviction, Shapiro said: “They would say to me, ‘Carol, I can never let this person out.’”
“They pull out this deprecation clause, even though the person before them has done everything possible and they are humble. and they’re aged — that’s the other part of this. Our prisons in New York state have become geriatric facilities. The research is clear on this: Vera, NYU, lots of places have done research showing that people who have committed the most heinous offenses who are elderly are at the lowest risk of reoffending. We know that. So what is the purpose of keeping them in prison? It’s not the safety of our communities. It is punishment, and it’s perpetual punishment.”
That perpetual punishment is often enacted “in the name of victims,” who can offer statements to place in someone’s parole file, Shapiro asserted. “We really need to do better by victims,” she said, “so that they don’t think that the only justice they can ever get is to keep somebody in prison.”
There is almost no public data on individual commissioners’ parole decisions. But the little information there is shows that they lean heavily on the so-called deprecation clause. Parole hearing transcripts obtained by the Parole Preparation Project in 2021 show commissioners citing the seriousness of potential parolees’ original crime in a majority of their parole denials. Incarcerated people know that all too well, said Shapiro.
“They see the parole system for what it is: It’s a sham. You get rejected in spite of doing everything you can to have changed your life around. That doesn’t give people a lot of optimism for going home. and these people are all connected to communities and families, so it has a ripple effect on particularly minority and poor communities where their family members and loved ones remain in prison forever. It doesn’t feel like a legitimate part of our justice system.”
New York’s parole board hasn’t always been so directionless, Shapiro said. She recalled a brief time in the 1980s, decades before her stint as a commissioner, when she worked as a consultant for the board. It was a different time: “There was a transparency and a fluency and an opportunity for parole board members to contemplate and think about what their job was and what their role was” — opportunities that weren’t there when she joined the board in 2017.
“I pushed hard. But there were no retreats. There was no real staff development. There was no opportunity as a group to say, ‘You know, let’s look at parole. What is it supposed to be and how should we be doing this?’ Instead, they said, ‘Here are some sample parole decisions, use them as your guideline.’ That’s not a way of thinking.”
Parole board members are overworked
The basic processes of the board’s operations reinforce its assembly line approach, Shapiro said. Commissioners hear cases in two- or three-member panels. Before a hearing, they’re given large stacks of paper case files, which they barely have time to read through, as parole commissioners in New York have far larger caseloads than those in most other states — a dynamic worsened by the board’s chronic understaffing. According to the limited available data, each commissioner hears, conservatively, nearly 1,000 release cases annually, on top of hundreds of other types of administrative meetings.
“Everything is last minute. Parole commissioners have to travel to sit in a parole office — they’re not going into a prison, except for a few times — to read the materials and then conduct the hearing over video. New York is neanderthal in its use of technology; if you had a different kind of automated system, you might get materials ahead of time. I don’t know how much justice you can do when you’re short staffed in terms of commissioners, and you’re going through a lot of cases very quickly. This is someone’s life.”
Reform legislation
Aside from internal parole board reforms, Shapiro advocates for the Fair and Timely Parole Act, now a centerpiece of the criminal justice reform agenda in New York. Originally introduced in 2017, the legislation would change the statute that guides parole board commissioners’ decision-making by barring them from focusing solely on potential parolees’ original convictions. It would
also instruct commissioners to default to releasing someone unless they believe there is a risk that they will commit another crime.
Until such reforms are implemented, people who’ve worked to atone for their convictions will remain in prison far past their minimum release dates, Shapiro said.
“Everything is stacked against a person up for parole,” she said: “by the way commissioners ask questions, by the disrespect shown to them, being on a video camera, not necessarily prepared by institutional staff or others.”
“And people are nervous. This is their liberty that you’re talking about.”