Notable new accounting of parole practices in South Carolina

In this post a couple of weeks ago, I flagged this Bolts article about parole practices in Virginia.  That detailed piece detailed bow parole grants have declined considerably in the Old Dominion State.  Now Bolts has a new piece focused on parole practices in the Palmetto State titled “Parole Plunges in South Carolina as Governor-Appointed Board Issues Denial After Denial.”  I also recommend this piece in full, and here is how it gets started:

After appearing before the South Carolina Board of Paroles and Pardons more than 500 times in the past 35 years, lawyer Douglas Jennings announced last year that he had participated in his final hearing.  It had become routine for the board to reject his clients, regardless of how much he showed that they’d changed since their crime.  “I just couldn’t justify taking somebody’s money as a fee to appear before the parole board when I didn’t feel good about being able to produce the right results for them,” he told Bolts.

The panel, which Jennings has nicknamed “the rejection board”, has made it increasingly difficult for prisoners to win parole in South Carolina. In 2018, it released roughly four out every 10 people who applied.  The odds of release have declined since then: By 2022, the board only approved one out of every 10 petitions.  Last year, the board’s grant rate was seven percent.  This downward trend has continued into 2024. In the first four months of this year, the board approved only 5 percent of more than 900 parole applications, according to data provided by the board.

Declining parole rates in South Carolina are part of a national trend.  Parole, which permits early release for eligible prisoners who exhibit good behavior and have a low risk of committing another crime, has fallen across the country in recent years as parole boards have succumbed to political pressure and media narratives that stoke fears about crime. Between 2019 and 2022, grant rates plummeted in 18 out of 27 states surveyed by the the Prison Policy Initiative, a criminal justice reform research organization.  Often, this decline has directly stemmed from state officials’ desire to crack down on release, and to the professional and ideological backgrounds of the people they appoint to parole boards, as Bolts has reported recently about the parole boards in Alabama and Virginia.