“No Release: Parole grant rates have plummeted in most states since the pandemic started”

The title of this post is the title of this new briefing from the Prison Policy Initiative authored by Emmett Sanders.  Here is how it gets started (with links from the original):

Earlier this year, Alabama’s Board of Pardons and Paroles made headlines when it denied parole to someone who had died ten days prior to their parole hearing.  This is just one of many threads in the Alabama parole board’s tapestry of dysfunction.  For months, their three-person parole board operated with just two members despite requiring a majority vote to grant parole.  It is no wonder that Alabama is on track to have a parole grant rate — the percent of parole petitions approved — of just 7% for 2023.  This also comes as studies show racial disparities in parole grant rates are widening: for example, non-white people in New York were released at a rate almost 29% less than their white counterparts in 2022 (up from a difference of around 19% between 2016 and 2021).

With parole board practices so much in the news, we thought it was important to look around the country and evaluate the direction in which state parole boards are moving.  We filed dozens of records requests and curated the best research to explore whether state parole boards are helping reduce mass incarceration or whether they are disregarding the hard-learned lessons of the pandemic, when they released even fewer people than before the crisis as people died behind prison walls.

In the 28 states for which we collected 2022 parole approval data, only 7 had grant rates above 50% — Connecticut, Idaho, Nevada, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming. Wyoming had the highest grant rate of 78%.  At the other end of justice’s sliding scale, Alabama (10%) and South Carolina (7%) have the lowest parole approval grant rates in the nation.

With few exceptions, parole grant rates dropped significantly from 2019 to 2022.  In the 26 states for which Prison Policy Initiative was able to track changes in parole approval rates from 2019-2022, only 6 — Connecticut (+29%), Georgia (+17%), Texas (+11%), Hawai’i (+8%), South Dakota (+6%), and Nevada (+1%) — have seen any increase since 2019.  In the remaining 20 states from which we received data, parole grant rates have seen either no change or have seen a marked decline, with South Carolina (-80%) and Alabama (-67%) seeing the biggest drop offs in grant rates.

But state parole boards did not only choose to release fewer people.  They heard fewer cases as well.  With the exceptions of Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Arkansas, parole boards continued to hear significantly fewer total cases in 2022 than they did in 2019.  The result is that since 2019, the number of people released through discretionary parole has decreased across the board.