CA extended password, but data shows no guarantee of release

from Joe GarciaCalMatters

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Thousands of California inmates face Parole Board hearings each year in hopes of a chance at freedom. It’s a daunting situation that results in high stakes for all involved.

Parole commissioners must follow legal standards, balancing issues of rehabilitation, public safety, and the lasting harm caused by the crime. Convicted criminals they must try to represent themselves truthfully — warts and all — as their detention records and psychological risk assessments are openly discussed. Victims and prosecutors attend the hearings, usually to challenge someone’s parole. From time to time they advocate the release of the prisoner.

Except for veto power of the governorcommissioners’ findings are usually the last buffer against an ex-offender’s release. Commissioners go through extensive training and take great care in deciding whether someone is suitable for parole, as evidenced by a recidivism rate of less than 3% — meaning 97% of inmates released on parole never reoffend. Less than 1% return for crimes involving violence against another person.

Over the past decade, California extended parole opportunities for people convicted of crimes during their youth and for older prisoners. The annual number of parole hearings has steadily increased, from 5,226 in 2018 to 9,017 in 2022, before reaching around 8,000 in 2023 and staying there. The state’s prison population has also dropped significantly in those years, from 128,000 in 2018. about 90,000 today.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation tried to changed its model of incarceration to focus on release from prison and re-entry into society. Offering better opportunities to young prisoners early in their incarceration can help them avoid the pitfalls of drug use, violence and gang activity in prison. Older inmates tend to “grow past” their previous criminal behavior.

By incentivizing rehabilitation programs, substance abuse treatment, and higher education, the system now seeks to help offenders work productively toward personal growth and self-improvement.

But at the same time, even with seemingly far more options and incentives, the success rate for inmates found eligible for parole is steadily declining, from 39% in 2018 to roughly 35% in 2019 to 2021 to below 25% in 2025.

CalMatters spoke with parole experts to try to understand the dynamics behind the numbers. No one could point to a single reason for the significant drop in parole eligibility rates; instead, experts said the downward turn could be due to many different factors.

Here’s what we learned:

Some older inmates struggle at hearings

Many older California lifers began their sentences decades ago when opportunities for parole were scarce. They logically believed that they had no hope of ever being freed. Many were stuck in remote prisons with no access to rehabilitation programs. They now face significant challenges to fully understand and articulate the evidence of personal transformation that parole commissioners need, such as insight, remorse and accountability.

“The number of elderly people now eligible for parole is increasing significantly,” said Lily Paratore, director of legal services for Uncommon Law, an organization that represents dozens of parole applicants each year at no cost to inmates. “In 2013 only 19% of hearings were over 60s, but now 32% of hearings are over 60s and of course that just reflects the aging prison population.”

About 19,000 inmates are 55 or older, according to the state budget proposal released by Gov. Gavin Newsom this month.

And as these older inmates continue to age, their mental and physical health can deteriorate and adversely affect their ability to appear before the parole board. Instead of becoming better prepared over time, repeated parole denials simply leave them feeling increasingly frustrated, confused, and discouraged.

Less urgency than some young offenders

The stakes are not nearly the same for offenders without a life sentence who committed crimes while under 26. Enhanced parole options now allow them to stand trial after 15 years. Unlike lifers, they know they have a predetermined release date. Being denied parole could mean waiting another five or 10 years to come home, instead of potentially never being found eligible for parole.

Also, younger people may not make the most of the first 15 years behind bars to pursue rehabilitation. Some do, but they hesitate a lot before they understand themselves. They tend to see their hearing as a chance to serve a reduced sentence rather than their only chance at freedom.

In contrast, young offenders serving life sentences get their first chance at parole after serving a minimum of 20 or more often 25 years. This naturally gives them more time to mature and prepare for the hearing. They evaluate their parole opportunities in ways that people without life sentences simply cannot because their sentences are unlimited.

High bar for sex offenders

Sex offenses elicit the most scrutiny at parole hearings and raise the most psychological red flags. Because these crimes are so difficult to talk about openly in group discussion—especially within prison communities—few rehabilitation programs are designed to address the specific triggers, causal factors, and flawed belief systems that underlie these crimes.

“There are so many different types of people who commit sex crimes for a wide variety of reasons, and successful programming for these people needs to be tailored to that particular problem,” said former Parole Board Executive Director Jennifer Shaffer. “So you’ll have, for example, sadists, people who actually get turned on physically by torturing people. That’s very different from someone who has anger issues and expresses them through basically sexually dominating someone.”

Because it is much more difficult for sex offenders to demonstrate to the parole board the necessary personal insight and transformation, parole commissioners are less likely to clear these offenders as no longer posing an “unreasonable risk to public safety.”

Part of the problem is that it is more difficult for sex offenders to undergo a psychological risk assessment. “As horrible as this sounds, they may at some point have equated pain with sexual arousal — and breaking that connection is really difficult and requires very, very intense programming,” Shaffer said.

A prisoner’s fingerprint

Parole commissioners review a person’s entire record days before their hearing and are tasked with interpreting all the facts in it through the lens of public safety. Any piece of information – such as visitor logs, notes, personal expenses and more – can be considered relevant.

“Over the past few years, the world of information that the board is looking at has grown — even though that information is not necessarily related to the risk of violence,” Paratore said. “They’re looking for more and more (unemployment) fraud and evasion of restitution. They’re looking at medical records. They’re looking at confidential information more and more.

“What they think they have to consider has just grown without any safeguards and has resulted in more people being denied parole because the board doesn’t know how to properly interpret that information. This is especially true for medical records.”

California began providing free electronic tablets to its incarcerated population in 2021, ensuring that all phone calls and text messages are now digitally monitored and ready for analysis and search by artificial intelligence. These types of detailed records can easily be highlighted now and provided to parole commissioners.

For example, more attention could be paid to how prisoners receive outside money placed in their institutional trust accounts and how they pay for canteens and other services. Following the easing of COVID and the massive rash of fraudulent unemployment claims across the country, the operation of some incarcerated individuals’ trust accounts has been called into question. The extra level of scrutiny drew unwanted attention to other forms of potential misconduct.

Restitution fraud

Criminal courts can order large amounts of restitution when a person is convicted, usually broken down into court fees and victim services fees. Prisoners who owe restitution will always have 50% of all wages or income withheld until the debt is paid. If a person works in the kitchen for $80 a month, he gets $40. Same thing if the family sends them $200. They will get $100 to spend.

Especially for lifers convicted of violent crimes, restitution can be quite high and it seems impossible to complete the payment through these 50% withheld installments. To avoid losing half of the money they spend, some inmates direct their families and friends to deposit money into other people’s accounts who don’t owe restitution. Prisoners will agree to a much lower deductible fee between themselves, usually 20%, and keep more money to spend on the canteen.

But such under-the-table transactions now leave more of a digital footprint. Parole commissioners want to see a person who shows remorse and demonstrates an awareness of the impact of the crime on victims. It is a bad look for the same individual to be seen participating avoidance of restitution to save money.

“The restitution issue is the only thing I can think of to really explain the drop in the grant rate,” said Vanessa Nelson-Sloan, director of the Life Support Alliance, an advocacy group for inmates and former lifers. “Sometimes when they pass a new law, a new population comes into the parole cycle, but recently there haven’t been any new laws to change the considerations.

“I’m so sure that’s all it is, because that’s all I hear from people who are being denied — restitution, restitution, restitution.”

CalMatters data reporter Jeremiah Kimmelman contributed to this story.

Joe Garcia is a contributor to California Local News.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.