Older age parole makes sense for CA’s aging inmates

By Keith Whatley, especially for CalMatters

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Guest Comment written by

Re: “Reform that re-traumatizes: California’s elderly parole program burdens victims, scares community“

When a parole decision draws public attention, the conversation too often stops at the crime. This is especially true of California’s elderly parole program, which deserves to be understood on its merits, not defined by the most extreme cases.

Evidence shows that elder parole works. The people it covers pose minimal risk. The process that evaluates them is rigorous. Ignoring all of this comes at a huge cost to taxpayers, to victims, and to any honest definition of public safety.

To be eligible for adult parole, someone must be at least 50 years old and have served at least 20 years. roughly 20% of California’s prison population is over 55 years of age and the number is growing every year. It costs $128,000 a year to incarcerate a younger person and two to three times that for someone over 80.

An increasing number are living with dementia. California has opened memory care units in two prisons for people who attend parole hearings and can’t remember why they’re there.

An elder’s parole gives a hearing, not a guarantee of freedom. Less than 10% of first-time adult parole hearings result in parole being granted; 16.4% overall. When the board grants parole, it is because the evidence supports it.

Parole for sex offenders is even rarer. Sex offenders receive the most scrutiny at parole hearings, and these individuals must clear sex offender-specific risk assessments before being found suitable. Those released are placed on the sex offender registry and subject to sex-offense-focused supervision, often including GPS ankle monitoring and mandatory treatment.

Victims have the right to be notified of parole hearings, to attend, to speak, and to have their safety considered.

What happens when people are released? There is not a single reported case of reoffending by someone who has been released early. In fact, the reoffending rate for this group is only 1.8% (and that’s 0.6% for each violent reoffending), while the average reoffending rate for all people released from California prisons is nearly 20 times higher at 39%.

For those over 65, recidivism nationally approaches zero, which applies to all types of crime. “Aging out of crime” is one of the most established findings in criminal justice research.

Ignoring this data doesn’t make anyone safer. It just costs more.

California prisons house roughly a third of them $17.5 billion health care budgetdriven largely by an aging population. While the prison population is is expected to decrease by 2030, we’re spending more every year to incarcerate people whom the evidence tells us are safe to release—money that could go to what actually keeps communities safe: victim trauma recovery, mental health treatment, housing, and programs that prevent harm before it happens.

The single strongest indicator of whether someone can safely return to their community is time served and age. There isn’t cumulative beneficial or deterrent effect prison after 20 years. Adult parole applicants by definition have already passed this threshold.

When survivor outrage, fueled by misleading rhetoric, drives legislation, we end up with thousands of people sentenced to die in prison, regardless of who they became after committing their crimes.

Ironically, such a legislative decision led to prison overcrowding in the 1980s and 1990s, prompting the Supreme Court to declare our prisons unconstitutionally overcrowded. Elderly parole has become a release mechanism in California that instills hope that a person’s rehabilitation matters and will be recognized.

The law requires release if a person no longer poses an unreasonable danger. For older parole applicants, the evidence suggests that they do not.

Californians deserve real public safety, not the expensive illusion of it.

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