Ben Austen, Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change, New York: Flatiron Books, 2023
review by Sherry Reames
I bought this book because of its focus on long-term prisoners seeking parole, but it sheds so much light on the larger stories surrounding today’s prison crisis that I think every member and friend of MOSES should read it. If we are serious about dismantling the systems of mass incarceration and the racial disparities that contribute to them, we need to understand how those systems, which didn’t exist fifty years ago, were created and what keeps them going despite the enormous toll they take on our society.
The Prison Boom. Austen dates the beginning of mass incarceration to 1973. That’s when the US prison population started to go up every year, increasing eightfold (from about 200,000 to a peak of more than 1.6 million). The seeds of this massive change were planted back in the 1960s, Austen reminds us. The Kerner Commission recommended attacking the “root causes of crime” with big investments in inner-city schools, job opportunities, and subsidies for childcare, food, and housing. But President Johnson and Congress backed off, redirecting more funds to policing instead.
The conservative administrations that followed went further, offering “the racial dog whistle of law and order” in place of civil rights (p. 53). “Tough-on-crime” politicians argued that leniency was dangerous; those sent to prison were “career criminals,” “predisposed to crime,” and releasing them just endangered the rest of us. Mandatory minimums were introduced in response to such arguments, including life without parole for habitual offenders (54-55). Despite some attempts to restore fairness and proportionality to sentencing, legislators kept voting for harsher punishments to show “their commitment to public safety” (79-80). Prosecutors were given new ways to stack multiple charges on a single crime. Children were increasingly charged as adults. The 1994 Crime Bill pushed states to adopt even more severe policies, giving longer sentences and allowing fewer paths to release.
That larger context is crucial for understanding what happened to Michael Henderson and Johnnie Veal, whose stories form the heart of Austen’s book. When these two Black teenagers went to prison in Illinois in the early 1970s, it was almost unimaginable that they would still be behind bars almost fifty years later. Michael, who committed a reckless but accidental homicide, turned down a plea deal for 7-20 years, a reasonable sentence for that crime. Johnnie was convicted of participating in an ambush that killed two Chicago police officers, but he too became eligible to start applying for parole as early as 1980. During the ensuing decades both he and Michael grew into responsible adults who could provide convincing evidence of being fully rehabilitated. But their transformation didn’t seem to matter. The norms had changed so much that the odds were stacked against anyone convicted of a violent offense who asked for a second chance.
Parole Issues. Five suspenseful and revealing chapters of Austen’s book are devoted to the multiple efforts made by Michael and Johnnie and their supporters to finally get them a positive decision from the Illinois Parole Board. Some of the procedural details are specific to Illinois, where the board has eleven members, any one of whom may interview each parole applicant and present that applicant’s case for a vote by the board as a whole. But others factors undoubtedly apply to parole decisions in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Individual commissioners’ education and life experiences matter, of course, and so do the news cycle and the political winds that happen to be blowing on the day when the board makes its decision. New to me and worth learning more about, I think, is the difference it makes for prisoners like Michael and Johnnie to have the assistance of lawyers or trained volunteers as they prepare their cases for parole.
When Michael is eventually released in 2018, after serving 46 years, Austen’s narrative follows him through the initial months of re-entry. The details in this narrative (chapters 9 and 11) should open the eyes of anyone who doesn’t know how much is required from individuals released to community supervision and how hard it is to avoid being revoked and sent back to prison. When Michael is arrested for a mistake with his electronic ankle bracelet, Austen observes that such setbacks are inevitable: “With more than a dozen requirements to complete each day, people on mandatory supervised release were bound to miss a couple now and then. Parole supervision was set up as if the goal were to prove someone’s criminality by catching them in any of thousands of infractions. The system was not broken. It operated as if failure were by design” (203).
Another valuable and eye-opening part of Austen’s book is his account of the victims’ rights movement (ch. 8) and how it has been used over the past several decades to counter liberal criminal-justice reforms. In effect, Austen argues, advocates for victims have successfully argued that criminal justice is a zero-sum game, with the protection of victims enhanced by reducing the rights of defendants. Victim families have become powerful witnesses at parole hearings, potentially making the outcome even more arbitrary because it might depend on their ability to be there every time and because they rarely know anything about how the offender has changed and reformed over the years.
The Possibility of Change. Given the unpredictability of parole decisions and their susceptibility to racial bias and other extraneous factors, prisoners themselves joined the campaign in the late twentieth century to replace discretionary parole with systems like Wisconsin’s Truth in Sentencing, which use set formulas to determine release dates. But those systems, which replaced parole in state after state, have not reversed the trend toward harsh sentencing, and they also lack the most positive features of parole: the incentives for prisoners to use their time well and the opportunity for authorities to reward positive change and correct unnecessarily long sentences.
Are there better alternatives? The most encouraging parts of Austen’s book introduce readers to some campaigns in Illinois and other states to greatly expand the possibility of second chances, at least for particular groups of prisoners– most often those whose offenses were committed during their teens or early twenties. Among the national organizations supporting such campaigns are the Sentencing Project, which urges a 20-year maximum (the norm in most countries) for nearly all cases; the Vera Institute of Justice, which argues that 15 years is enough for anyone who was under 25 at the time of the crime; and the American Bar Association, which supports universal “second look” resentencing after 10 years (237).
Persuading state governments to try implementing such reforms will not be easy. Indeed, as Austen reflects at the end of this book, the small steps toward decarceration that he witnessed in 2020-21, when Johnnie Veal was finally released, were followed before the 2022 election by a “punitive backlash [in which] all forms of early release from prison or jail were cast as existential threats” (292). Advocates of reform were quickly replaced by hard-liners, and prison populations went up again. But this valuable book persuaded me, and I think it will persuade other readers, that we have to keep trying. Our society can’t afford to continue “our devastating overreliance on imprisonment” (293), and we can’t undo the devastation unless we offer many more prisoners a second chance.