by MOSES Publications | Aug 30, 2024 | Newsletter, Prisons, Reviews
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.
by MOSES Publications | Mar 1, 2024 | Information, Life After Prison, Newsletter, Prisons, Reviews
Experts Speak on Correction – Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change, by Ben Austen
By Pam Gates and Sherry Reames
A good-sized crowd turned out on Feb. 1 to hear a panel organized by the UW Law School on issues surrounding parole: its pros and cons, how it works, how it doesn’t work, and how it could work. The panelists were journalist and author Ben Austen; Wisconsin ACLU staff attorney Emma Shakeshaft; John Tate II, Wisconsin Parole Commission chair 2019-’22, and Dant’e Cottingham, a former juvenile lifer who received parole during Tate’s term and is now associate director of EXPO. Professor Kate Finley of the UW Law School moderated this “dream panel,” as Austen described it.
When Finley asked Austen why he wrote this book, he answered: “It’s the 50-year mark for mass incarceration. We’re conditioned to not think about the prison system. But looking at parole shows you both the crime and all the subsequent time in prison. And what’s the point of all that time?” In the wide-ranging conversation that followed, the panelists returned repeatedly to this question, and to several related ones.
How are paroles granted (or not)? John Tate explained that an individual’s parole-eligibility date is given at sentencing. Once that date has passed, a parole commissioner evaluates each application for parole on the basis of the individual’s completion of required programs, in-prison conduct, release plan, and risk assessment if released, as well as the time served. The chair reviews the commissioner’s recommendation and makes a decision, sometimes release but most often deferral (apply again after a prescribed length of time). There is no appeal process.
How long are incarcerated people in Wisconsin waiting before parole? As Shakeshaft pointed out, almost everyone in Wisconsin who’s parole-eligible has been incarcerated since before 2000, when Wisconsin changed to Truth in Sentencing. Last year, 801 of those people applied for release on parole, but only 37 of them were allowed to go home. By contrast, over 400 were released under Tate’s leadership, from March 2020 to June 2022. “Covid gave the decision-makers courage,” Shakeshaft commented. Tate explained that Covid also gave him the opportunity to streamline the parole process.
What does parole achieve when the system works as intended? “Do we want parole?” Austen asked. “Will it make our society more just? There are hundreds of thousands of people living in the system, serving extremely long sentences. Parole offers moments of grace and miracle. We need systems of second chances.”
The possibility of parole can provide prisoners with hope and motivation to change. Cottingham called it “a blessing and a miracle” that he himself is now free, after serving 27 years for a crime at age 17, but he also made it clear that he turned his life around during those years. “Under [Wisconsin’s] old law,” he explained, “there were incentives to do well, to work hard. Under the new law – Truth in Sentencing – there are no incentives to participate in rehab and improvement.”
What often goes wrong with this system? When Illinois abolished its parole system in 1978, even people in prison approved of the change, Austen said, because they viewed the system as racist and unjust. ““Parole is a contest of storytelling,” he explained. “The parole board is not an investigative body. It’s supposed to weigh what has happened since the crime was committed, but there’s a catch-22: the crime story, which gets told over and over. And that story doesn’t change.” States that have moved beyond just focusing on the seriousness of the crime have succeeded in significantly increasing their parole rates, but that’s hard to do. Shakeshaft agreed, noting that mass incarceration wasn’t constructed overnight. The standards don’t allow for rehabilitation. Many bills and many policies have kept people inside. We see “catch-22” time and time again, she said.
In 2018, Shakeshaft and the ACLU filed suit against Wisconsin’s parole system, alleging violations of the Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments in the system’s treatment of individuals like Cottingham, who had committed crimes as minors and whose immaturity at the time of the crime was not being considered in deciding whether to grant parole. Many of those former juvenile offenders have subsequently been released, thanks in large part to the work of John Tate (who tried to reduce the barriers to such releases) as well as the ACLU. But Wisconsin’s prison population still includes many kids who received excessively long sentences, and those kids are disproportionately non-white. “We have to be intentional about race issues as we consider solutions,” Shakeshaft said.
Why should individuals convicted of a serious crime be given a second chance? “Because people change,” Tate said. “That’s the principle, to be applied universally – when it’s hard, and when it’s easy. I knew going into the role [of Parole Commission chair] that I’d have to take the hit [for controversial decisions],” he added. “Parole commissioners are civil servants, not subject to the whim of politicians. The chair? Not so much.” Tate strongly believes in Bryan Stevenson’s adage, that “We’re all better than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” He also asked, “Is the person seeking parole still the same person who committed the crime? If not, we’re punishing the wrong person.”
Cottingham added that we as a society need the talents and insights of the people in prison. They have a lot to offer, not just despite but also because of their prison experiences, which can make them ideal mentors for others who need help because of traumas, addictions, and social stigmas.
What about the role of victims in parole hearings? “For a crime victim, there is life before the crime and life after it,” Austen said. “Victims are locked into the process of parole. Their statements are always powerful. They’re asking for more punishment, but the system is failing them, too. Victims and criminals are trapped by the same experience. Restorative justice could bring something better.”
How can the correctional system do a better job of rehabilitation? “No program will rehabilitate everyone,” Tate said; “it starts with the person. We need to provide opportunities to help incarcerated people slow down their thinking, evaluate themselves.”
Cottingham testified that most of his experiences during incarceration seemed designed to break people, not to encourage self-evaluation. What finally touched him was a restorative justice circle organized by the Rev. Jerry Hancock. “I had to take an honest, clean look at myself,” Cottingham recalled. “In the circle, I was sitting next to a woman who had been the victim of a burglary. She was shaking the whole time she told the story, she was so traumatized by the experience. I thought, ‘I did that.’”
“What is rehab?” Cottingham mused later. “It’s being honest with oneself. We need trauma-informed care. Rehab in Wisconsin gets an ‘F’ from me. But there is hope; there are good people.”
What about the possibility of recidivism? Statistics show that practically no Wisconsin prisoners released on parole in recent years have been returned to prison for committing a new crime, but they all live with the possibility of being sent back for rule violations. “Your parole officer has your life in his or her hands,” Cottingham said. “When you’re locked up, the P.O. can investigate for 21 days. You can lose your job, your housing [waiting in jail for a decision.] Over 5,000 are in prison in Wisconsin due to rule violations.” Austen said that 25% of those in prison across the U.S. are there for rule violations.
How can we change the system? “Storytelling,” Austen said. Police unions and “tough-on-crime” politicians tend to oppose any form of mercy to former offenders, refusing to grant that people change. “We have to figure out how to tell better stories, stories with emotional appeal,” he said. “Statistics alone can’t change people’s minds.”
And former Parole Chair John Tate added: “We should be talking about what we’re doing – and why. The counter-narrative was so easy to consume.”
