Why Eliminating Parole Board Is Counter-Productive

Mandatory vs. Discretionary Prison Release By getting rid of parole boards in favor of mandatory sentences -- has this policy tended to reduce crime? For the sixteen states that have abolished parole boards in favor of mandatory sentencing -- has the rate of recidivism declined? Those are two of the questions approached in this paper; this paper notes that when parole boards are eliminated prisoners have no incentive to try and better themselves so they can be released earlier.

Thesis: getting rid of parole boards does little if anything to reduce recidivism, and in fact there is evidence that the parole system is more effective in reducing repeat criminality. Is Discretionary Release a Better System than Mandatory Release? According to journalist Fox Butterfield (writing in The New York Times), in 1999 several states that had eliminated parole boards "reinstituted" them because their prisons became overcrowded to the point that these states "were forced to release many of them early" (Butterfield, 1999).

In other words, under a discretionary system, some prisoners that had shown a change in mindset away from criminality were released before the initial sentencing date set by a court. But once the discretionary system was gone, prisoners were held until their mandatory sentences were up, which created the overcrowding situation. Butterfield quotes a leading authority on parole, Joan Petersilia, who is professor of criminology at the University of California at Davis.

Petersilia points out that when a dangerous criminal (who hasn't shown any change) is arbitrarily released because his sentence is up, it decreases the ability "to keep very dangerous offenders in prison" (Butterfield, p. 1). Petersilia points to the case of kidnapper Richard Allen Davis, who was rejected 6 times by the parole board in California, but when the state passed a law that ended parole, that system led to the automatic release of Davis when his sentence was up. In a few months Davis murdered a 13-year-old girl, Polly Klass.

Petersilia's point is thus made with a specific example of the danger of mandatory releases as opposed to discretionary releases. At the time that states were eliminating parole boards, politicians were being urged to get tough on crime, and so it was a "politically popular step" to get rid of parole boards, Butterfield explains (p. 1).

Some 80% of parolees in California in 1997 reported did not complete their parole responsibilities "successfully," Butterfield continues, and 57% of all individuals entering California state prisons were "not criminals convicted of new crimes," but rather they were parole violators, according to Petersilia (p. 2). These statistics give politicians a sense that they should dump parole boards, but on the other hand, there is "no statistical evidence that abolishing parole boards has lowered crime rates in any state," Butterfield asserts, based on his research into the matter (p. 3).

Meanwhile, micro-data research based on corrections-related data from state of Georgia show that typically parole boards assign "…longer terms to those with higher ex-ante recidivism risk" (Kuziemko, 2007). But inmates will "invest more in their own rehabilitation while they are in prison," and recidivate less once they get released, when they are under the jurisdiction of a parole board rather than a "fixed-sentence regime," according to research conducted by Ilyana Kuziemko of Harvard University.

In fact, the deeper research into getting rid of parole boards reveals that the "per-prisoner costs associated with imprisonment and recidivism rise by more than ten percent when a state abolishes parole" (Kuziemko, p. 1). An important point made by the author of this report is that parole boards can "increase the efficiency of correctional facilities" because the professional parole officers can better "identify low-risk inmates" than a judge can (Kuziemko, p. 2).

The judge has seen the offender at the time of the trial and the sentencing, but that judge hasn't been.