The Effect of Parole Board Racial Composition on Prisoner Outcomes

Parole boards have traditionally assessed prisoners’ future risk and rehabilitation prospects in deciding on early release from prison. However, parole boards may do more. In some systems, they may deny parole applications for punitive reasons, thus acting as a resentencing authority. This study conducted a qualitative analysis of the punitive discourses of parole decision-making, with Israel as a comparative case study. Through interviews with 20 chairpersons of Israeli Parole Boards, we found three themes of punitive parole decision-making: (a) preserving public confidence in the criminal justice system; (b) preserving penal proportionality; and (c) re-censuring an especially depraved moral character. The findings suggested that parole boards’ punitive discretion is multidimensional and complex. Such punitive discretion may be openly implemented, it may be cloaked as risk assessment, or decided without formal recognition. The findings further indicated that resentencing through discretionary parole may not only conflict with rehabilitation and risk aims, but may also raise challenges for retributive and deterrent penal policy. Implications for comparative parole policy are discussed.

Parole and parole boards play critical roles in criminal justice systems. With parolee numbers and imprisonment rates increasing in many countries, parole decision-making is a crucial contributor to prison population sizes and, more broadly, public confidence in the operation of correctional systems. This article examines the public understanding of and confidence in parole, from the perspectives of parole board members and other parole authority staff. It aims to determine whether and, if so, how, public opinion influences parole decision-making and how parole boards feel they can or should respond to this. It draws on interviews with 80 parole board members and other relevant staff in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Scotland.

The American Communist Party and the “Negro Question” from the Founding of the Party to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International J. A. Zumoff During the Great Depression, the Communist Party (CP) of the United States was in the forefront of denouncing anti-black racism and discrimination. “However one judges their motives,” one historian wrote, “communists were often at the front in the battle for black rights.” In the South, communists organized black and white workers and sharecroppers and bravely fought against Jim Crow racism and capitalist oppression. In the urban North, black and white communists fought against eviction and for relief. Communists fought against the frame-up of the Scottsboro Boys, exposing and fighting Jim Crow “lynch law justice.”1 Despite this work in the 1930s, the CP’s approach to what it called the “Negro question” during the first decade of its existence would not indicate the likelihood of such a development. Upon its founding in 1919, the CP had one black member, and throughout the 1920s it probably [End Page 53] counted less than 100 black members out of a total membership of at least 15,000. In 1929, it still had no more than 300 black members. As a result, much of the historical studies of the intersection between blacks and communists have dealt lightly with the 1920s and focused on the 1930s, such as Mark Naison’s Communists in Harlem During the Depression and Robin Kelly’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. However, Winston James has argued that the history of black Communists from the 1930s onward “cannot be separated from the earlier existence and efforts of black socialists,” a history he labeled “understudied and largely unknown.” James’s article, as well as his earlier study of Caribbean radicalism in the United States, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, offer invaluable insight into the history of black radicalism that was the antecedent of communist activity. Nonetheless, the question is still left, how did the communists, starting from a position of such weakness, tap into this historic substratum and end up playing such an important role in black politics in the 1930s?2 The archives of the Communist International (Comintern), made available after the destruction of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, provide historians rich material with which to attempt to answer this question. Mark Solomon’s The Cry Was Unity (1998), that used sources from the Comintern archives to update the work begun in his 1972 doctoral dissertation, showed that these archives could yield important finds. Nonetheless, the bulk of Solomon’s study focused on the 1930s. Randi Storch’s Red Chicago made extensive use of Comintern sources in its fascinating treatment of the Chicago communists in the early 1930s, but neither made the issue of party policy on black oppression its emphasis, nor focused on the party’s early years. Finally, a recent article by Hakim Adi, on “The Communist International and Black Liberation in the Interwar Years,” has shown the importance of Comintern in the fight for black liberation internationally during this period, but did not focus on the details of Comintern intervention in the early party.3 Using sources from Comintern and other archives, this article examines the evolution of the communist position on the American Negro question from the formation of the communist movement in 1919 through 1924, emphasizing the interaction of a trinity of historical agents in the early communist movement. First, it examines the history and [End Page 54] views of the early communist leadership in the United States, which was almost entirely white and largely indifferent to the Negro question. Second, it examines the first black communists who struggled to make the CP address black oppression. Finally, it examines the intervention of the leadership of the Comintern into the American CP to make its leadership understand the importance of the Negro question. It argues that the original, largely white, leadership of the CP maintained the traditional social-democratic color-blind approach of ignoring black oppression until the Comintern forced them to address the issue. At the same time, the presence of a small black communist cadre served as a mechanism within the...

Research concerning racial discrimination within the criminal justice system has focused largely upon the police and the courts. There is reason to believe, however, that differential treatment may be more common in less visible proceedings. This research addresses that possibility through an examination of the cases of 243 prisoners who appeared before a parole board from October 1, 1970, through September 30, 1971. There is no evidence of direct racial discrimination. There is evidence, however, that the board differentiated between black and white prisoners in selecting and weighting information when deciding parole. Compared to white prisoners, black prisoners had an additional criterion to meet in order to be paroled—participation in institutional treatment programs. The imposition of this additional criterion indirectly resulted in racial inequities. Black parolees who were treatment participants served a significantly longer portion of their sentence than did white treatment participants. The few black prisoners who were paroled without participating in treatment served a shorter proportion of their sentence than other prisoners. These few black prisoners were older, more likely to be property offenders and had slightly more prior convictions than black treatment participants. These findings are interpreted as indicating a bias against racial militancy.

This book is a study of the workings of the Discretionary Lifer Panels of the Parole Board, the body charged with the responsibility for making decisions on the release of discretionary life sentence prisoners. It traces the origins and development of the Discretionary Lifer Panels following the landmark Weeks and Thynne decisions of the European Court of Human Rights which led to the establishment of DLPs, and examines the way in which the DLPs developed subsequently - often rather differently to what was originally envisaged as necessary to comply with the decision of the ECHR. This book provides a fascinating case study of a little-known part of the criminal justice system, and explores at the same time the wider issues that have arisen - in particular the impact of the ECHR and the Human Rights Act on the criminal justice system; the relationship between the Parole Board and the Prison and Probation Services; the differences between release procedures for different categories of life sentence prisoner, and those detained compulsorily under the Mental Health Act;the broader social, legal and political context in which DLPs operate, and the nature of discretionary decision-making in the criminal justice system field. the first detailed study - from a leading authority in the field - of the way decisions are reached on discretionary life sentence prisoners explores the impact of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act on the working of the criminal justice system of interest to practitioners and academics concerned with the criminal justice system.

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

The association between substance use and crime is very common, but complex. Several countries have found strategies to face drug abuse and criminality that may exist associated to it, seeking to reduce overcrowded prisons and to promote the reductions of criminal recidivism and/or substance use. Through the guidelines of PRISMA, a systematic review was conducted with the aim to explore the different criminal reactions to individuals who use substances and are involved in the criminal justice system, namely the role of treatment and/or punishment in the reduction of crime recidivism and/or drug (ab)use. After gathering the following criteria of inclusion (individuals who use substances and are involved in the criminal justice system, between 18 and 65 years old, regardless of gender; consumers of licit/illicit psychoactive substances; without psychopathology not related with use/abuse of drugs; treatment programs; judicial interventions) the database found 155 articles between 1971 and 2022 from which 110 were selected for analysis (57 are from Academic Search Complete, 28 from PsycInfo, 10 from Academic Search Ultimate, seven from Sociology Source Ultimate, four from Business Source Complete, two from Criminal Justice s, and two from PsycArticles); additional records were included trough manual search. From these studies, 23 articles were included, as they answered the research question, and therefore, constitute the final sample of this revision. The results indicate treatment as an effective response of the criminal justice system in the reduction of criminal recidivism and/or drug use, addressing the criminogenic effect of reclusion/imprisonment. Therefore, interventions that privilege treatment should be chosen, although there are still gaps in terms of evaluation, monitoring and scientific publications regarding the effectiveness of treatment in this population.

The Constitutionalization of Parole: Fulfilling the Promise of Meaningful Review

Parole rejection/approval of inmates is subject to the decision-making of the parole board members of each prison. Previous studies have found that many factors influence the decision of the parole board. This study introduces Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), which is commonly used in commercial and industrial fields, to further explore the subjective factors parole board members consider in parole decisions. This study surveyed 20 parole board members in Taiwan and the results show that the major factors affecting the decision-making of parole boards include crime characteristics and offender recidivism risk, with crime characteristics being the most important factor.

Over the last 30 years, the victims' rights movement has expanded the role of victims in the American criminal justice system. As a result of this movement, judges, prosecutors and parole boards must now hear victims' views at all stages of the criminal justice process, including plea bargains, and sentencing and parole decisions. Legislative efforts have been spearheaded by victims' families, and legislation has been named after deceased victims. Also, victims' families can now view executions in states across the country. The victims' right movement assumes that the criminal justice system should privilege victims' interests over those of society. In so doing, it denies society as a consideration, which is tantamount to a denial of society itself. This article positions victims' rights' denial of society within the current conjuncture, marked as it is by the contradiction between neoliberalism and American liberalism. Victims' rights' denial of society is an expression of the denial of society implicit in American neoliberalism, which seeks to privilege individual interests over those of society. This paper argues that victims' rights is a powerful element of the neoliberal project for three reasons. First, victims' rights imputes the authority of legal discourse to neoliberalism's denial of society. Second, important actors in the rise of neoliberalism have also worked to establish victims' rights. Finally, victims' rights comprehensively circulates throughout America and offers powerful points of identification that incorporate Americans into the victims' rights formation. I explore the denial of society in three victims' rights practices: naming criminal legislation after crime victims and passing such laws in honour of victims; allowing victims' families to view executions; and prosecutors, judges and police personnel making legal decisions according to victims' wishes. I examine the consonant denial of society in three neoliberal practices – monetarism, supply-side economics and welfare reform – and demonstrate how neoliberal advocates like Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Paul Gann worked to advance victims' rights. I also describe the production, consumption and comprehensive circulation of victims' rights texts. Finally, I consider Cultural Studies' unique contribution to legal studies.

This is a comprehensive guide to challenging decisions of criminal courts and public bodies in the criminal justice system using judicial review. Written by a team of criminal and public law practitioners, it considers claims for judicial review arising in the criminal justice system, which now represent a distinct area of public law. These claims are set apart by special considerations and rules; for example, on the limits of the High Court's jurisdiction or the availability of relief during ongoing proceedings. Criminal practitioners may lack the background to spot public law points. Equally, public law specialists may be unfamiliar with criminal law and types of issues that arise. Criminal Judicial Review is intended as a resource for both. The book deals with the principles, case law, remedies and, the practice and procedure for obtaining legal aid and costs. It will be of assistance to any practitioner preparing or responding to judicial review claims involving the following: - The Police and the Crown Prosecution Service. - Magistrates’ courts, the Crown Court and Coroners. - Prisons and the Parole Board. - Statutory bodies such as the Independent Police Complaints Commission and the Legal Aid Agency. - Claimants who are children, young persons or have mental disorders. - The international dimension including extradition proceedings and European Union law. - Practical considerations such as CPR Part 54, remedies, legal aid and costs. From the Foreword by The Rt Hon Lord Judge “The book is offered in clear and simple style, focussing less on esoteric theoretical considerations and more on the practical needs of the practitioner. It brings together materials relating to public law with which a criminal specialist may be less well informed, and material relevant to the criminal justice processes which may not be immediately apparent to the public law specialist. It will assist with the preparation of arguments, and also enable submissions which are unarguable to be discarded. It will therefore provide valuable guidance in this broad and developing area of practice.”

The objective of this study was to conduct a systematic search of the literature for studies that estimated the prevalence/incidence of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) in correctional systems in different countries and, based on these data, to estimate a) the number of people with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)/FASD within the criminal justice system population, and b) the relative risk of becoming imprisoned for individuals with FAS/FASD compared with those without FAS/FASD. A systematic world literature review of published and unpublished studies concerning the prevalence/incidence of FASD in correctional systems was conducted in multiple electronic bibliographic databases. Very little empirical evidence is available on the prevalence of FASD in correctional systems. There were no studies estimating the prevalence/incidence of FASD in correctional systems found for any country other than Canada and the USA. The few studies that have identified incarcerated individuals with FASD estimate that the number of undiagnosed persons in correctional facilities is high. Based on available Canadian data, this study estimates that youths with FASD are 19 times more likely to be incarcerated than youths without FASD in a given year. More studies investigating the prevalence/incidence of alcohol-affected people in the criminal justice system are required. There is an urgent need to raise awareness about the prevalence and disabilities of individuals with FASD in the criminal justice system and about appropriate responses. The criminal justice system is an ideal arena for intervention efforts aimed at the rehabilitation and prevention or reduction of recidivism in this unique population.

The discretion that is inherent in legal decision making creates ambiguity about the reasons for parole boards’ decisions. Although research has documented some of the factors shaping parole decisions for male prisoners, the release process for female prisoners remains largely unexplored. This study asks: What characteristics of violent female offenders and their offences do parole boards emphasize in their decision to release? We employ a multi-method approach to (1) determine the association between parole release and individual, offence and institutional characteristics, (2) clarify the issues that parole boards emphasize when determining whether a prisoner is ‘ready’ to return to the community and 3) analyse how parole board members reconcile past and unalterable factors in a woman’s criminal background with concerns about her future dangerousness by assessing her degree of insight into her crime/s, criminogenic factors and triggers and whether she has learned alternative strategies for managing her potential risk. Data from federally sentenced women in Canada suggest that a parole board’s assessment of a violent offender’s ability to ‘change’ positively emerges as a central concern in whether she will be granted parole. Despite their discretionary power, parole boards thus appear to reinforce a dominant correctional logic that requires women to take responsibility for their choices and target dynamic risk factors in order to reduce the likelihood of recidivism.

Parole board decision-making is increasingly under scrutiny. Incidents of high-profile crimes committed by parolees have prompted Australian governments to conduct reviews of parole systems – this occurred in Queensland during July 2016 where changes were implemented resulting in the establishment of a completely new Parole Board Queensland (PBQ) by 2017. However, these changes remain unevaluated given the general reluctancy of parole boards to publish decisions. Furthermore, existing literature on parole board decision-making does not consistently indicate why and how factors are prioritised throughout the decision-making process. This thesis contributes new knowledge about parole board decision-making by examining an under-investigated area of decision-making: a process of preliminary parole refusal where the PBQ outlines reasons in refusing an application of parole, open to submissions from Prisoners’ Legal Service (PLS). Focal concerns perspective, a framework which understands how criminal justice actors may prioritise certain factors and make decisions, is used as a theoretical framework to guide a thematic analysis of 30 PLS casefiles drawn from the years 2017-2019 post-reform. By examining the focal concerns provided by the PBQ in preliminarily refusing parole, and whether and how PLS’s responses prompts the PBQ to reconsider the final outcome, this thesis indicates what concerns remain pertinent throughout the process after being contested, and adds to the limited research which investigates the effect of legal aid intervention upon parole outcomes. Analysis indicates that all focal concerns (blameworthiness, community protection and practical constraints) are evident to an extent in PBQ decisions, with PLS submissions elucidating further considerations relevant to the parole decision-making process. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings is discussed.

The proportion of incarcerated individuals in the United States who suffer from mental illness has increased significantly in recent years, and the treatment of these individuals within criminal justice systems has come under increased scrutiny. In Charlottesville and Albemarle County, as well as in jurisdictions across the country, there is a lack of coordination between the criminal justice system and mental health services, which leads to a gap in fully understanding the tendencies and trends within the inmate population suffering from mental illness. In an effort ameliorate this lack of coordination, Albemarle/Charlottesville seeks to become the second community in the country (behind Camden, NJ) to have data from community mental health service providers and criminal justice agencies analyzed together and the first to do so with a focus on a released jail cohort. The Albemarle/Charlottesville criminal justice system is a leader in evidence-based decision making practices, which aim to improve public safety and reduce jail overcrowding by using data and data-driven analysis in order to determine how to best manage the inmate population suffering from mental illness. This project contributes to the evidence-based practice by investigating treatment linkages and efficacy of treatments for individuals whom the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail has referred for further mental health evaluation and treatment. The project required merging data, covering an 18-month study period from July 2015 through December 2016, held by seven participating agencies, including the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, Charlottesville Police Department, Emergency Communications Center, Region 10 Community Services, Offender Aid and Restoration, Virginia Department of Corrections, and University of Virginia Hospital. By using data from the Brief Jail Mental Health Screener administered to individuals during jail intake, this project tracks the inmates that have been referred for mental health evaluation or treatment in order to identify any patterns or similarities between these individuals as they are diverted from, move through, or exit the jail system. Identifying information was used to merge disparate datasets, with a core dataset containing 3,848 unique inmates, on a secure computer and server. The merged datasets, stripped of personally identifiable information, were used for analysis to answer research questions including characteristic differences between referred and non-referred cohorts, the efficacy of Crisis Intervention Teams, and the effectiveness of treatment on recidivism reduction. Of the 3,848 inmates in the jail data, 2,151 inmates took a brief mental health screener and 23% of screened individuals were referred. Of this referred cohort, there was roughly a 44% treatment linkage rate of receiving mental health, substance abuse, or other services from Region 10. This unique combination of datasets that merges information from multiple sources lays the foundation for future collaborative efforts among the participating agencies and provides a framework for exploring additional research questions beyond the scope of this effort.