Parole Decisions Research Articles

Algorithms and Recidivism: A Multi-disciplinary Systematic Review

The adoption of algorithms across different jurisdictions have transformed the workings of the criminal justice system, particularly in predicting recidivism risk for bail, sentencing, and parole decisions. This shift from human decision-making to statistical or algorithmic tool-assisted decision-making has prompted discussions regarding the legitimacy of such adoption. Our paper presents the results of a systematic review of the literature on criminal recidivism, spanning both legal and empirical perspectives. By coalescing different approaches, we highlight the most prominent themes that have garnered the attention of researchers so far and some that warrant further investigation.

Examining Parole Decision-Making Pre- and Post-COVID-19: Does Elderly Status Matter?

Due to the growing concerns of mass incarceration, coupled with the recent global pandemic of COVID-19, parole is in the spotlight as an avenue for early release. At the start of COVID-19, the elderly incarcerated population received attention due to their vulnerabilities. In this article, the likelihood of parole release and the amount of time candidates must wait postdenial are examined by accounting for the COVID-19 period and a parole candidate’s elderly status. Data come from a U.S. state parole board’s written decisions issued between 2017 and 2022 for individuals sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. While logistic regression models showed COVID-19 and elderly status did not influence the likelihood of release, ordinary least squares (OLS) models found that having a hearing after the onset of the pandemic was significantly associated with shorter interval term lengths. The article concludes with implications for replicating similar studies to understand discretionary release outcomes.

Analysis of the Reasons for the Rejection of Parole Applications in Macao with 10 Criminal Judgments as Examples

The criminal law of the Macao Special Administrative Region has been influenced by European criminal law, and its provisions on parole are also very distinctive. This paper analyzes the current judicial situation of the application of the parole system in the Macao Special Administrative Region and carries out the necessary theoretical research and analysis by taking the relevant past judgments as the object of study. Based on the analysis and summarization of the cases, it can be concluded that the parole system of the Macao Special Administrative Region is characterized by the importance of the completeness of the formal and substantive elements, the impact of parole on society, and the individual’s right to consent to parole. Both the protection of the right to request parole and the provision of appeal against parole decisions are the application of the right to parole doctrine.

Parole decisions about perpetrators of domestic violence in England and Wales

AbstractThis study, the first to examine parole decisions for perpetrators of domestic violence in England and Wales, examines how parole boards reach decisions through a thematic analysis of interviews with 20 Parole Board members, alongside logistic regressions of all 137 parole decisions about perpetrators in an 18‐month period. In this sample, recommendations of professionals, especially psychologists, were by far the strongest predictor of a release decision. The nature of offending was also significant in predicting release. Size and composition of the panel may also affect decisions. More panel members, and longitudinal feedback, may encourage more reflective, considered decision making.

A place for public concerns in parole decision making in Japan

AbstractIn recent years, parole decision makers have grappled with an intensifying challenge in addressing public concerns. While discussions on the rise of ‘parole populism’ have emerged, especially in Canada, the United States, Australia and England and Wales, little is known about the way public concerns influence parole release in Japan. This article engages in legal‐systematic analysis of the intricate relationship between public concerns and Japanese parole decision making in general and release from life imprisonment in particular. The article argues that, while Japanese selective parole decision making considering public concerns in secrecy may have partially contributed to political rhetoric encouraging parole, it also poses unique challenges distinct from those in Anglophone jurisdictions. It reveals the value of fostering a transparent and accountable parole decision‐making system to promote a more balanced and fairer approach to parole in the Japanese context.

Rehabilitation vs. risk: What predicts parole board decisions and rehabilitation authority recommendations?

Parole decisions have a dramatic impact on individuals’ lives as well as public safety. Studies seeking to discern which factors predict parole decisions highlighted the role played by correctional reports submitted to parole boards by rehabilitation authorities; however, very few offered any in-depth insight into them. Moreover, research also failed to explore the interplay of reasoning employed by parole boards and rehabilitation authorities, which seem to represent different orientations and interests—risk reduction vs. the chances of rehabilitation. Using a quantitative content analysis of documents composed by parole boards and the rehabilitation authority in Israel, we have extracted risk or chance factors from 306 cases. Logistic regression models demonstrated that, while rehabilitation authority recommendations may be predicted solely by factors that focus on rehabilitation, as can be expected, parole board decisions seem to give similar weight to both rehabilitation and risk factors. The study's findings shed light on the dynamic of these two organizations and could enhance public trust in the early release process.

The Effects of an Incarcerated Person’s Gender Identity and Crime Type on Mock Parole Board Members’ Decisions

Parole members are tasked with deciding which incarcerated person is granted parole; however, factors such as the incarcerated person’s gender identity in combination with the crime committed could negatively affect this decision. This study investigated the effects of the incarcerated person’s gender identity (male, female, nonbinary) and crime committed (sexual assault, theft/larceny) on mock parole members’ decisions and perceptions of the incarcerated person. MTurk participants (N = 467) acted as mock parole board members. Participants read vignettes describing an incarcerated person eligible for parole, and participants rated their likelihood to release the incarcerated person and perception of the incarcerated person. We found that the incarcerated person’s gender identity affected participants’ parole decisions and perceptions of the incarcerated person, such that, in general, male incarcerated people were perceived more negatively than nonbinary and female incarcerated people, and female incarcerated people were perceived the most positively. Crime severity also affected parole decisions, such that incarcerated people who commit a crime of sexual assault were less likely to receive parole and were perceived the most negatively compared to incarcerated people who commit a crime of theft/larceny. There was no interaction between the incarcerated person’s gender identity and crime severity. This study can provide insight on perceptions of nonbinary incarcerated people, and how these perceptions compare to binary incarcerated people.

Parole Decision-Making and Empirical Practice: A Survey of Paroling Authorities

Paroling authorities should have a clear understanding of the empirical support for factors considered in suitability determinations. We presented a survey to paroling authorities across the United States and Canada to examine their purview and information considered in decision-making. We situated the findings among existing empirical research suggesting best practices for consideration of specific factors in parole decision-making. Paroling authorities claim to give equal consideration to all information available, regardless of its empirical relation to suitability for release. Probed further, they display a good understanding of the empirical support for and the weight to be applied to each factor.

Robin Fitzgerald, Arie Freiberg, Shannon Dodd, Lorana Bartels, Parole on Probation: Parole Decision-Making, Public Opinion and Public Confidence

Robin Fitzgerald, Arie Freiberg, Shannon Dodd, Lorana Bartels, <i>Parole on Probation: Parole Decision-Making, Public Opinion and Public Confidence</i>

Parole as a boxing match: Lifers, prosecution, and the adversarial making of parole hearings

Despite being depicted as powerful actors, the work of the State's representatives in parole hearings has to date remained largely invisible. In this study, we aimed to fill this gap through a qualitative analysis of the oral arguments of prosecutors in 130 lifers’ parole board hearings in Israel. The findings suggest that prosecutors construct lifers’ parole hearings as an adversarial, yet asymmetrical, “boxing match.” Three themes were unveiled: Prosecutors construct the lifers as worthy of re-censure; view the lifers as solely responsible for their parole release; and construct the lifers as inherently suspicious individuals. In conclusion, prosecutors’ parole work seems to be more a defense of their shared professional identity as crime fighters than a promotion of an individualized, inclusive, and future-oriented parole decision-making process.

Book Review: Parole on probation: parole decision-making, public opinion and public confidence

Book Review: Parole on probation: parole decision-making, public opinion and public confidence

Addressing racial bias in parole decisions: A pre-registered study of the Five-Level Risk and Needs System of risk communication

ABSTRACT Indigenous peoples are disproportionately influenced by biases in risk assessment and risk communication. The Five-Level Risk and Needs System (5-levels) is a risk communication strategy that adds standardized definitions to risk categories and incorporates evidence-based recommendations for rehabilitation. The current pre-registered study examined the ability of the 5-levels to mitigate biases in a mock parole case using a 2 (risk communication format: status quo vs. 5-levels) × 2 (race: Indigenous vs. White) between-subjects design. Four hundred and twenty-three community members residing in Canada were asked to make decisions regarding parole and other risk, treatment amenability, and report utility outcomes. Risk communication format had no effect on parole. However, participants in the 5-levels condition did provide more accurate risk information than those in the status quo condition. The 5-levels system was also rated lower in terms of understandability and resulted in lower levels of confidence in decisions. Contrary to expectations, participants assigned to the case involving an Indigenous client were more likely to grant parole and provided more favourable ratings of the client compared to participants assigned the case of a White client. Findings from this study may inform risk communication strategies resulting in more consistent and reliable decision-making.

The effects of emotion and juvenile diagnoses on parole release decisions: An experimental approach

Parole boards are often required to make many release recommendations after reviewing a substantial amount of information in a short timeframe. While making release decisions, parole board members might be motivated to sacrifice accuracy and, instead, use heuristics, such as their emotions. Emotions might increase the reliance on risk or threat related information, such as an inmate's mental illness status. The current study applies the appraisal tendency framework of emotion to assess the impact of emotion on parole decisions involving juvenile mental health diagnoses. Using a 3(emotion: anger, compassion, and control) x 4(mental illness: conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, depression, and control) factorial design, this study examined the extent to which mock parole board members' emotions impacted evaluations of inmates with juvenile mental illness diagnoses and subsequent release decisions. Results indicated that there was no effect of emotion on parole decisions. However, the inmates' mental illnesses did play a role in parole release decisions. Specifically, parole candidates with depression were released on parole at higher rates compared to conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and the control condition. Policy implications are discussed.

Granting Clemency to Antasari Azhar as the Object of a State Administrative Law Dispute

Antasari Azhar as the intellectual brain in the murder case of Nasrudin Zulkarnaen on March 14 2009. The victim was shot dead in the head while playing golf in Tangerang. Antasari was dragged into the worst case because there were messages containing threats against the victim as evidence. Antasari through his party submitted a request for clemency to the President, namely Joko Widodo, and in the end he received a parole decision to submit a request for clemency to President Joko Widodo, finally in 2016 Antasari was declared parole, and in 2017 he was released purely because the request related to his clemency was accepted President. The purpose of this paper is to find out how clemency is a special legal remedy based on the perspective of the Indonesian legal state and to find out whether the granting of clemency to Antasari Azhar is included in the object of state administrative law disputes. This research method is a normative juridical research method with a qualitative nature. Then the data were analyzed using descriptive analytical methods. Clemency is a special legal remedy, based on the constitution, clemency is essentially a form of pardon in the form of reducing or mitigating the criminal verdict handed down. Clemency issued by the President in the form of a Presidential Decree is one of the objects of state administration because in it there is a statement that has an individual, concrete and final nature which is imposed on a civil legal entity or a person, therefore a Presidential Decree containing clemency can be sued.

Offender Managers Matter: new research highlights the key role of professional recommendations in parole decisions for domestic abusers.

Offender Managers Matter: new research highlights the key role of professional recommendations in parole decisions for domestic abusers.

Purloined Significance: How Recidivism Algorithms Capture, Transform, and Automate our Intersubjective Unconscious as Data

Ever since ProPublica published their groundbreaking analysis of Northpointe’s Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions Core Risk and Needs Assessment software (COMPAS) in 2016, this web-based decision support system (DSS) has spawned a wide range of critiques and charges of racial bias. COMPAS provides a full suite of decision support applications to the US prison-industrial complex, including algorithmically derived recidivism predictions that increasingly guide parole decisions. The larger conversation surrounding COMPAS raises the question of how we analyze powerful, and yet opaque, data assemblages. In this article, I model an allegorical analysis of data assemblages. I argue the skills of literary analysis can help us surmount the “trap” of analyzing black-box algorithms. Guided by Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” I analyze how COMPAS purloins our mediated ability to give an account of ourselves under the guise of objective, data-driven decision making.

Addressing the challenges of remorse in the criminal justice system

Remorse in offenders appears in a number of criminal justice domains. It is a mitigating factor in sentencing, influences parole decision making, may be influential in offender rehabilitation, and may be valued in forensic mental health. However, evaluation of remorse presents challenges in relation to evidence for remorse and expectations about its performance. Nevertheless, remorse is embedded deeply in criminal justice. The consideration of remorse in relation to emotions of shame, guilt and regret may offer an approach for evaluating remorse in sentencing and for addressing remorse in offender rehabilitation. This approach to understanding and working with remorse requires further elaboration, development and testing.

An Algorithmic Assessment of Parole Decisions

ObjectivesParole is an important mechanism for alleviating the extraordinary social and financial costs of mass incarceration. Yet parole boards can also present a major obstacle, denying parole to low-risk inmates who could safely be released from prison. We evaluate a major parole institution, the New York State Parole Board, quantifying the costs of non-risk-based decision-making.MethodsUsing ensemble machine Learning, we predict any arrest and any violent felony arrest within three years to generate criminal risk predictions for individuals released on parole in New York from 2012–2015. We quantify the social welfare loss of the Board’s non-risked-base decisions by rank ordering inmates by their predicted risk and estimating the crime rates that could have been achieved with counterfactual, risk-based release decisions. We also estimate the release rates that could have been achieved holding arrest rates constant. We attend to the “selective labels” problem in several ways, including by testing the validity of the algorithm for individuals who were denied parole but later released after the expiration of their sentence.ResultsWe conservatively estimate that the Board could have more than doubled the release rate without increasing the total or violent felony arrest rate, and that they could have achieved these gains while simultaneously eliminating racial disparities in release rates.ConclusionsThis study demonstrates the utility of algorithms for evaluating criminal justice decision-making. Our analyses suggest that many individuals are being denied parole and incarcerated past their minimum sentence despite being a low risk to public safety.

Unnesting the Matryoshka Doll: An Ecological Model of Probation and Parole Decision-Making in Ireland

Understanding penal decision-making has become a central concern of criminologists over recent decades. Although scholars acknowledge the complex, multi-faceted, and contextual nature of penal decision-making, many rely on a single level of analysis to study the process. There is a rich literature on the socio-political, organizational, and individual context of decision-making, but few studies consider the impact of multiple influences simultaneously. To address this gap, this article uses a multi-level framework to shed light on the systems, processes, and actors that shape penal decision-making in Ireland. It draws on two case studies, namely probation and parole, to demonstrate that macro-, meso-, micro-, and individual-level influences must be considered to achieve a comprehensive understanding. Our analysis shows that macro-level systems such as legal and political processes play an important role in shaping probation and parole decisions. At the meso-level, institutional policies, values, and culture come into play while practitioner agency operates at the micro-level to support, alter, or subvert macro- and meso-level developments. Finally, the characteristics and behavior of victims and offenders can shape decision-making at the individual level. The article concludes with a reflection on the implications of this analysis for criminological knowledge.

The predictors of decisions to grant parole in China: Evidence from four prisons in Z province

Based on a sample of 1098 prisoners, this study examined the influence of age, race/ethnicity, family relationships, and drug use along with legal factors on decisions about whether to grant parole to prisoners in Zhejiang Province, China. The first model showed that age and family relationships of offenders do not play as strong a role in China as in the United States, but race/ethnicity and drug use have a significant impact on parole decisions. The second model demonstrated that with the addition of legal factors, the influence of extrajudicial factors is no longer significant, while legal factors such as administrative punishment, monthly scoring assessment, surrender of ill-gotten gains or payment of compensation, risk of recidivism, crime type, fulfillment of monetary sanctions are important factors in parole decisions in China. Finally, this paper explains that the legal factors may be the key criteria upon which Chinese judicial organs make parole decisions.