Many California Prisoners Get a Second Chance. A Declining Parole Rate Shows That's No Guarantee

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Thousands of prisoners in California go before the Board of Parole Hearings each year in hopes of a chance at freedom. It’s a daunting situation that deals in high stakes for all involved.

Parole commissioners must follow legal standards while balancing questions of rehabilitation, public safety and the lasting harms caused by the crime. Convicted offenders must try to present themselves truthfully — warts and all — as their custody files and psychological risk assessments are openly discussed. Victims and prosecutors attend hearings, usually to argue against someone’s parole. Every so often, they advocate for the incarcerated person’s release.

Other than the governor’s veto power, the commissioners’ findings are generally the last buffer against a former criminal being released. Commissioners go through extensive training and take great care in their decisions of whether someone is suitable for parole, as evidenced by a recidivism rate of less than 3%  — meaning 97% of prisoners paroled never reoffend. Less than 1% return for crimes involving violence against another person.

Over the last decade or so, California expanded parole opportunities for people convicted of crimes during their youth and for older prisoners. The annual number of parole hearings steadily increased — from 5,226 in 2018 to 9,017 in 2022, before plateauing at about 8,000 in 2023 and remaining there. The state’s prison population also dropped significantly during those years, from 128,000 in 2018 to about 90,000 today.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has tried to shift its model of incarceration to focus on release from incarceration and re-entering society. Offering young prisoners better opportunities early in their incarceration can help them avoid the pitfalls of drug use, violence and gang activity in prison. Older prisoners generally tend to “age out” of their previous criminal behavior.

By incentivizing rehabilitative programming, substance abuse treatment and higher education, the system now aspires to help offenders work productively toward personal growth and self-improvement.

But at the same time, even with seemingly much more opportunity and incentives, the success rate for prisoners to be found suitable for parole has gradually declined — from 39% in 2018 to roughly 35% for 2019 through 2021 to below 25% in 2025.

CalMatters talked to parole experts to try and understand the dynamics behind the numbers. No one could point to any one reason for the significant decline in parole suitability rates; the experts instead said the downward turn can be attributed to many different factors.

Here’s what we learned:

Some older prisoners struggle at hearings

Many elderly California prisoners with life sentences began their terms decades ago when parole opportunities were scarce. They logically believed they had no hope of ever being paroled. Many were stuck at remote prisons that lacked access to rehabilitative programs. Now they face significant challenges to fully grasp and articulate evidence of personal transformation that parole commissioners require, such as insight, remorse and accountability.

“The number of people who are now elderly parole-eligible is going up in a significant way,” said Lilli Paratore, director of legal services for UnCommon Law, an organization that represents dozens of parole candidates each year at no cost to the prisoners. “In 2013, only 19% of hearings were 60-plus, but now 32% of hearings are people who are 60-plus, and of course that just mirrors the aging prison population.”

About 19,000 prisoners are 55 or older, according to the state budget proposal Gov. Gavin Newsom released this month.

And as these older prisoners continue to age, their mental and physical health can deteriorate and adversely impact their ability to present themselves to the parole board. Instead of becoming better prepared over time, repeated parole denials just leave them feeling more and more frustrated, confused and discouraged.

Less urgency from some young offenders

The stakes are not nearly the same for offenders without a life sentence who committed crimes while under age 26. Expanded parole opportunities now allow them to go before the board after 15 years. Unlike lifers, they know they have a pre-determined release date. Getting denied parole might mean waiting another five or 10 years to go home, rather than potentially never being found suitable to be set free.

Additionally, younger people may not make the best use of those first 15 years behind bars to pursue rehabilitation. Some do, but many falter before figuring themselves out. They tend to view their parole hearing as a chance to serve a reduced sentence, rather than their only chance at freedom.

In contrast, youthful offenders serving life sentences get their first chance at parole after serving a minimum of either 20, or more usually, 25 years. That naturally allows them more time to mature and prepare themselves for a hearing. They appreciate their parole opportunities in ways non-lifers just can’t, because their sentences are open-ended.

High bar for sex offenders

Sex crimes generate the most scrutiny at parole hearings and raise the most psychological red flags. Because these crimes are so difficult to speak about openly in group discussion — particularly within incarcerated communities — few rehabilitative programs are designed to address the specific triggers, causative factors and flawed belief systems underlying these offenses.

“There’s so many different types of people who commit sex crimes for a large variety of reasons and successful programming for those folks has to be tailored to that specific issue,” said former Board of Parole Hearings Executive Officer Jennifer Shaffer. “So you’ll have, for instance, sadists, people who actually get physically turned on by torturing people. That’s very different from somebody who has anger issues and expresses them through basically sexually dominating somebody.”

Because it’s much harder for sexual offenders to demonstrate to the parole board the necessary personal insight and transformation, parole commissioners are less likely to clear these offenders as no longer an “unreasonable risk to public safety.”

Part of the problem is that it’s more difficult for sexual offenders to clear a psychological risk assessment. “As horrible as this sounds, they may have at some point equated pain with sexual arousal — and breaking that connection is really difficult and takes a lot of very intense programming,” said Shaffer.

A prisoner’s digital footprint

Parole commissioners look through a person’s entire dossier days before their hearing and are tasked with interpreting all the facts within it through the lens of public safety. Any piece of information — such as visitor logs, write-ups, personal expenses and more — might be deemed pertinent.

“In the last few years, the world of information the board is looking at is growing — even though that information isn’t necessarily related to violence risk,” said Paratore. “They’re looking more and more at (unemployment) fraud and restitution avoidance. They’re looking at medical records. They’re looking at confidential information more and more.

“What they think they need to consider has just grown without any guardrails and resulting in more people being denied parole because the board does not know how to properly interpret that information. This is especially true of medical records.”

California began providing free electronic tablets to its incarcerated population in 2021, which ensures that all phone calls and text messages are now digitally monitored and ripe for analysis and search by artificial intelligence. Those types of detailed records can easily be highlighted now and made available to parole commissioners.

For example, more focus can be paid to how prisoners get outside money placed into their institutional trust accounts, and how they go about paying for canteen and other services. In the aftermath of COVID relief and the huge rash of fraudulent unemployment claims statewide, some incarcerated individuals’ trust account activity came into question. The extra level of scrutiny drew unwanted attention to other forms of potential misconduct.

Restitution fraud

Criminal courts can order large amounts of restitution when a person is convicted, usually separated into court fees and victims services fees. Prisoners who owe restitution will always have 50% deducted from any wages or incoming money until the debt is paid off. If a person works in the kitchen for $80 a month, they get to keep $40. Same thing if their family sends them $200. They’ll receive $100 to spend.

Particularly for lifers convicted of violent crimes, restitution can be quite high and seemingly impossible to finish paying through these 50% deducted installments. To avoid losing half their spending money, some prisoners will direct their families and friends to deposit money into other people’s accounts who do not owe restitution. The prisoners will agree to a much lower deduction fee amongst themselves, usually 20%, and hold onto more spending money for canteen.

But such under-the-table transactions now leave more of a digital footprint. Parole commissioners want to see a person show remorse and demonstrate awareness into the impact of their crime on the victims. It’s a bad look for that same individual to be seen participating in restitution avoidance to save themselves money.

“The restitution issue is the only thing I can think of to really explain the decline in the grant rate,” said Vanessa Nelson-Sloane, Director of Life Support Alliance, an advocacy group for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated lifers. “Sometimes when they pass a new law, a new population comes into the parole cycle, but there’s been no new laws recently that would make any difference in the considerations.

“I am so sure that this is it because that’s all I hear about from people who are getting denied —  restitution, restitution, restitution.”

CalMatters data reporter Jeremia Kimelman contributed to this story.

Joe Garcia is a California Local News fellow.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.