Over the last decade, criminal justice reform in New York State has primarily focused on the front-end of the system; notably the push to change the cash bail system and easing the amount of time someone spends in solitary confinement.
But reforms are now being sought for post-release supervision, commonly known as the parole system.
Vincent Schiraldi is the former Probation Commissioner of New York City and current Co-Director of the Columbia University Justice Lab, a criminal justice reform think tank. In early-2020, the Justice Lab released a report which detailed the racial inequalities within the parole system:
“It showed that use of technical parole violations, these are violations not for new criminal behavior but for breaking a rule like missing appointments, or drug use, or staying out past curfew,” Schiraldi said. “So, for circumstances like that, Black people are being revoked at five times the rate of white people and Latino people are being revoked 30-percent more frequently than white people.”
Despite an overall drop in the jail and prison populations in the state, Schiraldi said these inequalities put New York as one of the leaders in recidivism rates in the country.
“This population, technical, non-criminal violations is going up throughout the state,” he said. “It went up 47% just over the last year in the Erie County jails, and New York violates the second highest number of people in the whole country.”
Rico, who asked that his real name not be used for this story due to fear of repercussions from his parole officer, served 8 years in prison on an assault charge. In March of last year, he was serving five years of parole and staying at the Bissonette House, a halfway house in Buffalo’s Delavan-Grider neighborhood.
He thought the way the parole system worked with technical violations is, for parolees, taking two steps backward for every step forward.
“That post-release is one of the worst things we’re going through nowadays,” he said.
And if you violate your parole terms you get sent back to jail, and the time you spend in jail gets added on to the end of your time on parole.
“It makes it almost impossible to get for you to get off parole,” Rico said. “I came home in May of 2017, I have five years post [release], which means that I should be done in May of 2022. Why am I being done October 25th, 2022? Because I caught a violation and my time has stopped.”
The current parole system is being challenged through the Less is More: Community Supervision Revocation Reform Act, which currently sits in committee in the State Senate.
Leslie Bishop is the Chairwoman of Citizen Action of Western New York, a grassroots social justice organization. She is appalled by the lack of rehabilitative support by state agencies for parolees.
“Now the sad part is we have all of these agencies out here that are supposed to be helping formerly incarcerated persons that have issues with drugs and it’s not happening,” she said. “We are also paying tax dollars for those programs.”
Bishop and the Citizen Action support Less is More and a number of other bills being sponsored in the state legislature.
“The Less is More Bill is saying ‘hey, we’re going to stop doing that. Not only that, we’re going to allow formerly incarcerated persons who get violated on parole to go through a neutral judicial process. We’re not going to hold them for 90 days and they lose their jobs and their housing.’”
Another reform bill in the state, the Fair and Timely Parole Act, asks that rehabilitation and personal redemption be taken into consideration during a parole hearing. Four years after its initial introduction, the bill was passed in the state senate crime committee in February.
These bills, plus an order signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo in last March to release people accused of technical violations from county jails in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, can be looked at as tangible progress from the various criminal justice reform groups as they continue to lean on legislators to adopt and sponsor their policies. But time will tell whether the bills, as currently constructed, make it to the Governor’s desk and become law.
