42 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019
ANNALS OFJUSTICE
THE INTERVIEW
A group of volunteers is helping incarcerated people negotiate a parole system that is all but broken.
BYJENNIFER GONNERMAN
E
arlier this year, the Parole Prepa-
ration Project put out a call for
volunteers, and more than a hun-
dred people applied. Many were law
students and lawyers, but there was also
a Planet Fitness employee, a pediatric
I.C.U. nurse, a professor of philosophy,
a software engineer, a waiter, and a trans-
lator. Parole Prep invited them to an
orientation, and, one Wednesday eve-
ning last April, some eighty people as-
sembled in a lecture hall at New York
University School of Law. Most were
in their twenties or thirties. Three-quar-
ters were female. A few people carried
reusable water bottles; one older woman
walked in with a cane.
Michelle Lewin, who is thirty-two
years old and the executive director of
Parole Prep, stood at the front of the
room, wearing a loose-fitting brown dress
and worn work boots. She explained that
Parole Prep requires an eight-to-twelve-
month commitment. Each volunteer is
assigned to a team of two or three peo-
ple, then matched up with someone who
has been incarcerated for decades, whom
the team helps prepare for an upcoming
interview before the parole board. Lewin
talked about Parole Prep’s “values as a
project.” “Nobody should be judged by
the worst thing they’ve ever done,” she
said. Then she introduced two men, Kevin
Bartley and Anthony Dixon, whom she
called “my uncles and my dear friends.”
Bartley, a sixty-seven-year-old man
with a shaved head and a confident de-
meanor, spoke first. “I’m not a law stu-
dent, like some of y’all,” he said. “But I
am an expert on corrections. What makes
me an expert? I did thirty-seven years.
I came home nine months ago. I went in
at twenty-eight, came out at sixty-five. I
was denied parole twelve times.” He talked
about his experience with Parole Prep. “I
had two of the best volunteers. They were
extraordinary,” he said. “I think I would
still be inside if not for Parole Prep. This
would’ve been my thirty-eighth year.”
The official mission of New York’s pa-
role board is to “ensure public safety by
granting parole when appropriate.” When
incarcerated people appear before the
board, its members evaluate “their ulti-
mate fitness to be paroled.” The incarcer-
ated people are expected to speak openly
about their crimes, take responsibility for
them, and express remorse. But some
people who are convicted of very serious
crimes minimize their actions when they
appear before the board, saying things
like “The gun went off ” or “I made a mis-
take.” “That’s a bad thing for anyone to
say,” Bartley told the would-be volun-
teers. Killing another man is not a “mis-
take.” “A mistake is you wake up in the
morning and put on a white sock and a
black sock,” he said. He added, “The hard-
est thing that you’re going to have to do
if you become a volunteer is you sit down
with the guys and you have to pull it out
of them. It’s like pulling teeth, especially
when someone carries a lot of guilt and
shame, like myself.”
Dixon, a soft-spoken fifty-eight-year-
old man with square-framed glasses,
spent thirty-two years in prison. Speak-
ing about the first time he went before
the parole board, he said, “I failed, and
I failed miserably. My particular prob-
lem was I knew what to say but I had
a hard time saying it myself.” In the
months before his third parole-board
hearing, a team of volunteers had come
to see him on weekdays, weekends, and
holidays. He said that they prepared
him well for the parole interview: “I felt
so much confidence.” He added, “I didn’t
want to let my volunteers down. I wanted
to give the best presentation that I could,
because I felt they had connected with
me so much that it would hurt them if
I was denied parole.” The board voted
to release him.
New York’s state prisons hold some
forty-six thousand people. Almost twenty
per cent are “lifers,” which means that
they are serving a prison sentence with
“life” on the back, like twenty years to
life. Parole Prep works only with lifers,
most of whom have been convicted of
murder or other acts of extreme violence.
Once they have completed their mini-
mum sentence, they are given a date to
appear before a panel of usually three
parole-board members. According to
the Vera Institute for Justice, the suc-
cess rate for lifers appearing before the
board in the past three years has been
thirty-six per cent. According to Lewin,
the rate for people going before the board
after assistance from a team of Parole
Prep volunteers is about sixty per cent.
In the past five years, Parole Prep
volunteers have helped a hundred and
forty-nine people get out of prison,
twelve of them women. Often, the re-
lationships between the men and women
in prison and their volunteers endure
after the prisoners are released. Tyler
Morse, who recently finished a master’s
degree in women’s and gender studies
at the CUNY Graduate Center, went to
a Super Bowl party hosted by a man
she helped get out of prison. Ben See-
gars, who was released from prison in
January, was a guest at the wedding of
one of his volunteers, Stacy Auer. When
Chloé Truong-Jones, a Ph.D. student
at N.Y.U., discovered that the seventy-
one-year-old man she had worked to
get freed was in a homeless shelter that
was unsafe, she arranged for him to stay
at her boyfriend’s apartment in Bush-
wick while he waited for a transfer.
Recently, Gina Lee recalled the first
Parole Prep meeting she attended, in the
fall of 2017. A friend had been a volun-
teer and told her about the project; Lee
was then twenty-five and working at a
nonprofit that helped teen-agers who
had been jailed on Rikers Island. She
filled out an application, went to an ori-
entation, and found herself on a team
with another friend, John White, a
twenty-five-year-old who worked for an
art-auction Web site, and Olivia Button,
