a twenty-four-year-old manager at a soft-
ware company. Lewin assigned the group
to work with a sixty-six-year-old man
incarcerated at Auburn, a maximum-
security prison in Cayuga County, two
hundred and fifty miles from Brooklyn,
where they all lived.
His name was Richard Lloyd Den-
nis, and he had been in prison for for-
ty-six years. The volunteers knew little
more than that he had been convicted
in 1972 of killing a police officer in
Brownsville, Brooklyn. He was twenty
when he committed the crime. At the
time, anyone convicted of killing a po-
lice officer in New York State faced the
possibility of the death penalty, but he
was sentenced to twenty-five years to
life. The parole board had turned him
down eleven times.
Lee, White, and Button travelled to
Auburn for the first time in December
of 2017. Waiting in the prison visiting
room, they noticed a short, balding man
walking toward them. He looked, as Lee
put it, like somebody’s grandfather. It
was Dennis. All the formerly incarcer-
ated men whom Lee had heard share
their stories at Parole Prep meetings had
been powerful public speakers. But Den-
nis rarely smiled, and he had a stutter.
When the volunteers tried to broach the
subject of his crime with him, he stopped
talking altogether. Two hours into their
interview, he said, “O.K., now you leave.”
On the ride back to New York City, the
volunteers were caught in a blizzard. The
nerve-racking weather matched the
mood in the car. Lee, in particular, was
worried about the task they had taken
on. “I just remember being, like, Oh, this
is going to be really hard,” she said.T
oday, New York’s parole board re-
ceives almost no scrutiny, but in
the early seventies its operations drew
enormous attention. In September, 1971,
men incarcerated at Attica seized con-
trol of parts of the prison, sparking a re-
bellion that lasted four days. By the end
of it, forty-three people were dead—
thirty-two incarcerated men and elevenstate workers. Afterward, an official state
investigation into the uprising revealed
that the way the parole board operated
had been “a primary source of tension
and bitterness” inside Attica. “The de-
cisions of the parole board are fraught
with the appearance of arbitrariness,”
the report stated. “Even when parole is
granted, inmates must often wait in prison
for months while searching for jobs and
places to live. This is done through the
mail, and they are given little assistance.”
Many of the incarcerated men also be-
lieved that the board was racially biased.
Most of its members were white men;
none was younger than fifty-nine.
After the rebellion, a disparate group
of prominent New Yorkers formed the
Citizens’ Inquiry on Parole and Criminal
Justice. Ramsey Clark, who had served
as Attorney General under President
Lyndon B. Johnson, chaired the inquiry;
the committee members included the
playwright Arthur Miller, the civil-rights
leader Bayard Rustin, the psychologist
and educator Kenneth B. Clark, and the
labor leader Moe Foner. In 1975, they
published a two-hundred-page report,
declaring that New York’s parole system
had “failed dramatically” and was “beyond
reform.” The board’s decision-making
process, which was “based on an assess-
ment of an inmate’s rehabilitation,” rested
on “faulty theory,” the report said. “Since
the theory of rehabilitation includes
vague and subjective notions of moral
character and future conduct, there is no
way that the parole board can measure
the degree of an inmate’s rehabilitation.”
As a result, the board’s decisions about
how long to keep someone in prison
were “irrational and cruel.” The group
shared a version of the report with pa-
role officials before publication, but they
received no response. David Rudenstine,
who directed the inquiry, wrote in the
final report, “It is regrettable that the
primary loyalty of public officials respon-
sible for an important social system such
as parole seems to be the maintenance
of things as they are.”
In the decades that followed, allega-
tions of racism in the parole system con-
tinued to circulate. In 2016, three report-
ers at the Times examined thousands of
decisions made by New York’s parole
board and found that black men were
“at a marked disadvantage.” Michelle
“Well, then, maybe don’t name your Wi-Fi TheRealBigFoot.” Lewin, in the years since she started