THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019 45
working with incarcerated people seek-
ing parole, has come to many of the same
conclusions that the Citizens’ Inquiry
did, forty-four years ago. As she put it
in a 2017 law-review article that she co-
wrote, “The Board’s practices exemplify
nationwide criminal justice policies that
are rooted in retribution and racism and
result in extreme punishment.”
Lewin grew up in Atlanta. Her pa-
ternal grandparents were Holocaust sur-
vivors, and she attended a Jewish day
school. She told me that she did not
have any non-Jewish friends until she
was fifteen, after she started attending
a private, progressive high school. As a
sophomore at Sarah Lawrence College,
she enrolled in a class called The Penal
State, and the professor took a group of
students to Sing Sing. “I remember just
the towering cells, stacked on top of each
other, floor after floor after floor,” she
told me. “It was horrifying.” After col-
lege, she worked for a victims’-services
group; she had a desk at a police precinct
in Coney Island and accompanied offi-
cers when they visited domestic-violence
victims. She later worked as a court ad-
vocate at the Hall of Justice in the Bronx,
trying to persuade judges not to imprison
people accused of low-level felonies.
In the fall of 2013, she enrolled at
CUNY School of Law, and soon after-
ward she attended a meeting of the Na-
tional Lawyers Guild’s Mass Incarcer-
ation Committee, in Harlem. One of
the other attendees, Scott Paltrowitz, a
Harvard Law graduate who worked for
a prison-reform organization, had re-
cently visited Otisville Correctional Fa-
cility, in Orange County, New York,
where he had met members of its Lif-
ers & Long Termers Organization. Pal-
trowitz informed Lewin and the other
meeting attendees that there was a man
at Otisville named Roberto Pascal, who
had been in prison for thirty-three years
and needed help obtaining parole. Lewin
and Nora Carroll, a Legal Aid attorney,
said that they would try to assist him.
Inside Otisville, Pascal gave crochet-
ing classes to the other men, and, Lewin
learned, he liked to feed Snickers bars
to the groundhogs in the yard. Lewin
and Carroll started visiting him every
other month. They worked with him to
prepare for his next parole interview,
helping him draft a personal statement
and studying transcripts from his earlier
interviews to figure out what had gone
wrong. Pascal had a heavy accent, and,
in Lewin’s view, the parole board “just
didn’t give a shit about him.” He seemed
to appreciate the women’s efforts on his
behalf, and on one visit he left them a
gift of two crocheted string bikinis to
pick up on their way out. (The next time
Lewin sent him a letter, she told him,
“Socks would’ve been nicer,” but, she
says, “it was harmless.”) The parole boardturned Pascal down at his next hearing,
but the women continued to work with
him, and he was later released.
Otisville had a very active Lifers &
Long Termers Organization. While
Lewin and Carroll were working on
Pascal’s case, they began hearing from
the group’s leaders, who told them sto-
ries about men who had been repeat-
edly denied parole. When the women
called lawyers who worked on prison
issues to get advice about how to help
the men, they realized that the lawyers’
knowledge was, as Lewin put it, “really
minimal.” “They really didn’t have a
sense of how to actually prepare some-
one for the board,” she said. “Most of
their clients were not getting out.”
In the spring of 2014, the two women
decided to expand their efforts, recruit-
ing volunteers and calling themselves
the Parole Preparation Project. That
June, at their first training session, some
thirty people showed up, most of them
law students. “I don’t even think they
knew what parole was,” Lewin told me.
“I think they just wanted to connect
with people in prison.” A jailhouse law-
yer at Otisville had sent them a list of
men who needed help obtaining parole,
and they assigned volunteers to work
with several of them. Six months later,
after they announced their second vol-
unteer training, a hundred and thirty
people responded, including a bartender,
a retired biology teacher, and a woman
who described herself as a “queer mama
of twins in the pursuit of justice.”Carroll recalled that, as word of the
project spread throughout the state’s pris-
ons, “letters just started coming.” Soon
they were overwhelmed with requests
from incarcerated men. In 2016, Lewin
graduated from law school and began
running Parole Prep full time, working
out of a café in Brooklyn. The organization
now has two desks at a shared workspace
in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The second
desk belongs to Anthony Dixon, who
left prison three years ago and some-
times wears a suit to work. Parole Prep
often collaborates with the RAPP Cam-
paign—short for Release Aging People
in Prison—which pushes for parole re-
form and has three desks nearby. A bul-
letin board above Lewin’s desk is cov-
ered with photographs of middle-aged
and elderly men (and one woman). She
explained that they were people with
whom she had worked in the past five
years and who had died either in prison
or shortly after they were released.
One afternoon this past spring, over
lunch at a soup-dumpling restaurant
near the office, Lewin reflected on Pa-
role Prep’s evolution. When the project
started, she said, she thought that the
work was going to be “very technical.”
The first training sessions focussed on
how to assemble a packet for the parole
board, containing an advocacy letter and
letters from relatives. “It was very legal-
istic,” Lewin said of the approach, “but
it was not related actually at all to the
work we were doing, somehow.” That
work was building relationships, trying
to befriend someone who had been im-
prisoned for decades, helping him to
speak honestly about his crime. Parole
Prep has attracted many volunteers with
degrees from colleges such as Brown and
Yale. “They come in with a lot of ideas
about their politics,” Lewin told me, “but
don’t necessarily have a lot of experience
connecting with people in prison.”
In the past few years, she, Carroll,
and another friend, with the help of sev-
eral men at Otisville, have written nu-
merous memos for volunteers on topics
such as what to bring on a prison visit
(singles and quarters for the vending
machine), how to act when they get a
collect call (don’t say anything critical of
prison staff, because all calls are recorded),
and how to relate to the incarcerated
people they are working with (“the best
advocate is someone who listens actively,