THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019 47
nis’s packet to a parole coördinator at the
prison. It was fifty-seven pages long and
included a well-written five-page letter
from the Parole Prep team advocating
for his release (“We write to voice our
enthusiastic support for Richard Lloyd
Dennis ...”). The letter reminded the
board how young Dennis had been at
the time of the crime and cited a Justice
Department report showing that “young
people between ages 14 and 25 are still
developing their abilities to control im-
pulses, suppress aggression, consider the
impact of their behavior on others.” The
packet also included a copy of his high-
school diploma, from 1969; Velma’s let-
ter and three other letters from relatives;
and three “inmate progress reports” from
his boss, the prison’s librarian, who had
deemed him “excellent” in categories
such as “dependability” and “attitude to-
ward authority figures.”
I
nside Auburn prison, on the second
floor of the Administration Building,
there is a small room that is empty most
of the time. With the exception of a
large screen with a camera mounted
above it, and an air-conditioner propped
in a window—one of the few A.C. units
in the entire institution—the room has
the feel of a forgotten place. There are
stains on its pea-green carpet, a curtain
missing from one of its windows, and,
when I visited not long ago, a broken
replica of the state seal, on the floor.
Every month, men in prison greens sit
on wooden benches in the corridor out-
side the room and wait, sometimes for
hours, for their names to be called. In
the past, parole interviews were con-
ducted in person, but a few years ago
the parole board stopped coming to Au-
burn. The interviews are now conducted
in this room via video hookup.
New York State currently has sixteen
parole-board members, who conduct some
twelve thousand parole interviews a year.
The governor appoints the board’s mem-
bers, and the State Senate confirms them.
The current chairwoman is a former pros-
ecutor, and past parole-board members
have often had backgrounds in law en-
forcement. The job, which has a six-year
term, carries a title (commissioner) and
pays a salary of a hundred and twenty
thousand dollars a year. The work can be
gruelling. Every Monday, parole-board
members drive to cities such as Syracuse,
Rochester, and Buffalo, where they stay
for two or three nights. Parole coördina-
tors deliver the paper files of the incar-
cerated people from the prisons where
they are held to the parole offices where
the commissioners conduct their inter-
views. Carol Shapiro, who joined the
board in 2017 and quit in 2019, said, “The
irony is we’re travelling around the state
for videoconferencing. It’s insane.”
Parole-board members conduct inter-
views on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and
sometimes on Thursdays. In 1994, the
State Legislature amended the law in
order to allow victims to give in-person
testimony to the parole board. On Fri-
days, the commissioners take turns re-
ceiving the family members of crime vic-
tims and listening to their stories. Many
families bring photos and tell personal
anecdotes about their loved ones. “They
are very difficult sessions,” Shapiro said.
“It definitely takes a toll on you—absorb-
ing this pain over and over.” The rela-
tives’ words are typed up into a “victim
impact statement,” which is placed in the
parole file of the imprisoned individual.
If a murder victim was a police officer,
members of the police union, the Police
Benevolent Association, often accom-
pany the family to show their support.
Parole-board hearings can run from
a few minutes to an hour or more. Sha-
piro told me that there was very little
time to read through each file. “Com-
missioners get the case the day they see
the person,” she said. On busy days, while
the lead commissioner asks the questions,
the other two commissioners might re-
view the file of the next interviewee or
write a decision for the preceding one.
Sometimes the multitasking can lead
to a commissioner asking a question
that another commissioner has asked a
few minutes earlier. “There is a numb-
ing repetition of the interview process,”
Shapiro told me. “There is a witching
hour. By six o’clock, you’ve kind of had
it. Your head hurts, your back hurts, and
you’ve heard a gazillion stories.”
In a three-person parole panel, two
votes are needed for an individual to be
released. Parole commissioners are sup-
posed to follow a series of statutes—to
take into account factors including an in-
dividual’s institutional record, his release
plans, and the seriousness of the offense.
But some board members have higher
release rates than others, and everyone
seems to have a different idea about how
much weight to give the various pieces
of information in each case. “For some,
the offense is it, no matter what,” Sha-
piro said. “For some, it’s the victim impact
[statement]. Everyone has their own val-
ues and draws different lines in the sand.”
Robert Dennison, who was appointed
to the parole board by Governor George
Pataki, in 2000, went on to serve as the
board’s chairman from 2004 to 2007.
“We’re supposed to measure remorse,
but it’s kind of hard to do that,” he told
me. “So you try to see if they’re really
sorry for what they did, or if they just
think they’re a victim being caught up
in the system, or they just want to tell
you what they think you want to hear.
It’s certainly not a science. It’s very sub-
jective, and sometimes we make mistakes.
But, from my experience, the longer the
person’s been in, the better the parole
risk they’re going to be when they get
out. If someone has been in for a long
period of time, usually they got a terri-
ble taste in their mouth of what prison
is like, and they don’t want to do any-
thing to put themselves back in prison.”
The people who have been impris-
oned the longest, however, tend to have
been convicted of the most heinous
crimes, and, for parole commissioners,
there is little downside to denying them
parole. Although the cost of imprison-
ment is higher in New York than in any
other state—seventy thousand dollars a
year per person, and often considerably
more if the individual is elderly or ill—
parole-board members are not required
to justify the financial impact of their
decisions. The board determines not
only who will be set free but what rules
they must follow on the outside. Every-
one who is released on parole has to re-
port regularly to a parole officer and obey
certain restrictions—such as meeting a
curfew and submitting to regular drug
tests—and those who do not follow the
rules risk being sent back to prison. (The
number of people incarcerated for such
“technical violations” of their parole is
higher in New York than in all other
states but one, and these individuals make
up nearly thirty per cent of all the peo-
ple sent to New York’s state prisons each
year. In 2018, the Justice Lab at Colum-
bia University released a report, titled
“Less Is More in New York,” which be-
came the blueprint for a bill that was
