48 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019
introduced in the State Legislature ear-
lier this year; the bill proposes limiting
the kinds of parole violations that could
be punished with incarceration.)
One’s odds of being released are heav-
ily influenced by where one is impris-
oned. “State paroling systems vary so
much that it is almost impossible to com-
pare them,” Jorge Renaud, an analyst at
the Prison Policy Initiative, a think tank,
wrote in a report earlier this year. But
Renaud’s report tried to do just that,
giving each state a grade. Renaud gave
his highest grade, a B-minus, to Wyo-
ming, noting that, among other strengths,
the state holds “in-person, face-to-face
parole hearings,” “allows incarcerated
people access to the information the
Board will use to determine whether to
grant or deny parole, and allows incar-
cerated individuals to question the ac-
curacy of that information,” and “allows
staff from the prison—who have true
day-to-day perspective on an individu-
al’s character and growth—to provide
in-person testimony.” Thirty-six states
got an F or an F-minus. Some of them
do not allow incarcerated people to ap-
pear before a parole board at all; in oth-
ers, such as Georgia, some individuals
can be made to wait up to eight years
after being turned down by the board
before their cases are reviewed again.
New York received a D-minus.
A few years ago, advocates lobbied
Governor Andrew Cuomo to appoint
commissioners with different types of
backgrounds, which is how Shapiro,
who is trained as a social worker, won
a seat. She described the culture of the
parole board as “very risk-averse.” At
times, she recalled, she would advocate
for an individual to be released, and a
fellow board member would respond,
“He’s playing you, Carol. He’s got your
number.” Shapiro told me, “I felt like a
lot of my colleagues focussed way too
much on the severity of the crime. If
this is your fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth,
ninth parole-board hearing, we really
shouldn’t be focussing on the crime any-
more. We should really be focussing on
your plans to go home.” She went on,
“I think the purpose of parole right now
is very murky. If the goal is to deter-
mine if someone is ready to go home,
that’s very different than relying on: Did
they serve enough time? Did the pun-
ishment fit the crime?”
The most closely watched parole
hearings are those in which the individ-
ual being interviewed has been convicted
of killing a police officer. “Generally, if
you’re a parole-board commissioner, it’s
very hard for you to let somebody out
who killed a police officer, because that’s
one of the things that governors do not
like,” Dennison said. “The chances of
that parole-board commissioner being
reappointed certainly went down severalnotches.” In 2018, Shapiro was one of
two board members who voted to re-
lease Herman Bell, the former Black
Panther who had been convicted of kill-
ing two N.Y.P.D. officers in 1971. The
decision was criticized by the governor,
the police commissioner, the editorial
boards of the Daily News and the Post,
and Mayor Bill de Blasio, who urged the
parole board’s chairwoman to reconsider.
(“Murdering a police officer in cold blood
is a crime beyond the frontiers of re-
habilitation or redemption,” he wrote.)
Shapiro said that she received a death
threat on Facebook, and many angry let-
ters. A few months later, the State Sen-
ate held a hearing on parole policies.
James B. Ferguson, Jr., a former prose-
cutor who served on the parole board
from 2005 to 2018, testified. Speaking
about people imprisoned for very seri-
ous crimes, he said, “The inmate can be
the perfect inmate. They’ve done every-
thing they possibly can. They perhaps
even demonstrate a genuinely changed
person.” But sometimes “enough time
has not been done,” he said. “What is
the public going to say if you release
Charles Manson?”I
met Dennis for the first time this past
spring, in the visiting room at Auburn.
By then, he had served nearly forty-eight
years in prison—close to double his min-
imum sentence of twenty-five years. De-
spite his volunteers’ dogged efforts, the
board had turned him down after his pa-
role interview in May, 2018. Part of theproblem seemed to be the gruesome na-
ture of his crime. On July 24, 1971, at
around 2:15 a.m., he was standing outside
a bodega in Brownsville when a police
officer named Robert Denton went in-
side to buy cigarettes, and after Denton
walked out of the store Dennis cut him
in the neck with a knife. “Cop Slashed
to Death, Youth Seized,” the Daily
News headline read. Denton, who was
twenty-six, was the eighth city police
officer that year to be killed on the job.
At the time, Dennis had been stay-
ing with the family of his brother Mel-
vin’s girlfriend in Brownsville. He had
no criminal record, and reporters seemed
at a loss to explain why he might have
killed a police officer; the News referred
to the crime as “an apparently motive-
less stab-killing.” The court record sug-
gests that alcohol may have been a fac-
tor; Dennis had been drinking beer and
vodka in the hours preceding the as-
sault. His trial was held in the spring of- Denton’s partner testified that Den-
nis had approached their patrol car
shortly before the incident and asked
how he could become a police officer—a
detail that Dennis’s lawyer disputed but
which the local press had seized upon
in its reporting. Trial testimony revealed
that, after Denton was stabbed, police
officers who had come to the scene had
beaten Dennis so badly that, at the pre-
cinct later, he had bruises on his face
and body and was bleeding from both
ears. He had been taken to the hospi-
tal—for a “possible skull fracture,” ac-
cording to law-enforcement notes—and
when Melvin arrived he found him in
a wheelchair in a hallway. “I didn’t rec-
ognize him at all,” Melvin testified. “His
nose was smashed and his face was about
three times the size.”
By May, 2018, Dennis had been im-
prisoned longer than all but nine other
men in New York State. If he had been
convicted of killing anyone but a police
officer, he likely would have been set free
long ago. The reason for this may have
to do, at least in part, with the power of
the Police Benevolent Association. One
of its mantras is “No parole for cop kill-
ers”; on the P.B.A.’s Web site, the union
keeps a list of people who are in prison
for the murder of a police officer, and
the site promises that, if someone clicks
on a victim’s name, a letter will be sent
to the parole board, urging it to deny pa-