A new book by Ben Austen argues that bringing back a robust parole system might offer prisoners a path to redemption.
From the standpoint of many on the left, former President Donald Trump did exactly two good things in office. He supported Operation Warp Speed, which facilitated the development and production of the first COVID-19 vaccines. And in 2018, he signed the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal-justice bill that shortened federal prison terms, gave judges more latitude in sentencing, and provided educational programming to ease prisoners’ eventual return to the outside world.
The best account of how Democrats and Republicans improbably joined forces in the lead-up to this effort to reduce mass incarceration comes from the political scientists David Dagan and Steven Teles. On the left, progressives managed to persuade centrist Democrats that Clinton-era tough-on-crime policies, such as lengthy prison terms for drug crimes and mandatory life sentences for repeat violent offenders, had done more harm than good. Meanwhile, on the right, a group of savvy conservative activists, some moved by Christian notions of forgiveness, reframed mass incarceration as an example of wasteful government spending. With crime hovering around a 50-year low, a vanishingly rare moment of cooperation became possible. Trump was proud to seal the deal.
We’re not in that moment anymore. Violent crime rose during the pandemic, and although it has since ebbed somewhat, fear remains high. Republicans have seized the opportunity to mobilize their base and court independents, attacking progressive criminal-justice reforms and calling for a retrenchment. Taking a dig at Trump earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis described the First Step Act as a “huge, huge mistake.” (He’d voted for an early version of it while in Congress.)
In our current environment, an ambitious initiative like the First Step Act seems impossible. Only the most commonsense proposals for improving the system stand much of a chance. But they exist, and one such idea has been gaining attention recently: reinvigorating the parole process so more prisoners who have already served years for their crimes and no longer pose a threat to public safety might be able to go free. How many prisoners fit those criteria is hard to say, but Ben Austen, a Chicago-based journalist, reports that approximately 165,000 inmates older than 55 are in American prisons, many of them sentenced for violent crimes committed in their youth. In his new book, Correction, he makes a case for giving them a way out.
Correction centers on the experiences of two Black men doing time for murder. One evening in 1971, Michael Henderson, an 18-year-old welder, was hanging out in front of a lounge in East St. Louis, Illinois. Richard Schaeffer, a high-school student, had been driving around with some friends; the group stopped Henderson and asked if he’d buy them beer. He did and then demanded a tip. When they refused, Henderson produced a gun, shooting as the kids tried to speed away. Schaeffer was killed. Henderson turned down a plea deal and was convicted, sentenced to 100 to 200 years behind bars.
The year before Schaeffer’s murder, 1970, two Chicago police officers, James Severin and Anthony Rizzato, were ambushed and killed as they walked through the Cabrini-Green housing projects, shot with a rifle at long range before they’d had the chance to draw their weapons. After an intense manhunt, the police arrested Johnnie Veal, a 17-year-old gang member, along with a janitor named George Clifford Knights. Someone reported that they’d heard Veal speak about his role in the killing. Narrowly escaping the death penalty, Veal got 100 to 199 years.
Given the life span of human beings, these sound like irrational, gratuitous sentences. What interests Austen about them is that they were handed down during a period when sentences were often indeterminate: However big the numbers pronounced by a judge, a prisoner could be released at whatever point a parole board decided that he’d been punished enough and had been rehabilitated.
Indeterminate sentencing was an invention of the progressive era. Although the practice gave prison authorities tremendous discretion, it may have had the paradoxical effect of reducing the amount of time prisoners would in fact serve, in part because it created an incentive for them to abide by prison rules and participate in rehabilitative programs.
In the early 1970s, however, indeterminate sentencing came under sharp attack. Echoing the complaints of prisoners radicalized during the ’60s, legal scholars charged that parole-board members—often political appointees with no special expertise—were incompetent at best, and vindictive and racist at worst. These criticisms gained traction, and in 1976, the state of Maine became the first mover in a trend toward the end of “discretionary parole.” In the ’80s and ’90s, victims’-rights advocates and law-and-order types came at parole from the other direction, favoring prison terms with less opportunity for early release that would at least have the benefit of “truth in sentencing.”
States would still use “supervised parole”: After serving a statutorily defined minimum term, prisoners could be let out under the supervision of a parole officer before the end of their sentence, if they’d earned so-called good-time credits inside. Yet there was much less flexibility in the process.
Read: The forgotten tradition of clemency
Illinois abolished indeterminate sentencing in 1978. But inmates such as Henderson and Veal, who’d been sentenced before then, remained governed by the old rules. Austen got to know the two men well. He paints a vivid portrait of what it’s like to be incarcerated for decades and have one’s fitness for freedom continually assessed, a dynamic that may be loaded with particular meaning and complexity for Black inmates.
Henderson owned up to his responsibility for Richard Schaeffer’s death; Veal maintains his innocence in the Chicago police murders. (Austen suggests that he was wrongly convicted.) Regardless, although neither was a saint in prison, especially in their early years, both eventually decided to make something positive of their lives.
Henderson became an expert tailor. He stopped smoking and took to running laps in the recreation yard, the exercise an opportunity for meditation and introspection. He counseled other prisoners on staying out of trouble and sought to mend frayed relationships with his family.
While surviving several years of near solitary confinement, Veal discovered reading. He was drawn to books that provided solace and insight. Later, he learned to play the saxophone and flute, mentored and protected younger inmates, and developed a political consciousness.
For both men, going up for parole every few years only to be turned down again and again was excruciating, the process marked by irrationality and unfairness. (For example, prisoners aren’t always represented by lawyers in parole-board hearings.) But the prospect that, at any of those hearings, the work they’d done to better themselves might be recognized and rewarded also served as a powerful incentive toward self-actualization.
Austen would prefer that America rely far less on imprisonment to deal with those who have broken the law. But the conclusion he draws is that if we’re going to have prisons, we should dramatically expand eligibility for parole, make the parole-decision process more transparent and fair, and boost our investment in rehabilitation (he favors a Scandinavian prison model that includes vocational training and mental-health care). That way, more inmates could have a shot at one day regaining their freedom.
Correction is smart and well reported. Austen is deft at interweaving policy and narrative, and he has an ethnographer’s eye for the social drama of parole hearings. Injustices and hypocrisies abound in our penal system, and Austen does good work in unearthing them. If the book has a weakness, it’s that Austen—like many contemporary writers on criminal-justice reform—sometimes seems to be writing more for his fellow progressives than for the centrists and conservatives who actually need convincing.
Consider an important claim he makes in arguing for an expansion of parole eligibility: that for most offenses, 20 years in prison should be the maximum punishment. Criminological research shows that sentences longer than 20 years have no additional deterrent benefit. Two decades behind bars is a harsh penalty. And keeping prisoners beyond that is extraordinarily expensive, especially as their medical-care costs mount later in life—yet another reason, Austen says, that we need “a carceral system focused not on vengeance and permanent punishment but on the possibility of everybody going home.”
These are all reasonable points, likely to resonate with lefty readers who find the very idea of prison abhorrent (with the caveat that prison abolitionists may wish that Austen had gone further with his critique). But readers with different moral sensibilities may think that some crimes are so heinous and destructive to the social order that the appropriate punishment is lifetime incarceration without the possibility of parole, if not death. They may also believe that we should therefore focus our energies on preventing these crimes, so that the double tragedy of a victim being injured or killed and the offender losing his freedom can be averted.
In many states, enough people take a position roughly like this to doom any political attempts at meaningful parole reform for violent offenses. (Almost two-thirds of Americans believe that the death penalty is the appropriate penalty for a crime such as murder.) What would be required to bring them on board?
Probably not what the book offers. Austen aims to convince primarily by making readers feel sympathy for and invested in Henderson and Veal’s fate, which is revealed before the last page. This is an admirable goal given that the incarcerated are often dehumanized. But many opponents of parole expansion won’t find Henderson and Veal to be sympathetic figures. Even if they did, you can feel sympathy for what people are going through because of their life choices without concluding that society should spare them those consequences.
Part of the problem is that Austen never takes his opponents seriously as interlocutors. When he writes about a debate program at Stateville Correctional Center, outside Joliet, where in 2018 the participants considered whether Illinois should bring back discretionary parole, he outlines only the “pro” argument. (The debaters themselves never took the negative side, deciding in the end, perhaps for strategic reasons, that the debate should be about how to reinstate discretionary parole, not whether.) When people who would presumably disagree with Austen’s proposals appear in the book, they’re cast as biased and reactionary. This is the treatment he gives to the Chicago police officers and members of James Severin’s family who showed up in protest to every one of Veal’s parole hearings.
Yet had Austen approached parole opponents with the same openness he extended to Henderson and Veal, he might have learned something valuable.
Read: What prison takes away
Is the motivation of such people truly to make sure that crime victims are never forgotten, as many of the Chicago police officers intimated? Then could they be persuaded by the argument that you honor those victims better by taking the money saved through parole reform and funneling it into local law enforcement, to help prevent future crimes? Alternatively, could you resurrect the argument that worked so well before the passage of the First Step Act, namely that lifetime incarceration means lifetime government benefits—shelter, food, medical care—at taxpayer expense?
Could you argue that, with relatively high levels of substance abuse among American adults, it won’t be long until just about everyone knows somebody locked up for making the worst mistake of their life, and wouldn’t it be good if redemption were possible for them too? Maybe the Chicago police officers who came to Veal’s parole hearings had someone like that in their families. Or maybe that was true for other Chicago police officers who didn’t come and who might not have been as hostile to the idea of second chances. That would have been a powerful story to tell.
David Dagan and Steven Teles’s research on the First Step Act shows that minds can be changed regarding criminal justice, even amid polarization. But it requires that you engage creatively and on their own terms with the worldviews you’re trying to shake loose.
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