MS. SUSAN BROWN: Welcome to the Urban Institute. I'm Susan Brown, Director of Public Affairs, and I'm standing in today for our president, Bob Reischauer. The Urban Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research organization located in Washington, D.C. Our researchers examine key social and economic challenges confronting the nation and evaluate options for resolving them.
This First Tuesday forum is part of our monthly noon-time discussion series. We provide fresh facts and perspectives on common concerns during these discussions.
Today's event is going to focus on parole. Panelists will draw on and discuss findings from a new Urban Institute report, "Beyond the Prison Gates: The State of Parole in America." The report is by Jeremy Travis and Sarah Lawrence. It was made possible by a generous support from the Open Society Institute. "Beyond the Prison Gates" provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive statistical portrait of parole today. It documents the major changes that have occurred in the concept and practice of parole since its inception, changes that have dramatically altered this cornerstone of American sentencing policy.
Let me just give you one statistic from the report that I think will make you sit up and listen hard. There has been a sevenfold increase, since 1980—that's sevenfold—in the number of parolees who return each year to prison. Parole, it appears, has become a new path to prison.
Our report, "Beyond the Prison Gates," is available on our website at www.urban.org, or through our publications office at 1-877-UIPRESS.
Now I would like to introduce our panel.
Ted Gest, our moderator, is a distinguished senior scholar in the Program on Crime Policy and the News Media at the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. He also is president of Criminal Justice Journalists, and a former writer and editor at U.S. News & World Report.
Jeremy Travis, co-author of our new report, is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. Prior to joining our Justice Policy Center, Jeremy directed the federal government's National Institute of Justice, and served as a deputy police commissioner for New York City.
Unfortunately, Sarah Lawrence, Jeremy's co-author of the report, is down for the count with the flu and will not be able to join us on the panel today, though I assume she is at home watching us on C-SPAN.
Nolan Jones, director of the Human Resources Committee at the National Governors Association, oversees projects on such issues as criminal justice policy, executive clemency, social services for delinquent youths, and prison crowding. He has been instrumental in the enactment of several major pieces of federal crime and drug enforcement legislation.
Finally, Mario Paparozzi, who is not here, and is probably on the New Jersey Turnpike coming up from Philadelphia and will be here momentarily, is a faculty member and associate director of research and technical assistance in the Department of Law and Justice at the College of New Jersey. He is a former chair of the New Jersey State Parole Board, and immediate past-president of the American Probation and Parole Association.
Before turning to Ted Gest, a word about our format. After our panel presentations, we invite the audience to participate in the discussion. Before speaking, however, please stand, wait for the mike, and then identify yourself and your affiliation. For our viewers on C-SPAN, the forum is being transcribed, and the transcripts will be posted on our website a few days from now.
Thank you all for coming. Ted, I turn it over to you.
MR. TED GEST: Thank you. Thank you, Susan. Thank you all for being with us today. We hope our last panelist shows up before the program ends. We'll go on till 1:30 today.
With prisoners being released each year and across the country by the hundreds of thousands, we, and the general public, might naturally wonder what happens to them when they get out. There may be a misimpression among some people that all released prisoners are under close supervision by parole officers. Now, the report that you're about to hear indicates that this may actually be true only for a vast minority of them.
As I think a lot of us know, parole is one of the important, but little examined, parts of our justice system. Over the years, its major functions of deciding how long a prisoner will serve in many cases, and also supervising releasees on the outside, may have become confused in the minds of the public and even in the minds of some policymakers. As, again, I think a lot of us know, some states cut back on parole because it became equated in the public mind with so-called early releases from incarceration, which may have, or may not, actually have been the case.
Existing parole agencies are limited by whatever they can get out of dwindling state budget coffers, and I think Nolan Jones will be talking about that. A representative of California's parole agents recently said that the number of parolees assigned to each agent was approaching 100. And as bad as those numbers may sound, there have been estimates, and I think Jeremy Travis may get into this, that the current number of 600,000 to 700,000 prisoners released every year may even double by the year 2010, so we're talking about some high numbers here.
Now, what are the implications of the current state of parole, both for the future of these individuals, many former inmates, and for public safety? These are just some of the questions that are raised by the research that we will discuss today.
So for the main presentation here, I'm now going to turn it over to Jeremy Travis of the Urban Institute. Jeremy?
MR. JEREMY TRAVIS: Thank you, Ted. Thank you for agreeing to serve as moderator for this forum today. And let me add my welcome to all of you who have come to this First Tuesday presentation. And let me also express to Sarah Lawrence, wherever she is today, that it's really, really unfortunate that she can't be here today to be part of the panel. She is coauthor of the report, and as you might guess, did a lion's share of the work, and it's really unfortunate that the flu caught up with her so she couldn't be here today.
Our report that we are releasing today, entitled "Beyond the Prison Gates: The State of Parole in America," is an examination of the state of this critical function in our criminal justice system, the institution we call parole. The report draws upon data made available by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and some officials from that organization are here today. And I just want to publicly acknowledge, on behalf of all of the researchers and policy analysts who study criminal justice policy, how valuable it is to have BJS providing the high-level data that it provides, so that we can do reports like the one that we're releasing today. To begin our discussion, I would like to place the institution of parole in the context of America's approach to sentencing and corrections. For the 50-year period between the 1920s and the 1970s, Americans' sentencing policy was remarkably stable. We tend to forget this.
During that period of time, every state in the union—and the District of Columbia—embraced the concept of indeterminate sentencing. Developed by criminal justice reformers in the Progressive Era, the indeterminate sentencing model is based on the notion that offenders can be rehabilitated and that a major purpose of the criminal justice system is to promote the successful reintegration of those who have violated the law. The indeterminate sentencing model envisions an intricate network of relationships between various governmental agencies—relationships that ultimately determine the length of a prison sentence for many of the individuals convicted of serious crimes.
In this model, the legislature establishes a broad range of possible penalties for violations of the criminal law. In some cases, that range has been as broad as, quote, "from a year to life." A judge then sentences an offender to a particular term of years, again within minimum and maximum term—for example, from five to 20 years. Under the indeterminate sentencing model, the actual release date, the actual length of the prison term, is decided by another entity: an agency of the executive branch government called the parole board.
So how does this work? Under this model—which, as we'll see very soon, did not apply to all cases even in this golden era—the parole board hears applications from eligible prisoners who want to be released from prison.
Typically, the prisoner prepares what is called a parole packet. Some elements of a typical parole packet focus on the prison experience itself. The prisoner documents his or her participation in prison programs, discusses any disciplinary infractions that might have occurred in prison, and generally assesses his or her readiness to return to free society.
The board packet also focuses on the future. The prisoner verifies the availability of a job, the availability of housing following his release; describes his or her relationship with family members; and generally asserts a commitment to stay clear of crime and other risky behaviors.
Sometimes the board packet will focus on the crime itself. A prisoner may express remorse for wrongs committed, offer apologies to victims or articulate a new resolve to go straight.
Sometimes that packet is persuasive. Often it is not.
Then, if a prisoner is released by a parole board, under the classic indeterminate sentencing model, he or she is supervised by a parole officer, a second component of the criminal justice system institution we call parole. The released prisoner is technically still serving a sentence, but this portion of the sentence is served in the community, not in prison. The parolee must abide by a set of release conditions, such as living at an approved address, keeping a job, meeting with a parole officer on a regular basis, staying drug-free, not associating with known felons, not committing new crimes.
If the parole officer—sometimes called a parole agent—discovers that these conditions have not been met, then the parole officer typically has the discretion to consider the parole, quote, "violated," to change the conditions of release or, in certain cases, to return the parolee into prison following a parole revocation hearing.
So, under the indeterminate sentencing model, the institution of parole plays three critical roles, roles that we examine in our report. First, a parole board makes decisions whether to release inmates from prison. Second, a parole officer supervises those who have been released from prison. Third and finally, a parole officer can recommend to the parole board or some other similar entity that a parolee should be returned to prison.
Now, over the past generation, there has been considerable ferment in American sentencing policy. Beginning in the early 1970s, the classic indeterminate sentencing model came under intense scrutiny from the liberal and conservative ends of the political spectrum. Liberals found that too much discretion was given to judges and parole boards to determine the length of a prison sentence. They documented patterns of sentencing disparities, some of which reflected
racial bias. Conservatives thought that the rehabilitative goals of indeterminate sentencing represented wishful thinking. In support of their position, they cited research findings of the mid-1970s that concluded with the now-famous phrase, "Nothing works." The rising crime rates of the '60s and '70s gave added impetus to the view that the courts were too lenient and that criminals, in fact, could not be rehabilitated.
As a result of these attacks from left and right, the American consensus about our approach to sentencing policy fell apart. We have seen a variety of sentencing reforms sweep the country. Some states have established sentencing commissions. Others have enacted "three strikes and you're out" laws or mandatory minimums, or lifetime sex offender registration, or truth in sentencing schemes, new penalty legislation, or waivers of juveniles into the adult criminal justice system.
We've also seen an exponential growth in America's prison system. Today there are about 1.3 million people in prison. After 50 years of stability, our per-capita incarceration rate has now quadrupled, rising from 110 per 100,000 in 1973 to 478 per 100,000 in 2000. America has now overtaken Russia as the country with the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world.
Now, the institution of parole has not been immune to these sweeping changes in our jurisprudential landscape. On the contrary, it has often been the lightning rod for political controversy. Parole came to represent in the eyes of many the worst elements of indeterminate sentencing. The parole system has been criticized as exhibiting leniency towards criminals, as exhibiting unreviewable discretion by unaccountable governmental officials, and as showing disregard for the safety concerns of the public, for what some have alleged to be fundamental unfairness and political expediency in decision-making regarding release.
The institution of parole has been transformed by these political and policy crosscurrents. But there is, interestingly, no consistent pattern of transformation. Many states have abolished parole as a release mechanism; others have kept it. Some states have cut back on parole supervision services; others have expanded parole supervision. Some states have used the power to revoke parole in a very aggressive manner, sending tens of thousands of people back to prison for technical violations of the conditions of their release, and others have kept all but a very few parole violators from returning to prison.
Regrettably, our policy discourse on the changing landscape of punishment in America does not reflect a solid empirical understanding of the ways that parole has changed. So with support from the Open Society Institute, Sarah and I have prepared this report that lays an empirical foundation for a public discussion of the state of parole in America.
In this report, Sarah and I conclude that it is time to take a critical look at the way parole operates. Our strategy in writing this report resembles the motto of Jack Webb on "Dragnet,"—"Just the facts, ma'am." It is our hope that policy debates that begin with the facts on the state of parole, particularly recognizing this variety of state innovation in the use of parole, that these facts will lead to new approaches to this unique American institution.
So what are the changes in parole that we document in our report? Again, to remind you, we think of parole as serving three distinct functions. Parole boards make decisions to release people from prison; second, parole agencies supervise prisoners in the community; and third, parole officers can make recommendations for the revocation of parole status and the return to prison.
In our report, we examine each of these three functions at both the national and the state level. We find that for each function, parole has undergone dramatic changes. Far fewer prisoners are now being released by parole boards; far more released prisoners are now being supervised by parole agencies or their equivalents; and far, far more parolees are being violated and returned to prison. So let's take a closer look at each of these three. And in your packets you'll find handouts that include some of the graphs taken from our report that will provide some further documentation of these shifts.
The first important shift is that far fewer prisoners are being released by parole boards. In 1980, a short 20 years ago, slightly over half of the prisoners released from state prison were released because a parole board decided they should be released. We call these discretionary releases. These prisoners went through the process of preparing that board packet that I spoke of, their applications met with parole board approval, and they were released to the community. Slightly more than half.
Today, by contrast, about a quarter of the prisoners being released from state prisons are released by parole boards—half the rate of 20 years ago. Let's state that differently: Three of four prisoners being released today are released by operation of law. We call these mandatory releases; they have served their time and the prison has no choice but to release them. Yet beneath this national trend, with a sharp decline over time in parole releases, we see some significant variation.
Six states have decided that virtually all prisoners should be released mandatorially: California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and New Mexico. They have essentially abolished parole boards as release mechanisms. And at the other end of the spectrum, 20 states have retained parole boards as their principal release mechanism, releasing more than 95 percent of their prisoners this way: Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia. And in between, we find all sorts of variety along that spectrum of states that have made different policy choices about who makes the decision to release people from prison.
This shift towards mandatory release, and the significant state level variations, raise important policy questions: What is the best way, after all, to make release decisions? What is lost when prisoners no longer have to present their plans for life after prison to a parole board? Is the movement toward mandatory releases an improvement over the sometimes arbitrary decisions of parole boards? Is there a way, after all, to retain the best of both systems?
When we look at the second parole function, the supervision of released prisoners in the community, we also find an important shift in national policy.
But first we present some data that I alluded to before, that show that even in the heyday of indeterminate sentencing, what Michael Tonry refers to as the "golden era," not every prisoner was supervised by a parole officer after being released from prison. In fact, from 1923 to 1960, 60 percent of those released from prison were placed on parole supervision, but the remaining 40 percent were released without supervision, straight into the community.
Beginning in 1960, however, as incarceration rates started to climb in America, so too supervision levels started to increase. In 1999, 82 percent of those released from prison were placed under supervision, and only 18 percent were released straight to the community. And that 18 percent were not on parole. They had no legal status, no parole officer, no conditions of their release.
Taken together, these two national trends paint, I think, a very complicated but important picture. We are using parole boards less, but we're using parole supervision more.
So the policy question then comes into sharper focus. If parole has provided a linchpin between life on the inside and life on the outside of the prison walls, do we have a new mechanism for creating those linkages when parole release is on the decline and parole supervision is on the rise?
Again, when we step back from this national trend to look at the state-to-state variations, we find remarkable differences. In some states, such as Florida, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Virginia, more than half of their prisoners leave prison with no supervision—more than half. At the other extreme, in states such as Oregon, Rhode Island and California, virtually every prisoner faces a period of supervision after release. And again, there are states at every point in the spectrum in between.
These state variations point up for us how little we know about the operations of post-prison supervision and about the effectiveness of supervision strategies.
The first question is clear. What are the criteria for deciding who gets supervised when not everybody does? What are the differences in parole officer caseloads in these states, some with high supervision and some with low supervision? What is the relationship between different supervision strategies and rates of recidivism, or other outcomes that we might care about, such as finding jobs, finding housing, connecting to family, and connecting to the positive influences within community?
These questions become even more important when we realize that over the past decade several states have decided to double their parole caseloads, and 15 states have seen a decline in their parole caseloads just in the 1990s. The policy questions, again, are fairly obvious. Have resources followed these shifts? Have resources gone up in those states that have increased supervision? Have they declined in those that have decreased supervision? Have caseloads per officer kept pace? And how were these policy decisions made in those states?
Finally, when we examine the third parole function, the decision to revoke parole and send a parolee back to prison, we see the most dramatic shift at the national level.
One way to understand the shift is to look at who comes in the front door of a state's prison system and ask how many of them are parole violators. In 1980—again, a short 20 years ago, for those of us who are over 30—across the country, 17 percent of all state prison admissions were parole violators—17 percent. By 1999 that rate had doubled; 35 percent of all parole—admissions are now parole violators.
Even more remarkable is the fact that we see—is that we send about as many people to
prison as parole violators in 1999 as we sent to prison for any reason in 1980. According to best estimates, about one-third of these parole violators were returned to prison because they committed new crimes. The remaining two-thirds were sent back because they committed technical violations of their parole status.
And we don't understand these differences very much, and we need to do more research here. But the important point that we like to emphasize in our report is that we have, in essence, created a separate pathway back to prison through the use of parole revocations.
Once again, the state-to-state variations are critically important here. In some states, such as Florida, Alabama, Indiana, West Virginia, and Mississippi, fewer than 10 percent of their prison admissions were parole violators. In other states, including Montana, Louisiana, Utah and California, more than half of the prisoners coming in the front door into their prison systems are there because their parole was revoked and they were sent back to prison.
California leads the nation in its parole revocation practices. In 1999, 67 percent of the admissions to California's prisons were parole violators—nearly 90,000 individuals.
These trends have important implications for corrections managers in these states. What does it mean for prison systems, such as California's, that have a high number of parole-violators cycling in and out, staying for relatively short periods of time? What are the implications for screening and assessment practices; for program participation; for prison discipline; for keeping connections to families? When we examine these national trends and state-level variations, we conclude that today's parole system is a far cry from that envisioned by the reformers who introduced the indeterminate sentencing philosophy early in the 20th century.
The profound changes in parole that we document in our report require us to ask whether our current sentencing system is serving society's broader interests. At its best, the parole system serves as a linchpin between life in prison and life on the outside. It places an obligation on prisoners, and prisons and parole systems, to prepare for the inevitable release of an inmate back into the community. So we should be concerned that the decline in parole releases means the prisoners are returning home with fewer connections to family, home and work. At its best, the parole system serves to enhance the reintegration of returning prisoners. So, to the extent that supervision populations have increased significantly without adequate resources, we are losing opportunities to reconnect returning prisoners to the positive institutions of civil society.
At its best, the parole system offers incentives and sanctions to shape the behavior of returning prisoners. So they are likely, maybe only somewhat more likely, to become productive law-abiding citizens. And revocations of conditional liberty are decisions made in rare, limited, and appropriate circumstances. So to the extent that parole revocations have increased
dramatically, we have in essence created a backdoor sentencing system, another pathway to prison for hundreds of thousands of individuals each year, that operates largely outside of public view.
Now, the rhetoric of the parole system, and the reality of the parole system, are of course not one and the same. But, at a time when over 600,000 individuals are leaving our state and federal prisons each year, we need to think carefully about how to prepare them, their families and their communities for this inevitable moment, and to increase the chances of their successful return. The rhetoric, and sometimes the reality, of parole represented an effort by another generation of criminal justice policymakers to wrestle with similar questions. By examining the state of parole in America today, we hope that we have helped focus attention on these same questions in their modern setting.
Thank you.
MR. GEST: Thank you, Jeremy. (Applause.)
We've now been joined by our other panelist. But I think we'll start with the first commentary by Nolan Jones. And for those of you who came in late, Nolan is the director of the Human Resources Committee at the National Governors Association.
Nolan?
MR. NOLAN JONES: Thank you, Ted. Thanks for the invitation. This is a very significant and timely report, and I must compliment my good friend, Jeremy, and his associate, Sarah Lawrence, for examining the state of parole in America. As this report points out, there has been a major change in how parole is viewed among the states. Parole today stands in sharp contrast to the past. Just a few decades ago, no one raised serious questions about parole. Its function in the criminal justice system had not received much scrutiny. Parole, like prison sentencing, had not been questioned in a very serious manner by researchers. Its internal operations were handled by professionals and the costs were acceptable. But as you've heard, around the late 1970s or early 1980s, the public began to complain about the rate of crime and that it was unacceptable. This was coupled with the introduction of victim support groups, who began to raise public awareness about the innocent victims. They began to monitor courts and individuals released from prison. They complained to public officials about judges using liberal sentences, unsupervised prisoners in neighborhoods, and, in general, an uncaring criminal justice system.
In order to correct this situation, these citizen groups pressured officials for changes in sentencing, such as from indeterminate sentencing to determinate sentencing. This began to have a major impact on parole, as you've heard. Public pressure continued on the criminal justice system throughout the '80s and into the early '90s. Many state legislative ballots saw initiatives such as truth in sentencing, requiring offenders to serve a certain percentage of that time, usually 85 percent; banning parole for certain types of offenders; mandating life without parole; and, an analogy taken from the game of baseball for repeat offenders, three strikes and you're out.
Many of these sentencing issues found their way into federal law in the 1994 crime bill, and from our data we've heard that by the end of 2000, 16 states had abolished discretionary release from prisons by parole boards for all offenders, and a few others have abolished it for only violent offenders. But public pressure on parole has varied in impact on the states, as pointed out in the paper before us today.
However, let me raise a word of caution as we examine parole in the states. The states are different. One of those valued constitutional powers that states have is known as police powers. The criminal law which sentences offenders and determines what is a crime and what is the penalty is quite different in various states. What might be considered a misdemeanor in one state could be a very serious felony in another, and the offender would be sentenced accordingly. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that parole systems differ between states.
Also, just as earlier citizen groups felt dissatisfaction with the criminal justice system and how public officials were handling crime, once again we find citizens are taking the initiative in reducing sentences and mandating alternatives to serving prison and/or jail time. For example, the state of California, that gave us "three strikes and you're out" laws, passed an initiative in 2000 calling for treatment instead of prison for drug offenders.
There are initiatives and referenda on the ballot in several states today that will change the sentencing structure. One of those such initiatives caught my eye, as it relates to our discussion today. It's Proposition 203 in Arizona. This proposition would amend the state's constitution in one act which they call the Drug Medicalization, Prevention and Control Act. Proposition 203 would require probation on conviction of a first or second offense involving the personal use or use of paraphernalia associated with possession or use of a controlled substance, and prohibit the court from imposing a term of incarceration in prison or jail as a condition of probation. However, there are others; for example, that would create an act of criminal law for aggravated animal cruelty, punishable by six years in prison for the first offense and up to 40 years in prison for a subsequent offense.
But one initiative on the ballot in one state is quite interesting, and is one of the reasons that I believe initiative and referendum is a very poor way to make public policy. The initiative would require the state to provide treatment in lieu of incarceration for drug offenders. To some, that probably doesn't sound bad. But the initiative goes even further to require the state to spend $247 million over seven years to pay for drug treatment programs, and to allow the applicable records of offenders, who complete treatment instead of incarceration for illegal drug use and possession, sealed and kept confidential for most purposes.
This initiative not only affects crime policy in the state, but will have a direct, mandated fiscal impact on the state. And for that matter, states are facing some very difficult fiscal times now. They are closing prisons, raising tuition in higher education, and imposing various other fees and taxes. For fiscal year 2000, the state budget shortfall was estimated to be about $50 billion, or close to 10 percent of state spending. Unfortunately, after this huge budget was reduced for 2002, it now appears that fiscal year 2003 will be dramatically worse for states as revenue declines continue to accelerate. Revenue growth for states has now been negative for four straight quarters. I recently heard that Standard & Poor's said that the budget shortfall for states in fiscal year 2003 could reach $60 billion, and they would not be upgrading state credit ratings during the year.
So, in conclusion, it's obvious that states will not have much money to spend on new programs. But this paper on parole reminds us that we must spend wisely, understanding the simple fact that individuals in prison will be returning to society, no matter how long they stay in the institution, more individuals are being released today than ever before. What's happening to them? Will they find jobs? Will they find housing? Is there a bridge from prison back to the community? Who participates in building that bridge? This paper informs us about the role of parole in building this bridge.
But also, I must point out that Jeremy Travis has led the discussion about the need for offenders to have bridges back to the community by changing the rhetoric and focus of this discussion and getting us started thinking about what's called "reentry"—getting back into the community. So for those who don't like the old concept of parole, it has been reinvented: reentry.
Congress also has seen fit to build bridges on reentry. In recent reauthorization of the Department of Justice legislation that was recently passed, an offender reentry pilot demonstration program was established. These pilot projects will allow state and local government to provide oversight and monitoring of released offenders. It may or may not be parole as we know, but if it accomplishes the task of parole, we should all be appreciative and thankful.
Thank you. (Applause.)
MR. GEST: Thank you, Nolan.
We're now going to turn to a long-time practitioner in this field, Mario Paparozzi. And again, to remind those of you who may have come in late, he is a faculty member at the College of New Jersey, and the former chair of the New Jersey State Parole Board.
Mario.
MR. MARIO PAPAROZZI: Thanks, Ted. Thanks a lot. Thank you for the invitation to be here. I've spent 30 years in this business; started out as a parole officer in 1972 in Newark, New Jersey. I'm not sure that we ever really understood the mission of parole, as I look back over 30 years. Lots of things have affected the way that we define success, failure, and the very nature of parole.
The redefinition of parole as reentry is long overdue. Parole, when it's early release, is an injustice to folks. It's unfair. It means they got out earlier than they should have gotten out,
in plain English. And folks want to buy some justice, I think, and they find justice valuable in our system. I think it's very fruitful to look at parole as a way to make us all safer. To get folks from behind the wall back to the streets in a way that really protects us in the future, and if we can, while we're at it, stop the next wave of crime, or at least diminishes it a little bit, in the communities where crime dwells the most.
I think that it's important to reflect on why we're here today, and why this report is so important. And I think it's so important because of the sheer numbers. When I started out in 1972, the statewide parole caseload in New Jersey was something like 3,000. And today it's something like 20,000, it's over 20,000, actually. And my caseload in 1972 was 100, 100-110. I had center-city Newark, only the housing projects. Today, the caseload though in New Jersey is about 35 to one, statewide, which is excellent. But yet, our violation rates are much higher.
So what are we doing? Have we changed the way that we work, or have we given more folks more time to watch people, catch them doing bad things, and not try to, quote, unquote, "work a case" to help them to re-enter and transition to society, as opposed to going back, as Jeremy points out so often when I see him speak, the tremendous violation rates that are literally crippling state budgets, in my view. Does it have to be that way? Some states are violating to the tune, technical violations without a new offense, to the tune of 70 percent. Some states are around a third. My state's around a third. That seems to be normative, about 33 percent, or so.
Does it really have to be that all those folks need to go back to jail? And what would happen if we took some violators, by the way, on their way back, and did something halfway-back? We have an initial piece of evidence that's about to be released in the next couple of months that shows that parole violators that go through some kind of a residential community treatment program, as opposed to prison, experience recidivism rates that are about 10 percent lower than parole violators who do not go through such an experience. That's significant, given the sheer numbers that we're talking about.
What's driving this car? Bad people? People who can't keep appointments? People who change their residence or move in with a girlfriend overnight and didn't tell their parole officers where they were? Or a parolee who comes in and says, "By the way, I've used drugs, can you help me?" and one parole officer will maybe refer a person to treatment, and the other might lock him up? We have everything on each extreme in this country, and everything in between. We have parole that hasn't decided whether it's a law enforcement agency, whether it's a social casework agency, or whether it's both. We have organizations that don't understand how to define success in our country. We have success simply defined, I think and appropriately defined, as successful completions on parole, or from parole; not as how many people we violated.
Some bureaucrats will come forward, myself included in one of my iterations, and tell you that we're doing a good job, because we have so many violators, but there are no new offenses amongst those violators; they're all technical PVs, as we say in the business. That's not a sign of success. That's a sign of system failure. We need to own up to that. We need to own up to the fact that not everyone will succeed on parole, no one expects that. But we need to know that we were better off because of the existence of parole, as opposed to being without it.
What's gone wrong, really? Well, let me just take a couple of seconds and tell you my view from the street level looking up, and from the top level looking down. Who is it that constitutes parole boards? How do we think about operating parole boards in our country? Well, we're an eclectic mix of pretty much every discipline, and then some, in our country. We need to speak very carefully about who it is that's on parole boards. I jokingly kid with my colleagues,
locally and nationally, that I'm the accidental parole board chairman in my state. First one that actually came from parole, that has credentials academically in the field, and so on.
Is it the case that anybody can do this business? I think not. We've acted like anybody can. This is very serious business. It's about risk-prediction, it's about case-planning, it's about addressing things even beyond an offender. And I think one of the neat things that I see coming out of the reentry discussion, it's not just the redefinition of parole, but it's the demand that collaborations exist across agencies that affect a wide variety of social problems, housing, employment, school, and crime—they all live side by side. You can't fix crime without addressing some of the others, and vice versa. We need some serious expertise brought to the table.
I think what the biggest benefit for me is, from these reports, is that it's pointing out the critical need for parole to take a fresh look, and an opportunity to maybe reorganize its paradigm. Maybe parole needs to exist in a judiciary context in order to get its paradigmatic act together. Maybe not. But the end result will drive the car. We need to find out whether or not parole officers should be law enforcement agents, social workers, or both, but we don't need to do that absent where we're going. Discussions about strategy absent valued results go all over the place, and when the results don't matter, you can, frankly, do anything; but when the results matter, you can't.
And I think what I'm hearing in reports like the Urban Institute's report is that the results just simply have to matter, not only because it's a matter of life and death and it's breaking our budget; it's fundamentally humanitarian to address the lost lives that are going back into our prisons in droves. In droves. And I've watched it one too many times in 30 years. And I hope that we can have the beginnings of sensible discussions, not just here today by virtue of this report, but over the next few years in the whole context of the federal government initiative about reentry, and make the field, make the profession step up to the plate and decide who it is and what it is that it's willing to own as an end result.
Thank you, Ted. (Applause.)
MR. GEST: Well, thank you, Mario.
We have plenty of time for questions here. And as we said at the outset, if you want to ask a question, of course raise your hand and wait for a microphone to be brought to you, and then identify yourself and address the question to anyone on the panel that you care to.
MR. LOU MARANO, UPI: I'm curious about the variation among the states in terms of parole release and also return to prison. Let's say you take a case like California, I believe you said that has a high rate of parole release but also a high rate of return. Now, can we conclude that the parole boards in California are using bad judgment and not doing a good job in reviewing the
inmates' applications, or can we conclude that the violations, the technical violations, are being enforced there more stringently than they are in other places, rightly or wrongly?
MR. TRAVIS: The first thing to realize is that there's a relationship between these two decisions, to supervise somebody and to revoke their parole. It goes this way: If you place people on parole supervision when they're released from prison, then you can violate them. So imagine a state where nobody's placed on supervision. There can be no parole violations.
So you have to start with an understanding of the first threshold decision to supervise somebody after prison and to place the conditions on their liberty. Can't violate somebody who's not on parole. So California is one of those states where we looked at the BJS data that said, Which states are placing lots of people on parole? California is one of them. But California is also distinctive in a separate way, which is that it violates lots of people and sends, you know, 90,000 people or so back to their prisons.
One could hypothesize that there are differences in the behavior of people in California compared to the other states. I tend to think that's not the case, but it is a function of policy. It's a function of policy and practice that emanates starting at the top and working its way down to the actions of a parole agent on the street. And if you look at California, they've shifted their policy over time to being much more aggressive in terms of forcing conditions, and it sort of approaches a zero-tolerance view of sending people back to prison when they find violations. So there is a culture, really, of parole in California that places lots of people on supervision and they keep these people on supervision for a long period of time. And then they have a very aggressive enforcement. So it is a matter of state policy that starts really at the parole board and works its way down, and it's influenced by the sort of discussions within the state, policy discussions within the state on crime and justice topics sort of broadly defined.
And whether there's a shift in California remains to be seen. There's a lot of people and institutions now taking a look at California, within California, to see if they want to make some policy changes. It costs California about a billion dollars a year to house its parole violators. So this is—if you're the governor of California, this is an opportunity to look for costs savings. But you have to sort of grab a hold of the policy and the culture of parole
supervision within the state of California or others.
MR. GEST: I think Mario has a comment on this also.
MR. PAPAROZZI: My experience in states where parole officers are peace officers, you have a dramatically higher violation rates. California, New Jersey, some other states that I can think of—I'll use those two—where parole officers are peace officers, carry weapons, and so on, are affiliated with bargaining units—the Policemen's Benevolence Association, California Corrections Peace Officer Association, and so on.
(Momentary tape break)
—as surveillance agents, and when there's a violation, incarceration is not a bad thing.
MR. BOB LERMAN, Urban Institute and American University: Jeremy, you mentioned that it's a unique—parole is a unique American institution. I wonder what are the institutions that some other developed countries use? Do you know anything about —
MR. TRAVIS: They usually use parole.
MR. LERMAN: So it's not so unique?
MR. TRAVIS: No, it is uniquely American in its sort of origins, but it has been embraced by most Western countries?
MR. LERMAN: Well, more broadly, do we have any lessons from other countries about substantial reductions in recidivism or ways of dealing with release of prisoners, the reentry issue, and so on, that we might be able to learn from?
MR. TRAVIS: Well, I think—and others may want to comment on this as well—in European countries, there's much more—first of all, incarceration rates are much lower, and there's much more attention paid to transition planning. And this is seen as something that government is responsible for, is to make this transition work as well as it can.
So, I remember visiting a German prison, for example, and there were people working inside the prison in a factory that was run by a German company that had a commitment to employ them when they got out of prison, and they were all union members. Now, that's not likely to happen in the U.S. (Laughter.)
So, I mean, there is a different philosophy, I think, towards reintegration generally. It's not to say that they're doing it perfectly; far from it. And there's actually an interesting discussion in the U.K. and other places about ways to do it better. But I think it just starts with a different premise about the social obligation to enhance the likelihood of successful reintegration. Once you start from that premise, then other things fall into place.
MR. JONES: I found that—in the mid-'80s, I visited the German youth camps and youth centers, and they place a lot of emphasis on reintegration, and start with the process of both working the kids like they were in the institution, but they went to the public schools. The supervision then gave them—helped them get a job so that they would not continue into the life of crime, et cetera. So I agree.
MR. PAPAROZZI: Just one quick follow-up as well. In the U.K., in particular, they are really committed at the Home Office to evidence-based practices. And we are starting to do that here. But they're doing it in a very serious way and tying it to concrete outcomes, much more so than we seemed to be willing to do over time. And we can learn from evidence-based practices types of approaches, obviously.
MR. TRAVIS: That's a great reminder, because the Home Office is now actually certifying prison-based programs based on their ability to show, in good research, that they can produce results, particularly reduction in recidivism. And if you can't meet that standard, you don't get funded. So they're moving very sharply in that direction.
MR. GEST: Okay. Yes?
MS. NAN ROMAN, National Alliance to End Homelessness: I was wondering if anybody could speak in more detail to the intersection of housing with all of this. During the so-called "golden age" of parole, there was a surplus, actually, of affordable housing units relative to people who needed them. Housing was available. At the same time that you're talking about parole changing, over that same period, we've seen a reduction in affordable housing, till now there's a shortage of affordable housing. It's sort of setting people up in many ways, I would think, for failure. And certainly we see a lot of folks coming directly out of prisons in the homeless assistance system, which we'd like to stop. But are people getting more help with housing? Or how is this being addressed by the parole system—this shortage, absence of affordable housing?
MR. TRAVIS: It's hard to help with housing if housing's not available, so that's a challenge at the outset.
But most people, when they return from prison, return to families, so the housing is back home. And I think the question there is how to work on family issues, rather than housing issues, so that that can be a successful transition.
But over the same period of time, particularly in the '90s and particularly with some of the "war on drugs" enactments of the U.S. Congress, as you know, housing has been put off limits to people with certain felony convictions or, in some cases, all felony convictions—public housing, Section 8 housing, and the like. So that's made return to that form of housing more problematic.
But applying for private market housing is difficult, because you're often asked, "Do you have a felony record?" You often have to go through some sort of credit check.
So the community of policy folks, like your organization, that are interested in homelessness are finding an interesting conversation with people who are interested in reentry, because there's an overlap between those two phenomenon. And some states are documenting, you know, a fifth of the people or so coming out of the prison basically end up going straight to shelters or on the street. So I'm not sure that's hard data, but I've seen some data that suggests that it could be that high. So I think it's a real concern.
Now under the classic parole idea, you had to have housing to get released.
MR. GEST: Anyone else want to comment on—
MR. PAPAROZZI: In my state, we've always had something called placements, which is a parole officer's nightmare, by the way. That means the person comes out without a home. And going back to 1972, when there were maybe more apartments available, they weren't very good. And again, my perspective comes from inner-city Newark, so granted, it could be variable across the country. It's not such a bad thing that some of those housing units are not there. On the other hand, it beats sleeping at Penn Station.
What we need to do is to think about ways to revise our emergency welfare support system to pay for housing that would be supportive of a transition, not some small, little room with a metal, you know, box spring, and a light bulb hanging down from a wire. That is not homelessness, I guess, right? But that is also going to be an absolute mitigation against successful transition.
MR. GEST: Let's see. We had a question back there.
MS. NKECHI TAIFA, Open Society Institute: Jeremy Travis or anyone else, in your research, have you discerned any racial disparity with respect to revocations for technical violations?
MR. TRAVIS: We didn't examine that, and I'm trying to think quickly whether I know of any research that has examined that question on violations. I'm not aware of any. There may be some. It's a terrific question. And I think the larger point is we don't understand much about the exercise of discretion in revoking conditional liberty and the discretion that's exercised both by parole officers and by parole boards. But for me, it is subject to the same sort of inquiry that we made of indeterminate sentencing itself 20 years ago, because there the inquiry was, are like cases treated alike; are there other examples or patterns of discrimination based on race or other inappropriate criteria; and to what extent are these decisions made in reviewable and open ways?
I think if you take those questions that we asked of indeterminate sentencing 20 years ago, those same questions can be laid at the doorstep of parole revocation. It requires good data. It requires public will to take a look at it. But I think it's—when I call it backdoor sentencing, it is a form of sentencing that requires the same sort of examination.
MS. SALLY HILLSMAN, American Sociological Association: Jeremy, is there anything about the characteristics of the population currently being released from prisons, perhaps differences over time or whatever, either about their criminal background or about their social and personal background, that could help us think about whether policy responses to this issue might actually be able to solve many of these issues if properly addressed, or whether this population is
more intractable and therefore perhaps the policy responses might have greater difficulty?
MR. TRAVIS: We know that there are shifts in the profile of the population. If you look just at what people have been charged with as they come into prison, there are shifts, particularly significant increases in the number of people in prison now who have been convicted of some sort of drug offense. So that's a place to start to ask about connection between prison and community for those who are drug users, not all of whom are convicted of drug offenses; and not all of those convicted of drug offenses are drug users. But I think that's a place to start to ask your question, which is, could a more targeted intervention, that links what happens in prison to life in the community, for some subset of returning prisoners be more likely to be successful?
And I think there's good research, as you know, that also shows that a linkage between in-prison drug treatment and post-release drug treatment, including testing and sanctions, is highly successful at reducing drug use and reducing crime. So that would be my nomination for a place to start.
MR. GEST: Am I missing anyone on this side here? Apparently not. So—yes?
MR. GENE GUERRERO, Open Society Institute: I have two questions, if I could. On the problem of technical violations, you mentioned, Mr. Paparozzi, the idea of halfway houses for people on the way back in. Is there anything else that could be done, by state legislators or Congress, to deal with the technical violation problem?
And then the second question is, I mean, it seems like that the practices of the states are all over the map. You have states doing all these different things. Is there any way to look at that data to see whether their differences in recidivism rate, or crime rates, or whatever from the use of parole or the stopping parole. Does the data lend itself to that kind of comparison state by state?
MR. PAPAROZZI: Well, on your first point, yeah, there are several things that folks can think about doing to, kind of, deal with the issue of parole violators. Not just halfway-back residential facilities, but how about an 850-person waiting list on a drug program in a typical inner-city, right now? How about addressing quality of programming? I mean, I have great love and affection for many urban drug programs, but are those the programs that we in the suburbs are sending our kids to? Would we, if they had a drug problem? I think we're not doing that, I mean, I know we're not doing that, frankly. So, quality and getting rid of waiting lists.
How about mental health services that are nicely on paper provided in attachment areas, but parole officers have no access really to them because of the funding issue. Folks on parole generally don't have any third party payment capabilities. But we need serious mental health services for our folks, not just some kind of an eclectic mix of something or other, or seeing somebody once a week, or once a month for 15 minutes or a half an hour. But we have waiting lists in that regard, too.
Housing came up before. Crucial. And another thing that states can do, and I like this, and in fact, my state, to its credit, has done this pretty much my whole career, but targeted-job tax credit. And also, subsidizing vocational training for on-the-job training and so on, to give employers inducement to hire offenders.
Some of the things that states can also do are to look at undoing some things, like the requirement that we notify employers, and how we do that. Many states require that parole officers notify employers all the time of, you know, complete criminal history and so on, and it kills the job very often. We have to weigh, you know, our obligations in that regard, but we've gone a little bit overboard, I think, and we have difficulty with folks doing that. Transportation money, I mean, I can go on, and on and on, but you get the point. There are many, many things we can do. Many commonsensical things, many evidence-based sophisticated things that we can do to address that.
On your second point, I guess I'll let Jeremy address it, but I think the data, my personal opinion, does lend itself to a comparison. Does it matter whether we have discretionary release or not? Does it matter—what I'd like to see is, if you're going to have discretionary release with a group of folks who come from all walks of life, and then all of a sudden, get charged with making risk decisions, as opposed to a statutory-type of a release, as opposed to a very thoughtful board making a decision, I think we pick the last choice, would be my guess. But I don't think we have a natural laboratory for all three of those, but we certainly have a natural laboratory for discretionary and mandatory, in my opinion, but I could be wrong.
Jeremy?
MR. TRAVIS: The Bureau of Justice Statistics just made public a data set that a lot of people are spending time looking at now that examines a release cohort from 1994. In 10 states? Eleven states? And it examines their recidivism rates over time, and they are on very different—within those states, there's a lot of variety in terms of supervision policies. So, I think there is research that can be done that would look at variation within the sort of state experiments, policy variations, to see if there are differences in recidivism rates.
My own view is that that's not going to answer the question because if we find some difference, which we would, I would expect, I think there's a larger set of policy challenges that we face, and that the public really wants something else. Because even—you know, the basic numbers, of people released from state prison, two-thirds or so are rearrested for one or more crimes within three years after release. And if you brought that down to 50 percent, would the public say, "Oh, that's terrific, now let's do that."
I'm increasingly coming to the view, personal view here, that we need a very different sort of structural way of thinking about this relationship between prison and post-prison experience, and that requires going back to asking ourselves why it is that we think that the prison sentence is still being served, but in the community. Right? So I am coming to the view that we need to decouple those two notions; that you do your time while you're in prison, and then there's some period of time that's something else, that is transition time; it's not the continuation of your sentence, but you're still under some sort of legal obligation to do certain things.
And that I would prefer—and if you're interested in more on this, I gave a talk on this topic at the Vera Institute last May. But I would prefer to have a limited amount of time, and a pretty significant investment in transition needs, like the housing need we were talking about, or drug treatment need, and not say you continue to be on supervision for five years. Just to say there's transition support and supervision that's needed, with public safety still being the prime consideration, but reintegration being the second.
And the structural change that I would make, if I were rewriting our history here, would be to have that period of supervision overseen by a court, not an executive branch agency. Because I think that, for reasons that Mario and Nolan have both alluded to, I think that, unfortunately, politics get mixed up in this too much. And I think the judicial branch has more independence and is a more open process. So the idea of reentry courts, which I've advocated for a while, would be sort of a structural way of thinking about decoupling the sentence and a period of restricted liberty that's called supervisory transitional period of time.
MR. JONES: I think also on that—and Jeremy hit on something very helpful, is that how the public view what we do in criminal justice, over and against any other professions, I continuously say that in our profession, in criminal justice especially, that we can't make any mistakes, and success is defined as that you must stay off of drugs, you must do this thing, you must be correct forever, you know. Now, other professions, in medicine and others, it's two years or three years of something, a feeling of being successful might be described as success. You know, if they can keep you alive for five years, they say they have been very successful. The public won't have that in the criminal justice system. We cannot make those kinds of mistakes. They look for—success means forever, you know. And those are sometimes things that we can't guarantee—that an individual won't relapse after 10 years, after five years, et cetera.
MR. PAPAROZZI: Can I add to that?
MR. GEST: Yeah.
MR. PAPAROZZI: You know, this—I totally agree with Nolan, and I would like to add that folks, though, do have an expectation that we've done what they think is the state of the art. We expect medical doctors to do the state of the art, and we know that we might not get well even so. But we can't often define this—that we did the state of the art. We're not sure what it is and so on. And that angers the public, and I think that's legitimate. I think that's legitimate.
The issue—I think we should be able to stand up to the public and say, "Look, we've done the best we can, and here's how, and here's why we think it's the best we can." And we still have some failures, like all other professions do. But because we can't do that, we're in this debate as to—every time we have a failure, that we're an abomination as a profession.
MR. GEST: Okay. Yes? We had a question on the aisle there.
MS. MARGARET FELDMAN, National Council on Family Relations: We've mentioned housing. We've mentioned jobs. I've heard that retaining a strong tie to the family and acceptance by the family is one of the most important features that helps someone return to society. And that—and I'm wondering whether there are programs where that is a deliberate part of the program.
MR. TRAVIS: I'll take a stab at it. There's good research that shows that positive connections with family are important to successful reintegration, by a number of measures. So the question is, how does our current—the way we structure the world promote or impede the creation of positive connections with family when you return from prison?
If we just look at the classic parole model, one of the things that you're supposed to say to the parole board is something about your family being ready—or not—for you to come home. And as good as that might have been, it's really too simple. I think family connections are very complicated when you get out of prison.
And just to illustrate that, I was in New York City two or three weeks ago, watching a new initiative by the Vera Institute of Justice called Project Greenlight. And these are all people being released from prison, not by parole boards but by operation of law. And they have said, irrespective of the fact that they're being released this way, that they still want to do something about family connections. So they have set up three family group counseling processes. They're located close to the community, which most prisons are not. So the family can come in. And they have one group that looks at couples that hope to be reunited; another group that is what they call co-parents, so it's mom and dad who have no prospect of being a couple again. And then they have what they call families of origin. They bring in siblings and cousins.
So they are trying, in an experimental sort of way—they're doing good research—to understand what are the tensions and dynamics about reintegration. And when you start with the fact that people have been in prison, on average, two and a half years or so, you know, life has gone on, things have changed, and it's not always "yellow ribbon around the old oak tree" when Johnny comes home. So there's a reality that has to be dealt with at the moment of release, starting right before people get out and right after, that is beyond, I think, our traditional way of thinking about family reunification.
MS. FELDMAN: What about starting when they first enter prison?
MR. TRAVIS: Yeah. All reentry should start the day you come into prison. Actually, in my view, it should start the day you're sentenced. But at least there's a moment of, it seems to me, unavoidable obligation to do something when you're about to let somebody out of prison.
MR. GEST: We had a couple questions here. Why don't we go to you first.
MS. JUNE CRAWFORD, National Institute for Literacy: So you can guess my question. I do quite a bit of work with the Correctional Education Association, and we know that there's a high incidence of illiteracy or low literacy in prisons. And we are also finding large numbers of adults with learning disabilities, which impact their ability to hold down jobs, to get along with their families, to get along with society and so on. And I don't see a lot in prisons to address these issues prior to people getting out, and it seems to me that would have a huge impact. And I'd like you to respond to that, any of you on the panel.
MR. PAPAROZZI: Well, I agree with you. (Laughs.) So there you go. But, you know —
MS. CRAWFORD: I'm not in a position to do something, and you are.
MR. PAPAROZZI: We all are in a position to do something. You know, when I hear comments like, "Let's reintegrate with families from the beginning," who would disagree with that? Yet we run our systems—and someone asked, "What can states do?" How about stop charging surcharges on telephone calls, so that they can stay connected that way? How about figuring out ways—we do video parole revocation hearings, how about video visits? There are many small things we can think about. If we believe and if we can demonstrate that the state of the art includes these kinds of things and that it matters in terms of our public safety, these kinds of things won't be optional.
Literacy is a particularly important thing. In my experience, there's nothing more profoundly embarrassing to someone who's on parole sitting before me as a parole officer or as the chairman of the parole board and they can't read. They'll go to great length to cover that up. If we can work on that issue with them, we will have made a very meaningful connection. In other words, we will have become more significant, I think, to that person.
Even more importantly, one of the things that I tried to foster in the last couple years is working on literacy issues in the family even when we don't have to; again, to become more significant. Connected, if you will. If we have those kinds of relationships established, it would be more likely folks would see us as the person or the entity that's going to help bring us out of here, this place, and bring us to a new place. We don't do those kinds of things.
The question as to why? Well, I'll go back to my simplistic comment, maybe, but I think it's where I stand. When the result is not articulated and when it doesn't matter, you can do anything. You can charge for phones or not. You can do literacy or not. We have literacy programs in some places because leaders like it and are committed to it. In other places, it's an individual decision: "I don't think it's a big deal," or "I have other issues that I need to address here, so literacy will go down in the queue."
It can't be optional. We know that this matters at the end of the day, the connections to the family, literacy and so on. We have to nail it down for folks. That becomes best practice, the state of the art.
MR. TRAVIS: If I could just add the voice of sort of somber reality here, Nolan reminds us that the states are facing enormous budget crises—all of them. And if you look at what's happening within corrections budgets, the first things to be cut are the programs that aren't many to start with, that are sort of the soft expenditures in a corrections budget—drug treatment, literacy, vocational. So it's not a good time to be raising this particular matter.
I think if there is a silver lining to this very dark cloud at the moment, there may be ways to save money for the state budgets by rethinking the back end, and rethinking ways to slow down violations or have alternate ways of handling parole violators. But the state budget situation doesn't bode well for questions like yours.
MR. PAPAROZZI: May I add to that, Jeremy? We cannot afford not to, frankly. This is one of those airplane oxygen-mask issues, okay? If we don't put it on, the state budget will be even worse and worse and worse.
And with all due respect to states — and I'm not going to speak for other states, but my own state in particular, in over 30 years, there is a whole bunch of stuff going on under the umbrella of turf, and that you can figure out how to do a cheap literacy program with a small shift of cost inside a system. Some of this is the lack of the will to do it. I don't mean to sit here and say that there's a silver bullet and we'll get rid of our budget woes, but frankly, if we all sat and had a very, very serious discussion, we would, I think, come to the conclusion pretty quickly we can't afford to not do these things. Look where it ended up 30 years from when I walked through the door, with 600,000 people coming home every year.
MR. GEST: I think we only have time for a couple of more questions.
But, yes?
MS. SONIA SHAH: I just wanted to ask you, Mr. Travis, the United States Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments this afternoon on California's three-strikes law. If they find that the three-strike law is unconstitutional for cruel and unusual punishment, what effect do you think that will have on the parole system in California?
MR. TRAVIS: It will have little effect on the parole system, because the three-strikes legislation is basically a way for deciding how long a prison term is and who gets those long prison terms. If three strikes and you're out means for life, which it does in some states, then it will mean that some people who are now in for life will be getting paroles when they're very old, and it will be a fairly small number.
So, I don't want to guess what the Supreme Court would say, but it's not a decision that would go to the nature of parole release, except for a small number of cases, or parole supervision.
There are new cases coming up on the docket, Supreme Court docket, this year, one on sex-offender registration, actually, that would have more profound implications for parole supervision.
MR. JONES: Yeah, on that, too, he's perfectly right, because the three strikes is defined all over the field, if you look at the number of states that are there. In California, I believe it's 25 years and then you are eligible for the system of parole that you could have, and that's what the third strike will do. And in other states, the third strike might be a mandatory number of years. So it's defining that third strike in every state that's completely different in what you do and what happens at that particular time. So Jeremy's perfectly right. So—and none of us want to guess what the Supreme Court will do on it.
MR. GEST: We're getting to the end of the time. Any other questions? If not, thank you all for spending part of your Election Day with us, and thanks to the panelists.
(Applause.)
(END OF EVENT.)
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