The Parole Preparation Project in New York state put out a call for volunteers this year, and more than a hundred people applied. Many were law students and lawyers, but there was also a Planet Fitness employee, a pediatric nurse, a philosophy professor, a software engineer, a waiter, and a translator. Michelle Lewin, Parole Prep’s director, says the program requires an eight-to-twelve-month commitment. Each volunteer is assigned to a team of two or three people, then matched with someone who has been incarcerated for decades, whom the team helps prepare for an interview before the parole board. “Nobody should be judged by the worst thing they’ve ever done,” Lewin says, the New Yorker reports. The mission of New York’s parole board is to “ensure public safety by granting parole when appropriate.”
Incarcerated people are expected to speak openly about their crimes, take responsibility for them, and express remorse. New York’s prisons hold 46,000 people. Almost twenty per cent are lifers. Parole Prep works only with lifers, most of whom have been convicted of murder or other acts of extreme violence. The success rate for lifers appearing before the board in the past three years has been 36 percent. Lewin says the rate for people assisted by a team of Parole Prep volunteers is about sixty per cent. In the past five years, Parole Prep volunteers have helped 149 people get out of prison, twelve of them women. The New Yorker tells how the process worked in the case of Richard Lloyd Dennis, who has been in prison 46 years for killing a police officer in Brooklyn. Lewin says New York’s parole practices “exemplify nationwide criminal justice policies that are rooted in retribution and racism and result in extreme punishment.”