Public defender’s office urges legislators to reform ‘draconian’ parole system

New Jersey lawmakers should give parole-eligible incarcerated people a fairer chance of release by ensuring everyone gets a lawyer at parole hearings and access to confidential documents that shape parole decisions, the state Office of the Public Defender urges in a new report.

The report is the office’s third since 2020, when it began scrutinizing the parole system’s routine denials even to parole applicants with exemplary institutional records. The office found through records requests that the state parole board granted parole in just half the cases it heard in 2020, 40% of cases in 2019, and 42% of cases in 2018. The parole board’s latest annual report shows it granted parole to 47% of 2,343 applicants in the 2022 fiscal year.

“The Parole Board consistently fails to release parole eligible applicants, even though the law imposes a presumption of release for anyone who is eligible for parole,” assistant public defender Joseph J. Russo wrote in the report. “The result is that clients remain behind bars beyond what sentencing judges intended, and beyond the completion of the punitive portion of their sentences, regardless of the fact that there is not a substantial likelihood they will reoffend or fail to comply with parole.”

Once parole is denied, the board can set “future eligibility terms,” sometimes years or even a decade away, that Russo called “essentially disguised resentencings.”

Russo blamed the board’s tendency to deny parole on a lack of legal representation at all stages of the parole release process, a problem the public defender’s office also identified in its previous reports.

State lawmakers responded last spring by introducing legislation, which Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law in September, to give parolees free legal representation at parole revocation hearings for the first time since 1991. Most parolees get booted back to prison after such hearings; the board revoked parole for 78% of the 1,318 parolees whose cases it heard in fiscal year 2022, according to the board’s latest annual report.

Since the new law took effect, the office has represented almost 200 people at parole revocation hearings, Russo wrote. In examining those cases, Russo discovered that two thirds of them faced returning to jail for violating the conditions of their parole, rather than committing new crimes. Such violations could range from breaking curfew to failing to maintain employment, pay court fines, or complete community service.

The Office of the Public Defender also found that 78% of those sent back behind bars were Black or Hispanic.

Such trends are “staggering,” state Public Defender Jennifer Sellitti said.

“New Jersey’s parole system is completely broken,” she said. “Changing it requires legislation and a mindset that public safety is best served when parolees who do not pose a threat to the community get the help that they need to succeed within it.”

Russo said their findings show policymakers must reinvent parole in New Jersey.

“The current parole supervision model is punitive, not rehabilitative,” Russo said. “This is not surprising given that New Jersey has uniformed parole officers, all of whom graduated from the Police Academy, supervising parolees. The focus must be on keeping parolees in the community so they can maintain employment, remain with their families, and be productive members of society.”

Nicole M. Swiderski, a board spokeswoman, declined to comment, saying the board was reviewing the report.

Reform happening, but more needed

Legislators in 2020 passed a law that added protections for juveniles who were behind bars but eligible for parole, including free legal representation, limits on the length of parole, and frequent reviews of parolees’ status.

In its latest report, the public defender’s office urged legislators to extend free legal representation to parole-eligible incarcerated people too. Policymakers also must give parole applicants access to the psychological reports, risk assessment tools, victim impact statements, and other documents they base their parole decisions on — but now keep confidential from parole applicants and parolees, the report says.

The public defender’s office has petitioned the parole board to consider in its parole decisions an applicant’s age and recidivism risk and change its practice of withholding confidential records, but the board denied that petition. The office appealed to state Superior Court, and the case remains pending.

The office also has urged policymakers to reform lifetime parole, which typically applies to people who received life sentences, which is 25 to 35 years in New Jersey depending on the crime. Now, the board rarely grants early discharge from lifetime parole, even if the parolee has led an exemplary life after getting released from prison, the report notes.

And policymakers must require the board to base parole decisions on sound science about recidivism risk and its own administrative code, Russo wrote in the report.

Instead, the board now often denies parole for reasons unrelated to either of those things, citing subjective, arbitrary reasons like the applicant “lacks insight into his criminal thinking,” “lacks remorse,” or has “insufficient problem resolution,” he wrote.

At the same time, board members often ignore the memory problems of elderly applicants and intellectual disabilities of others, which could shape their demeanor and responses during hearings, Russo added.