A review by lingfish7
Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change by Ben Austen

hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

🎧 Thanks to NetGalley, Flatiron Books, and Macmillan audio for providing an ARC audiobook of this book, which was published today, on 11/7/23. This is a very heartbreaking but crucial nonfiction read. It follows the stories of two “life with parole” incarcerated men: Johnnie Veal and Michael Henderson. They were both incarcerated in the 70’s and 80’s when they were teenagers. Ben Austen attends multiple parole hearings for these two men and provides a thorough history of parole in America as well as the current limitations and flaws of it. 

Overall he argues that every state should reinstate parole because it provides a platform to see the humanity of incarcerated people in a system that often ignores it. It also “is a way to question what incarceration is supposed to accomplish, and to see the ruthlessness and wastefulness in a process that denies our mutual responsibility.”

He concludes that in order for parole to become truly effective, the entire concept of prisons needs to be redesigned with the possibility that anyone and everyone could become rehabilitated and go home. In its current state prisons are not designed with rehabilitation in mind, but are themselves criminogenic.

This book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in becoming an informed citizen about the state of our prison systems and how parole actually works. I am still shocked, outraged, and broken-hearted about what I read. But these are important stories to share because there are real people, with real freedom and lives at stake. Every human deserves a second chance. ❤️

Note: the audiobook narrator, Brett Barry, did an excellent job. He read this book so that it didn’t feel scripted or dry. I loved his inflection and tone.

My detailed notes: 

• There is an age distribution for crime. Most crimes are committed by young people, below the age of 35. Older people are of little to no risk of committing crimes and yet it costs 3 times as much to continue imprisoning them. 
• American prisons don’t reform people, they actually end up causing criminal behavior (they are “criminogenic”) 
• Indeterminant sentences are corrupt and unfair. Because often parole becomes impossible. 
• Parole board members have incredible power but their criteria to evaluate whether a prisoner is worthy of parole is often arbitrary. They have no training in law and are not required to have specialties in psychology or behavioral science. Yet they are tasked to evaluate someone on their understanding of psychology based off interviews that last mere minutes.
• In Louisiana it’s easier for a guilty man to be granted parole than an innocent one.
• Many parole board members are biased against the original crime so no matter how many years they’ve served or how much they’ve reformed, these prisoners can never do enough to be granted parole. 
• Other countries like Canada and in Europe declared life sentences without parole unconstitutional and yet America continues to offer these sentences.
• The concept of victimhood is nebulous because hurt people hurt people. 90% of all those incarcerated for violent crimes experienced violence in their home as a child. But raising this at a parole hearing can come across as presumptuous. The fact that many of the people imprisoned for their crimes have also been victims of crimes themselves.
• A parole candidates freedom can hinge on whether or not the victim’s family attend the parole hearings.
• The victims movement has been good in some ways but has also brought a lot of harm to the justice system. “Conservatives were able to portray the criminal justice system, and really the entire country, as a binary: of victims and offenders.”
• Most victims rights groups in the 80’s and 90’s were led by middle class white women, so they were not representative of all victims. “In the United States a black person is 6 times more likely than a white person to be a victim of homicide. Black Americans are also more likely to be victims of sexual assault, robbery, motor vehicle theft, and nearly every other type of crime.”
• Victim consciousness has pervaded American culture. But this culture just perpetuates an unhealthy myth that all offenders are evil and all victims are good. Not only that, but it lit the fire for policies that drove mass incarceration and inhumane punishments.
• “Homelessness among the formerly incarcerated is ten times higher than it is among the general population.” This number is higher for women and people of color.
• “Police officers wield the immense power to determine what is known and believed to be true…. It’s not what happened, it’s what the police said happened.”
• “Prosecutors build convictions on the work and word of police. Parole boards, decades later, still reference the statements of facts to help determine who deserves to go free. When the policing is tainted, the entire system is corrupted.”
• “It was the word of a black gang member, a convicted murderer, against that of two Chicago police detectives and their commanding officer, all of them white.” (The context of this statement is a case of two police officers electrocuting a man's penis to get him to confess to a murder he didn't commit. 😳😳😳)
• Because of how strict parole supervision is, many formerly incarcerated on parole end up back in prison for minor infractions. Many had their parole revoked for technical reasons like a missed curfew. They were sent to prison without having committed another crime. Mass incarceration has led to mass supervision.
• “The country created a rigid caste system in which those with a felony conviction continually face barriers to re-entry. With a felony, people out on parole struggle to find employers who would hire them. They are frequently denied food stamps, student loans, and public assistance.”
• Some parole members don’t believe in the concept of rehabilitation. So they end up focusing on the original crime and determining parole based solely on that and not on whether the convicted are still a threat to society or not.