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Ben Austin and Khalil Gibran Mohamed

Mr. Austin is writing a book on crime, punishment and parole. Dr. Mohamed is a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard University.

In 2018, in a heavily guarded prison an hour away from Chicago, a debate team gathered on a stage to debate the benefits of resuming parole in Illinois. Under current law—Illinois abolished discretionary parole for all future offenders in 1978—no one of the 14 members of the Stateville Correctional Center debate team will appear before the parole committee.

Their coach, Katrina Burlet, also led a team at the Evangelical College of Arts and Sciences, and she invited 177 members of the Illinois State Convention to participate in the debate. Approximately 20 lawmakers appeared in the prison theater.

Raul Dorado, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for 20 years, told politicians that he and the rest of the debate team were imprisoned between the ages of 16 and 26. "There is a reason for this," he said. "People age just because of crime."

The Bureau of Justice Statistics and numerous studies have shown that Mr. Dorado is right. Arrest rates for violent and non-violent crimes usually peak in their late teens and early 20s, and then criminal behavior steadily declines. Mr. Dorado said that if he cannot be released on parole, he and his teammates are likely to die in prison. Half of them were sentenced to life imprisonment. Among them, the shortest sentence is 40 years.

Oscar Parham’s amiability earned him the nickname of "smiley face". He said that the harshest punishment should be limited to the worst criminals, rare massacre murderers or serial killers. However, in prisons across the country, more than 200,000 people are serving life imprisonment or virtual life imprisonment of 50 years or more.

"Am I a monster that threatens the social structure as the natural life judgment implies?" he asked. Palem was a teenager in a gang. His friend killed two people in a drug deal. According to the legal theory of "accountability", he was convicted of double murder, which allowed prosecutors to charge accomplices or accomplices as if they had committed actual crimes. "Just as prisoners must change and reform, so must the system," Mr. Palham said.

After a few weeks of public debate, the prison disbanded the Stateville team. The coach was barred from entering any state prison in Illinois. One explanation came from the then director of the Illinois Department of Corrections, who said that the coach did not follow "safety and security measures."

But the team has attracted the attention of several visiting lawmakers. The debaters drafted a bill that gave everyone in Illinois prisons the right to review parole. With outside supporters, the five members of the team formed a group called Parole Illinois. They raised funds and hired an organizer. Now, Illinois legislators have the opportunity to pass a parole reform bill, which is the result of years of work by the Stateville debate team.

Senate Bill 2333 will grant parole review to anyone who has been imprisoned in the state for at least 20 years. In Illinois, 2,500 people have spent 20 years in prison; thousands more will eventually pass that mark. According to the proposed law, they will not be automatically released; the Parole Board will evaluate them and assess the risks and benefits of restoring their freedom.

We both visited and studied prisons in other Western countries, where the 20-year sentence was considered extreme and very rare. In Germany, according to a 2013 report by the Vila Judicial Institute, fewer than 100 people were sentenced to more than 15 years in prison; in the Netherlands, except for a very small number, everyone was sentenced to four years or less. In American prisons, life imprisonment is commonplace.

If the pending Illinois law is passed, it could lead other states to follow suit, weakening one of the many pillars of mass incarceration. The legislation is a promising sign that people have changed their lives and has little meaning in large-scale punishment mechanisms.

Parole has a complicated history in this country, and this history helps explain how we fell into the crisis of mass incarceration and how we found a way out. At the beginning of the 19th century in the United States, parole was conceived as a means of helping prisoners to reform by encouraging good behavior and possibly early release.

However, by the 1970s, the parole board was under attack. Conservatives pointed to rising crime rates and civil unrest, and condemned parole for being too lenient. They say that discretionary release will always bring dangerous people back to the streets and encourage more crimes, because soft punishment cannot act as a deterrent.

On the other end of the political spectrum, people in prisons are busy protesting prison conditions. They say the parole board lacks transparency and systematically discriminates against petitioners of people of color. They and their supporters believe that the clearly defined fixed terms will not be affected by the prejudice, racism, and indifference of the parole board, so these terms will be shorter. They were wrong.

Sixteen states and the federal government eventually cancelled or severely reduced the existing parole system. Other states soon restricted eligibility for parole to a small percentage of the prison population. But facts have proved that the abolition and restriction of parole is the country’s first sentencing reform in a punitive shift.

Open the gate to the minimum mandatory limit, the real sentence, three hits, and you are out. More and more people are being sentenced, and the sentence is getting longer and longer. The number of state and federal prisons surged from 200,000 in the 1970s to 1.6 million in 2009. Since then, these numbers have fallen slightly.

A wealth of evidence documented the damage caused by prolonged imprisonment. People over 50 are not only the fastest growing segment of American prisons, but over time, they also face increasing mental and physical health risks-a crisis that has changed during the Covid-19 pandemic. It's more obvious.

One of us is the author of the 2014 National Research Council report on the occurrence and consequences of mass incarceration. The report recommends returning to the principle of simplicity, which is a wise idea, that is, the severity of punishment should be limited to what is needed to prevent future crimes. The report pointed out that when the "judiciary loses its legitimacy," excessive punishment will have the opposite effect.

Many legal scholars and criminologists now agree that whatever the prison should achieve—whether it is incapacity, accountability, rehabilitation, or deterrence—can be achieved within 20 years. The non-profit sentencing project believes that unless there are special circumstances, the United States should follow other countries and set the imprisonment period to 20 years. The Model Criminal Law of the United States Law School, a century-old organization led by judges, law professors, and legal experts, recommends that long sentences be reviewed for re-sentences or release after 15 years.

In Virginia, there is also a campaign to restore eligibility for parole. A bill in New York State would grant people 55 years and older who have served for at least 15 years the right to attend a hearing. The expansion of parole considerations in Illinois and elsewhere is not enough to offset the devastating effects of mass incarceration. But this will be an important step in continuing efforts to reduce the prison population, and may bring other necessary changes.

If the cruel prison conditions cannot be improved, if there is no opportunity for education and rehabilitation, if the person released on parole fails, the discretionary parole will not succeed. In 2010, one-fifth of people entering the country’s state prisons did not commit another crime, but because they technically violated the conditions of parole.

Participating in the parole hearing, we also saw that parole considerations provide the potential to achieve the results achieved by the Stateville team in the debate on a larger scale: forcing people to account for the human nature of prisoners and the injustice of extreme incarceration.

Senate Bill 2333 has more than a dozen sponsors and is supported by local celebrities such as Chance the Rapper and Common. But in the first few days of the Illinois Legislative Assembly this month, Senate Criminal Law Committee Chairman John Connor did not submit the bill to a vote because he believed it could not receive sufficient support. He also worried that even a sex offender who was released on parole might continue to commit serious crimes. Regardless of whether Illinois legislators decide to pass these reforms in the remaining days of next week’s legislative session, they should continue to work hard—don’t miss the chance to restore parole.

Joseph Dole, the policy director of the Illinois Parole Center, has served 23 years, including 10 years in a super prison in Illinois, known for its abusive forms of isolation and deprivation, and was subsequently closed. In a recent email from Stateville, he explained that what he and his teammates said in the debate was not as important as what they showed to the legislators in attendance: they were truly intelligent, ambitious, and legitimately concerned. People.

"That," Mr. Dole wrote, "the most important thing is to eliminate the social narrative that the'prisoners' are all'evil', incorrigible monsters and should be imprisoned to death."

Ben Austen (@ben_austen) is writing a book on parole boards, crime and punishment. Khalil Gibran Muhammad (@khalilGMuhammad) is a professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Together they are the host of the podcast "My Best Friend is..."

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