Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, on Tuesday sliced the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles during an intense hearing to review the Sunset Commission’s report on the Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice. Whitmire, a member of the Commission, took the BPP to task for its parole decision inconsistencies. “If you’d just followed your own guidelines, we wouldn’t have a [prison] capacity problem right now,” Whitmire told BPP members, reports the Houston Chronicle. Indeed, according to the Commission’s report, the BPP has failed to follow its own guidelines when making decisions regarding parolees – perhaps this shouldn’t come as such a shock, after all, these are the same people who think its perfectly fine to review death penalty cases without ever meeting together as a board, and who apparently think it is perfectly peachy to simply fax in their votes when deciding whether to grant clemency to the condemned.
“Despite numerous reports citing the [BPP’s] lack of adherence to the guidelines, parole panels continue to deviate from the established guidelines,” reads the report. “Parole approval rates show a significant departure from the adopted parole probability rates, further demonstrating the parole panels’ reluctance to use this tool as it was intended by the Legislature.” Based on a review of parole panel decisions, commission staff found that the board treated similarly situated inmates – say, two inmates with the same history who were convicted of the same offense – differently. In turn, the board’s decisions have – surprise, surprise – helped exacerbate prison overcrowding, in part by keeping parole-worthy candidates locked up.
In 2005, parole board panels – six across the state, each made up of a Parole Board member and two parole “commissioners” – evaluated more than 71,000 inmates, approving just 19,582 for parole. The approval rates fail to meet parole guideline criteria, especially for inmates considered “low risk” and whose crimes were at the lowest level of the “offense severity” scale. “In fact,” the report notes, “the … Board has not complied with the recommended approval rates since the inception of the guidelines in 2001.” Further, the commission reports that although the Board is required to explain its reasons for deviating from the guidelines – for example, to explain why an inmate was denied parole – the board “rarely” provides any narrative reason, instead issuing a “denial reason” that lacks any substantive explanation for the decision to deviate from guidelines.
To correct the inequities, the commission recommends that the board be required to make an annual report explaining its efforts to meet parole guidelines, to annually review and update its parole guidelines, and to provide “specific reasons” in cases where the board deviates from those guidelines. Implementing the commission recommendations wouldn’t have a “direct fiscal impact” for the state, the report notes, but could, in fact, help avoid costs associated with housing low-risk offenders and could “help prevent the necessity to build a new prison unit, at a cost of nearly $300 million, with ongoing costs of $35 million each year.”
This article appears in November 10 • 2006.