About 1,200 people in prison at any given time are there for violating the conditions of their parole, not because they committed new crimes. Critics are calling for change. (AP Photo | Morry Gash)
About 1,200 people in New Jersey prisons on any given day are parolees who got hauled back to prison — not for committing new crimes, but for missing curfew, relapsing in their addiction, not checking in with their parole officer, or breaking other conditions of their parole.
They remain behind bars for months, sometimes years, collectively costing taxpayers about $90 million a year, or almost $250,000 every day. If state officials quit reincarcerating people for violating their parole conditions — what’s known as “technical parole violations” — they could close an entire prison, critics say.
“We’ve done a lot in New Jersey to address mass incarceration, but instead we have mass supervision. Extensive parole conditions breed the parole violator. But you’re not increasing public safety by incarcerating individuals on technical parole violations,” said Joseph Russo, director of the state Office of the Public Defender’s parole revocation and resentencing unit. “It’s a punitive model of parole supervision.”
Now, Russo and other advocates are calling on state parole officials and lawmakers to stop relying on reincarceration as the “knee-jerk response” to technical parole violators and instead keep people in the community while addressing the underlying reasons why they violate parole.
“If parole was constructed as a helpful entity rather than a monitoring one, I think we would have much more success,” said Bonnie Kerness, coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee’s Prison Watch Program.
Russo and Kerness both have issued reports urging policymakers to act on the issue.
While legislators didn’t bite, Gov. Phil Murphy signaled he would act. In his budget proposal in February, he included funding for a consultant to develop a tool the state parole board could use to weigh the seriousness of a violation and the violator’s risk level, as well as “determine appropriate intermediary sanctions that can limit the overuse of revocation,” Murphy wrote.
A Murphy spokeswoman said Thursday that the administration is working on the issue now.
“In addition to legislation signed last year to provide public defender representation at parole revocation hearings, this year’s enacted budget allocates $1 million for a consultant who will assist in the development of new tools to help streamline the State Parole Board’s process of reviewing parole violations, enabling us to both keep our communities safe and prevent people from being sent back to prison unnecessarily,” Murphy spokeswoman Maggie Gabarino said.
The parole board reincarcerates 80% of the parolees who violate parole, even though it costs more than 10 times as much — $74,750 a year, on average — to incarcerate someone than to monitor them as parolees in the community, which costs about $6,351 per parolee a year, state budget documents show.
Those pushing for change say reincarcerating technical parole violators also threatens to undo the progress New Jersey has made in reducing its prison population.
The number of people New Jersey holds in state prisons, juvenile lockups, and halfway houses has fallen 55% in the past two decades, from almost 29,000 in 2000 to about 13,000 this year, Department of Corrections data shows.
The downward trend came after lawmakers expanded community-based restorative justice programs, decriminalized some low-level offenses like marijuana use and possession, allowed judges to free pretrial defendants without cash bail, and released scores during the pandemic to curb contagions. Murphy also launched a new clemency program in June, with a goal of pardoning potentially thousands of New Jerseyans who are now both in and out of prisons and jails.
A parole board spokeswoman did not respond to the New Jersey Monitor’s questions on the issue.
Criminalizing addiction and poverty?
People most often violate their parole conditions because they use drugs or alcohol, relocate without notifying their parole officer, fail to report for required check-ins, and fail to complete a rehabilitation or mental health program, according to Russo and testimony parole officials gave during state budget hearings.
But, Russo added, reincarceration shouldn’t be the penalty, especially because these violations often stem from poverty, addiction, unaffordable housing, a lack of transportation, and other challenges people endure in the weeks and months after they leave prison.
“We should not be criminalizing addiction. We should not be criminalizing housing insecurity,” he said.
Al-Tariq Witcher, an Avenal resident who heads a returning citizen support group in Newark, remembers how tough it was to comply with some parole conditions when he was paroled in 1995.
“Parole wanted me to report in the middle of the day, during the time that I was supposed to be working,” Witcher said. “I’m like: ‘I can’t leave the job to come report. First of all, I’m not driving. I’m relying on public transportation. I just came home after serving eight years, and I just can’t take off work.’ So that that became a contentious situation with me and my parole officer.”
The bureaucracy and burdensome conditions of parole, as well as the threat of reincarceration, leave some incarcerated people reluctant to be released on parole, Witcher added.
“We have people in jail that actually say, ‘I’ll stay an extra several months rather than deal with parole,’” he said.
Compounding the parole problem is the parole board’s months-long delays in holding final revocation hearings, Russo said. Most people nabbed for technical parole violations get sent back to prison before the board has even confirmed a violation occurred and warrants reincarceration, he said. That means some parolees then spend months behind bars, even if the parole board eventually deems them not guilty of violating parole.
“Even if they win, they lose, because they’ve been deprived of liberty for four or five months before the matter is finally resolved,” Russo said.
In that time, they can lose jobs, housing, and relationships, erasing any progress they’d made since their initial release, he added.
While reformers wait to see what the Murphy administration does on the issue, they hope he’ll follow New York’s lead. State lawmakers there passed the Less Is More: Community Supervision Revocation Reform Act in 2021. That law, which took effect in March 2022, limited the sanctions technical parole violators faced.
Parole officer caseloads fell 40% and 13,000 parolees completed parole early after that law’s passage, according to an analysis by a coalition of advocates who support the law. Some critics, though, recently pushed for rollbacks in the law after a paroled killer absconded and returned to the community where he’d raped and murdered his victim in 1999. He was subsequently sentenced to seven days in prison for violating parole.
But Russo and Witcher said New Jersey policymakers could act in other ways too to make parole fairer and increase parolees’ odds for a successful reentry.
Russo urged parole officials to consider giving some parole officers specialized training to better handle parolees with mental health disorders, much like the state has invested in helping police officers better respond to people in mental crisis.
Witcher called on correctional officials to help people save more money behind bars to ensure a smoother transition back to the community when they’re released. The state Department of Corrections recently boosted the wages incarcerated people make for prison jobs after at least two decades of stagnant salaries. Most still make just a few dollars a day though, Witcher said.
“People inside should be able to save more money before they come home because they really don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of when they get out,” Witcher said. “This would circumvent some of the parole violations, because people would come home with a little bit more cushion to land on.”
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