Racial Disparities in Lifer Parole Outcomes: The Hidden Role of Professional Evaluations

Abstract

One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these people will eventually be eligible for discretionary parole release. Yet parole hearings are notoriously understudied. With only a handful of exceptions, few researchers have considered the ways in which race shapes decision-makers’ perception of parole candidates. We use a data set created from over seven hundred California lifer parole hearing transcripts to examine the factors that predict parole commissioners’ decisions. We find significant racial disparities in outcomes, with Black parole candidates less likely to receive parole grants than white parole candidates, and test two possible indirect mechanisms. First, we find that racial disparity is unassociated with differences in rehabilitative efforts of Black versus white parole candidates, suggesting that differential levels of self-rehabilitation are not responsible for the disparity. Second, we test the hypothesis that racial disparity owes to commissioners’ reliance on other professionals’ determinations: psychological assessments, behavioral judgments, and prosecutors’ recommendations. We find that reliance on these evaluations accounts for a significant portion of the observed racial disparity. These results suggest that inclusion of professional assessments is not race-neutral and may create a veneer of objectivity that masks racial inequality.

How parole boards judge remorse: Relational legal consciousness and the reproduction of carceral logic

“…Corrections personnel also have enormous discretion about whether and when to issue citations, and prison watchdog groups have alleged that they are sometimes issued inappropriately, in retaliation for acts of political protests, such as hunger strikes (Law, 2014). Quantitative analyses suggest that the citations in a parole candidate's file have a significant effect on his chances of receiving a grant (Young & Pearlman, 2021). And although commissioners sometimes distinguished between varieties of disciplinary citations, they often pointed to the presence of any citations as evidence of unsuitability.…”

The Association of Race with the Decision Whether or Not to Grant Parole

“…Thus, when it comes to parole decisions in California, we cannot say that race does not matter, at least if the candidate for parole is Black. In this regard, it is worth repeating that similar findings were made by Bell (2019) and Young and Pearlman (2021).…”

“…Or this: nationally, one in seven people in prison is serving a life sentence (Nellis, 2017), with the vast majority eligible for discretionary parole release (Young & Pearlman, 2021).…”

“…By contrast, researchers have thoroughly documented the mechanisms at virtually every earlier stage of criminal justice processing, from investigation to sentencing, that contribute to racial disparities (Young & Pearlman, 2021). For instance, researchers have found racial disparities in police stops, police coercion, police use of force, arrests, charging decisions, plea negotiations, sentencing severity, and wrongful convictions (Young & Pearlman, 2021).…”

“…demonstrate likeBell (2019) found,4 Young and Pearlman (2021) found that "this disparity does not seem to be related to racial differences in self-rehabilitation" (p. 25). Additionally, apart from the disparity in outcomes between Black and White parole candidates,Young and Pearlman (2021)…”