A parole board against paroles

Who's behind Alabama's cold war against second chances?

(Former prosecutor & current parole board chair Leigh Gwathney was appointed by Gov. Kay Ivey in 2019)

Here I am, musing out another newsletter about Alabama’s parole mess, but it never feels like I’ve said enough on this subject. I spend a great deal of time thinking about the vertical plunge parole grants have taken in the last 3 years and I wonder what’s driving this, and which disruptive forces are at work outside the public view?

Is board chair Leigh Gwathney the person calling the shots? Attorney General Steve Marshall? Who or what is this meltdown serving? And how is it connected to Governor Ivey’s aggressive push to build mega-prisons that cost $1.3 billion?

(Parole releases from ADOC took a nosedive beginning in 2019. Today they’re at an all-time low.)

I ask questions about this crisis all the time, which feels a little like pushing raw cake batter over a mountain or maybe like dipping my fishing net in the water and only catching a mosquito. I get a lot of guesses, opinions and anger, but no concrete evidence. Nothing solid to explain this seismic shift.

They don’t want to let anyone out so they can keep the prisons overcrowded to get their mega-prisons. This is the idea I hear over and over again—not just from people denied parole, but their attorneys, their families, even employees inside the prison system.

No one has been able to tell me who gave the directive to start denying parole to almost everyone who is eligible, but a few things are crystal clear: the attorney general’s office is categorically against parole, along with the advocacy group called “VOCAL,” which stands for “Victims of Crime and Leniency.” And these two entities have an outsized presence at parole hearings, arguing against parole 100% of the time.

If we have to identify a starting point, almost everyone points to the Jimmy Spencer case. In July of 2018, Spencer, while on parole, was arrested and charged with murdering three people, including a child. I think the quiet crusade to obstruct paroles started before that, when parole grants went up to an all-time high of 54% in 2017. This was the result of a parole board, led by Lyn Head, using evidence-based evaluations and risk assessments in their decisions, prompted in part by a package of sentencing reforms passed in 2015. The AG and VOCAL DID NOT like what was happening and the Spencer murder gave them an opening to stop it.

There was a lot of posturing by Governor Ivey and AG Marshall about how the parole board was to blame for the murders, but that was a load of bunk. The truth is, neither Marshall nor VOCAL opposed Spencer’s parole at the end of 2017. He had served close to 30 years in prison and did not have a particularly violent record— some property crimes, second-degree burglary and a second degree assault from a prison incident. He was serving a sentence of life with the possibility of parole under the habitual offender act, but so are 1,254 other people, many of them for drug or poverty-related crimes from years ago. Marshall characterized Spencer as a “violent offender” who should have never been let out of prison by the parole board, but that was only after he was accused of murdering three people.

In 2019, Alabama’s legislature passed a “parole reform” bill written by Marshall that gave the Governor more power over the board and made the Executive Director position a political appointee, as opposed to a merit-based position named by the 3-member board. The Executive Director, by the way, is not a voting member of the board. Ivey picked former Attorney General Charlie Graddick and named Leigh Gwathney to replace Lyn Head on the board.

Gwathney was a career prosecutor who was working for Marshall when she was tapped to chair the board. What else do we know about her? She opposed a sentence reduction for a child convicted of murder, arguing that Evan Miller deserved to die in prison even though he was 14-years old at the time of the crime. Evan Miller grew up with violence and abuse, drug use and poverty. He attempted suicide several times as a young child.

(Evan Miller was 14 when arrested for the murder of a neighbor. He’s spent more time in prison than he did as a free child.)

Despite his immaturity at the time of the crime and an incredibly traumatic childhood, Gwathney argued Miller was “incorrigible,” going against modern brain science and legal scholarship that says children who commit crimes are capable of positive change and should not be held to the same culpability as adults. Evan Miller is now 33-years old, and even though his own case led to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Miller v. Alabama that gave thousands of children prosecuted as adults a second chance, he will stay in prison for the rest of his natural life, thanks in part to Gwathney and her refusal to accept all the mitigating factors in his case.

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So who is benefiting from 89 percent of parole-eligible people being denied release and continuing their incarceration in Alabama’s overcrowded prisons? Undoubtedly the companies and government agencies that utilize (exploit) the labor of people incarcerated in ADOC’s minimum-security work centers and work release facilities. These are, by the way, supposed to be short-term stays to prepare people for release from prison. ADOC’s website describes one of these facilities, Red Eagle, with a mission “to provide suitable surroundings, work programs, and staff to assist male inmates to reintegrate into society.” As I’ve been reporting in the last few years, that’s not happening. Men incarcerated at Red Eagle earn $2 a day. One told me in 2020, “We feel like slaves.”

I looked at data in ADOC’s monthly statistical reports to show this dramatic drop. Using YTD data from June reports (the most recent month available in 2022), you can see from the graphic above that parole releases from min-security prisons have tumbled 83% since Gwathney assumed control of the board. Incarcerated men and women achieve a minimum-custody status by serving time and following the rules, so a transfer into one of these facilities used to be a clear signal that parole was imminent. That’s no longer the case.

The rottenness of this reality isn’t just that people can’t go home to their families and communities, it’s that the state is allowing them (forcing them) to work outside the fence, for businesses or government agencies with minimal supervision and keeping part of their earnings, instead of just allowing them to go home and earn money for themselves.

For work release, which includes mostly minimum wage restaurant jobs and the like, ADOC keeps 40 percent “to assist in defraying the cost of his/her incarceration.” But for work centers, ADOC only pays workers $2 a day and pockets the rest of the money paid by state, county and municipal agencies. I’ve requested these contracts before, but ADOC denied they were public records. I did obtain an April 2019 invoice for one such contract between the Alabama Department of Transportation and ADOC.

It shows AL-DOT paid Red Eagle $50 a day per worker to weed eat, put up signs and guard rails, and cut trees and limbs for a total of 18 days. The total price of the contract was $7,150. A $2 per day wage means workers would have been paid a mere $286 from this contract, allowing the facility to keep $6,894.

Keeping a plentiful labor pool of incarcerated workers is something Alabama has long celebrated. This newspaper article from 1899 boasts of the state’s “attractive asset—We have a money-making, state-developing penology,” the author cheers. The undoubtedly privileged, white writer goes on to praise the bounty of the state, including forced labor in a list of natural resources. “The fertility of the soil, the abundant supply of pure drinking water on all, and the never-falling replenishment of obedient and efficient labor.”

All of this is deeply disturbing in a state with such a long history of racism and exploitation, but you would not know that down at the parole board. They continue to hold hearings as if everything is normal, but conduct their votes like hellbent prosecutors intent on inflicting the harshest sentence possible. I guess it makes sense considering Gwathney’s commitment to punishment, but I wonder what else is going on there? I wonder if any past board members or employees know something we don’t know? Maybe they’ll drop me a line. My email is bethshelburne1974@gmail.com