New Jersey spends $90 million a year incarcerating parole violators, despite no new crimes being committed • New Jersey Monitor

About 1,200 people in New Jersey prisons are paroled on any given day and returned to prison — not because they committed new crimes, but because they missed curfew, relapsed into addiction, failed to report to have violated their probation officer or other conditions of their prison. parole.

They remain behind bars for months, sometimes years, collectively costing taxpayers about $90 million a year, or nearly $250,000 a day. If state officials were to stop reincarcerating people for violating their conditions of release — known as “technical parole violations” — they could close an entire prison, critics say.

“We have done a lot in New Jersey to address mass incarceration, but instead we have mass surveillance. Extended parole conditions provoke the parole violator. But you do not increase public safety by incarcerating individuals for technical parole violations,” said Joseph Russo, director of the parole revocation and retention division of the state Office of the Public Defender. “It is a punitive model of probation.”

Now Russo and other advocates are calling on state officials and lawmakers to stop relying on reincarnation as the “reflexive response” to technical parole violators and instead keep people in the community while addressing the underlying reasons why they violating parole.

“If the parole board were designed as a beneficial entity rather than a controlling entity, 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 have both released reports calling on policymakers to take action on this issue.

Although lawmakers didn’t bite, Governor Phil Murphy signaled he would take action. In his February budget proposal, he included funding for a consultant to develop a tool that the state parole board could use to weigh the seriousness of an offense and the offender’s risk level, and to “establish appropriate interim sanctions that the overuse of repeal,” Murphy wrote.

A spokeswoman for Murphy said Thursday that the government is now working on the issue.

“In addition to legislation signed last year to provide public defender representation at parole revocation hearings, this year’s enacted budget allocates $1 million to a consultant who will help develop new tools to streamline the process of to help streamline the State Parole Board’s parole review process. allowing us to keep our communities safe and prevent people from being unnecessarily sent back to prison,” said Murphy spokeswoman Maggie Gabarino.

The parole board reincarcerates 80% of parolees who violate their parole, even though it costs more than ten times as much (an average of $74,750 per year) to incarcerate someone than to monitor them in the community as parolees , which costs approximately $6,351 per parolee. per year, according to state budget documents.

Those pushing for change say that reincarcerating technical release 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 detention centers and halfway houses has fallen 55% over the past two decades, from nearly 29,000 in 2000 to about 13,000 this year, Department of Corrections data show.

The downward trend came after lawmakers expanded community-based restorative justice programs, decriminalized some low-level offenses such as marijuana use and possession, allowed judges to release pretrial suspects without bail, and during the pandemic had released bills to curb infections. Murphy also launched a new clemency program in June, aiming to potentially pardon thousands of New Jerseyans now both in and out of prisons.

A spokeswoman for the parole board did not respond to the New Jersey Monitor’s questions about the matter.

Criminalize addiction and poverty?

People most often violate their parole because they use drugs or alcohol, move without notifying their parole officer, fail to report for mandatory 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, re-incarceration should not be the punishment, especially since these violations often stem from poverty, addiction, unaffordable housing, lack of transportation and other challenges people face in the weeks and months after they leave prison. have left.

“We should not criminalize addiction. We should not criminalize housing insecurity,” he said.

Al-Tariq Witcher, an Avenal resident and head of a returning citizen support group in Newark, remembers how difficult it was to meet certain parole conditions when he was released on parole in 1995.

“Parole wanted me to report in the middle of the day, during the time I was supposed to be working,” Witcher said. “I’m like, ‘I can’t leave the job to come report. First of all, I don’t drive. I depend on public transport. I just came home after serving eight years, and I just can’t take time off work.” So that became a contentious situation between me and my probation officer.”

The bureaucracy and burdensome parole conditions, as well as the threat of re-incarceration, make some inmates reluctant to be released on parole, Witcher added.

“There are people in prison who are basically saying, ‘I’ll stay a few more months rather than face parole,’” he said.

The parole problem is exacerbated by the parole board’s months-long delays in holding the final hearings on the revocation, Russo said. Most people arrested for technical parole violations are sent back to prison before the board has even confirmed that a violation occurred and that reincarceration is warranted, he said. That means some parolees spend months behind bars even if the parole board ultimately finds them not guilty of violating parole.

“Even if they win, they lose because they are deprived of their liberty for four or five months before the case is finally solved,” Russo said.

During that time, they could lose jobs, housing and relationships, undoing the progress they have made since their initial release, he added.

As reformers wait to see what the Murphy administration does on the issue, they hope he will follow New York’s lead. State lawmakers there passed the Less Is More: Community Supervision Revocation Reform Act in 2021. That law, which went into effect in March 2022, limited the sanctions faced by technical parole violators.

Parole officers’ caseloads fell 40% and 13,000 parolees completed parole shortly after that law’s passage, according to an analysis by a coalition of advocates supporting the law. However, some critics have recently called for rollbacks of the law after a paroled murderer absconded and returned to the community where he raped and murdered his victim in 1999. He was subsequently sentenced to seven days in jail for a parole violation.

But Russo and Witcher said New Jersey policymakers could also act in other ways to make parole fairer and increase parolees’ chances of successful reentry.

Russo urged parole officers to consider giving some parole officers specialized training to better deal with parolees with mental health disorders, just as the state has invested in helping police officers better respond to people in a mental crisis.

Witcher called on correctional officials to help people save more money behind bars so they would have a smoother transition back into the community when they are released. The state Department of Corrections recently increased the wages that incarcerated people earn for prison jobs, after at least two decades of stagnant wages. However, most still earn only a few dollars a day, Witcher said.

“People stuck inside should be able to save more money before they go home because they really don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out when they get out,” Witcher said. “This would circumvent some parole violations because people come home with a little more cushion to land on.”