There is a version of the parole debate in the United States that most people have heard, and it goes like this: some states have parole, some states do not, and the states without it are the ones where people serve their full sentences and accountability is real. This binary has shaped public understanding, political rhetoric, and criminal justice policy for decades. It is also, as the Prison Policy Initiative has now documented in careful and specific detail, not how the system actually works.
The Prison Policy Initiative’s June 2026 briefing, published in response to a wave of questions following its major two-part report on discretionary parole systems, addresses the binary directly. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have eliminated discretionary parole for most or all incarcerated people. That fact is accurate and its implications are real. What it obscures is equally important: every one of those seventeen states and D.C. still has a parole authority. Every one of them still conducts hearings. Every one of them still operates a range of conditional release mechanisms that function, in many measurable respects, in ways that are not wildly different from the states that retained discretionary parole. The parole did not disappear. It was narrowed, restricted, and redesigned in ways that removed access for the vast majority of incarcerated people while preserving the institutional and administrative apparatus in modified form.
<cite index=”21-1″>Binary thinking about parole does not reflect the wide range of ways that states manage early release, particularly those states that are thought to have no parole at all.</cite> Understanding what actually exists in these systems is not an academic exercise. It is the essential prerequisite for any reform effort aimed at safely reducing incarceration at the scale that both justice and fiscal responsibility demand.
The Origins of the “No Parole” Policy Era
The elimination of discretionary parole was one of the signature criminal justice policy choices of the 1970s and 1980s, adopted under the banner of “truth in sentencing” as part of a broader push toward determinate sentencing structures that promised predictability and accountability. The argument was straightforward on its face: if a judge sentences someone to ten years, that person should serve ten years. The discretion that parole boards exercised to release people before the end of their maximum sentence was framed as an unpredictable, unaccountable loophole through which dangerous people could return to communities before they had genuinely served their time.
The states that acted on this argument represent a diverse cross-section of American politics and geography. The list includes California, which began eliminating discretionary parole in 1977; Illinois, which abolished it in 1978; and a range of other states spread across the political spectrum that made similar changes in the years that followed, often in response to specific high-profile crimes or sustained political pressure that made expanding sentences the path of least resistance.
<cite index=”18-1″>The approach taken by 17 states and D.C. to eliminate discretionary parole is known as part of a truth-in-sentencing structure, and it did take away a huge opportunity for early release for the vast majority of people entering prisons.</cite> What it did not do, in any of those states, was actually eliminate the administrative and legal infrastructure that surrounds the management of sentenced people’s time in custody and eventual return to the community. It changed who could access that infrastructure, and on what terms, but the infrastructure itself remained.
What the Research Actually Found
The Prison Policy Initiative’s briefing examines the release mechanisms that exist in the seventeen states and D.C. that have formally eliminated discretionary parole, and what emerges from that examination is a picture considerably more complex than the “no parole” label suggests.
In most of these states, a parole board or its equivalent still exists and still makes consequential decisions. The population eligible for those decisions has been dramatically narrowed, often to people sentenced under pre-abolition laws, people serving certain life sentences, and individuals in specific categories defined by age at offense or sentence structure. In California, which has the largest prison population in the country, the discretionary parole system that was eliminated in the late 1970s for most newly sentenced individuals still applies to tens of thousands of people serving sentences under pre-abolition law. In Illinois, the parole board continues to operate for the small population that remains eligible under pre-abolition rules.
Beyond the residual discretionary parole populations, these states operate a range of alternative release mechanisms that have different names but perform recognizable functions. Mandatory supervised release, used in Illinois and several other states, automatically releases people after they have served a defined portion of their sentence, without the individualized assessment of a parole hearing but with a period of community supervision attached. Mandatory conditional release programs in Florida and elsewhere apply to specific offense categories and impose post-release supervision structured by the sentencing court. Post-release community supervision programs in states like Arizona and California provide structured transition support without the hearing-based individualized review that traditional parole entailed.
<cite index=”20-1″>In the 17 states and D.C. that have abolished discretionary parole, hollowed-out parole systems remain in place, allowing some people to remain eligible for parole under strict and limited criteria. Parole eligibility and outcomes in these states depend heavily on individual state policy and history.</cite>
The comparison between these hollowed-out systems and the active discretionary parole systems in the remaining thirty-three states reveals that the practical distance between the two categories is smaller than the political rhetoric around parole abolition has suggested. Both categories of state have conditional release mechanisms. Both have post-release supervision requirements. Both have revocation processes for people who violate the terms of their release. The primary difference is that the discretionary parole states have a more flexible and individualized mechanism at the front end, one that allows a board to evaluate a specific person’s transformation, risk profile, and readiness for release, while the “no parole” states have replaced that mechanism with more rigid, schedule-based alternatives that respond to the arithmetic of the original sentence rather than to the ongoing reality of the individual who has served part of it.
The Case for Expanding What Already Exists
The significance of this finding for reform is direct and practical. Advocates and policymakers who work in states that have formally abolished discretionary parole frequently encounter the argument that reform is structurally impossible because the state has already made a definitive policy choice. What the Prison Policy Initiative’s analysis demonstrates is that this argument is not accurate. The infrastructure exists. The boards exist. The hearing processes exist. The supervision systems exist. What is missing is not the machinery but the political will to expand who can access it.
<cite index=”34-1″>Most parole applicants do not pose a risk to the community. An effective parole system should start with the presumption of release, then require the parole board to justify why release is inappropriate.</cite> This inversion of the standard burden, from requiring the incarcerated person to prove they deserve release to requiring the board to demonstrate why release is inappropriate, is the reform principle that the presumption of release framework embodies, and it is applicable to both discretionary parole states and the “no parole” states whose existing release mechanisms could be modified to incorporate it.
The specific mechanisms available in “no parole” states for expanding release are not hypothetical. California’s Proposition 57, which created a pathway for nonviolent third-strikers to seek early parole consideration, demonstrated that targeted expansions of release eligibility can be accomplished within the existing framework without requiring a wholesale reversal of the truth-in-sentencing structure. Emerging adult provisions that recognize the scientific consensus on brain development and its implications for the culpability and rehabilitative capacity of young adults have been incorporated into parole eligibility criteria in several states. Good-time credit expansion, which allows people to reduce their sentence through demonstrated participation in programming and maintenance of positive conduct, represents another mechanism that operates within the existing framework and does not require restoring full discretionary parole to produce meaningful change in release outcomes.
Interviewing for Freedom: The Webinar and What It Addresses
The Prison Policy Initiative, alongside Latino Justice and the MacArthur Justice Center, recently convened a webinar specifically focused on the parole board hearing process and the legal and policy case for a presumption of release. The event, titled “Interviewing for Your Freedom,” addressed both the human experience of the parole hearing and the legal framework that governs what boards are required to do with what they learn in those hearings.
The webinar began with Frank Silva, who provided a first-person account of his own interview for freedom, the specific and intensely personal experience of sitting before a board whose members have the authority to determine whether you go home. This kind of testimony is essential context for any policy discussion about parole reform because the procedural and institutional dimensions of parole board hearings are difficult to understand in the abstract. Frank Silva’s account places the human experience at the center of a conversation that too easily becomes disconnected from the individuals whose lives depend on its outcomes.
Clinical Professor of Law Heidi Rummel followed with an analysis of the legal concept of the presumption of release and how California’s framework has shifted the burden of proof in parole proceedings. The presumption of release doctrine holds that the default position in a parole hearing should be that a person who has served a defined portion of their sentence is presumed suitable for release unless the board can articulate specific, evidence-based reasons why release would be inappropriate. This is a legal structure that treats incarceration not as the natural resting state of the system but as a condition that requires ongoing justification. It changes the dynamics of the hearing process in ways that have measurable consequences for release rates and for the quality of the board’s decision-making.
California’s implementation of a presumptive release framework for certain categories of sentences has produced outcomes that advocates argue demonstrate the approach’s viability and safety record. The legal analysis provided by Heidi Rummel at the webinar extends that analysis to the question of what other states’ legal frameworks would permit and what legislative action would be required to implement similar presumptions in different jurisdictions.
The coalition that organized the webinar, bringing together the quantitative research capacity of the Prison Policy Initiative with the direct advocacy experience of Latino Justice and the legal expertise of the MacArthur Justice Center, reflects the kind of cross-sector collaboration that effective parole reform requires. Research findings about release mechanisms in “no parole” states provide the empirical foundation for arguments that the infrastructure for expanded release already exists. Legal analysis of presumptive release frameworks provides the doctrinal tools for implementing those expansions within existing statutory structures. Direct advocacy and community organizing provide the political pressure that motivates legislatures and parole boards to act on what the research and law have established.
The Health Crisis That Release Without Support Creates
The third element of the Prison Policy Initiative’s recent work that deserves sustained attention is its addition to the Research Library of a retrospective cohort study on emergency department utilization among recently released prisoners, conducted by Joseph W. Frank and colleagues at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School.
The study, which linked Rhode Island Department of Corrections records with hospital system data from 2007 to 2009, provides one of the most rigorous available examinations of what happens to people’s health in the year following release from prison. Its findings are sobering. <cite index=”27-1″>Among the 1,434 recently released prisoners in the study cohort, 455 had three or more emergency department visits within a single year of release, and 354 had their first emergency department visit within one month of release.</cite>
The nature of those emergency department visits tells a story about what incarceration does to people’s health and what release without adequate support does to their ability to manage it. <cite index=”30-1″>Emergency department visits by recently released prisoners were significantly more likely to be for mental health disorders, substance use disorders, and ambulatory care sensitive conditions, which are conditions that are optimally managed in outpatient settings rather than in emergency rooms.</cite> Ambulatory care sensitive conditions include things like asthma, diabetes, hypertension, and other chronic conditions that, with appropriate primary care, should rarely require emergency department intervention. When they do require emergency intervention, it is typically because the person does not have access to the outpatient management that would have prevented the crisis.
The emergency department, in other words, is serving as the primary care system for a population that has extremely high rates of mental health disorders, substance use disorders, and undertreated chronic disease, and that has been released into communities without the structured connection to outpatient health services that would allow those conditions to be managed before they become emergencies. This is not only a human welfare failure. It is an extraordinarily expensive one. Emergency department care is among the most costly forms of medical intervention available, and using it as a substitute for primary care and outpatient mental health treatment for a high-need population is a fiscal choice that states are making, largely by default, every time they release someone from prison without ensuring continuity of care.
The implications for parole policy are direct. Parole and conditional release mechanisms that include structured health care transition planning, that require connection to primary care and mental health services as a condition of release planning rather than as an afterthought, and that provide bridge coverage for medications and treatment during the highly vulnerable period immediately following release, would reduce emergency department utilization, reduce the costs those visits impose on hospital systems, and reduce the rates of the health crises that contribute significantly to reincarceration. The research makes the case for this not as a compassionate optional enhancement to release planning but as a practical health care system intervention with measurable fiscal and public health consequences.
The period immediately following release is also, as decades of research have established, the period of highest mortality risk for people leaving prison. Overdose deaths in the first two weeks following release occur at rates many times higher than the rate in the general population, driven by the combination of tolerance loss during incarceration, immediate return to environments where substances are available, and the absence of the structured support that incarceration, however inadequately, provides. The Frank et al. study’s finding that more than a quarter of the recently released prisoners in its cohort had their first emergency department visit within the first month of release is consistent with this documented vulnerability window.
What Reform Requires and What the Research Shows Is Possible
The three pieces of work discussed in this article, the briefing on early release mechanisms in “no parole” states, the webinar on the parole hearing process and presumption of release, and the research on emergency department utilization after release, are not separate strands of inquiry. They are parts of a coherent analysis of where the American system of incarceration fails the people it processes and the communities those people return to, and what specific, evidence-based changes would produce better outcomes.
The briefing establishes that the infrastructure for expanded release already exists in states that claim to have abolished parole, removing the structural objection that change requires rebuilding from scratch. The webinar establishes that a legal framework for presuming release and shifting the burden to justify continued incarceration is constitutionally viable and already operating in at least one major state. The health research establishes that the period immediately following release is when the consequences of incarceration’s health failures are most acute, and that addressing them requires proactive planning rather than reactive emergency care.
Together, these three pieces of evidence describe a system that is holding more people than it needs to hold, releasing them without the support they need to stay out, and then experiencing the public health and fiscal consequences of both failures simultaneously. The path forward is not mystery. It is the application of what the research consistently shows: individualized, evidence-based release decisions that presume suitability for release and require specific justification for continued incarceration, paired with structured transition planning that connects people to the health care, housing, and community support that reduces the emergency department visits, the overdoses, and the reincarceration that make mass incarceration’s costs perpetually self-renewing.
The people sitting in parole hearings asking to go home are, as the Frank Silva testimony at the Prison Policy Initiative webinar illustrated, doing something that requires preparation, vulnerability, and the particular courage of asking for something that should not require asking at all. The least the system can do is start from the presumption that they have earned it.
Sustainable Action Now will continue covering parole reform, criminal justice research, and the campaigns to reduce mass incarceration in the United States.
