Bill would ease parole violation penalties, with support from prosecutors
Originally published in
Politico
ALBANY — A new bill seeks to reduce the number of people jailed for minor violations of their parole terms.
The legislation, called the Less is More Act, will be announced Thursday at the Brooklyn School of Law by its sponsors, state Sen. Brian Benjamin (D-Manhattan) and Assemblyman Walter Mosley (D-Brooklyn), alongside a coalition that includes Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, former New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman and other academics, advocates and people affected by New York State parole policy.
The bill would mandate alternatives to detention for certain minor parole violations.
“The reality is that approximately one-third of new admissions to New York prisons are due to technical parole violations and the post-release supervision system has ballooned in our state far beyond its original purpose,” Gonzalez said in a statement to POLITICO.
Law enforcement officials are often at odds with activists on criminal justice reform. That's not the case with this bill, supporters noted.
“There's a lot of agreement about what we want to see as New Yorkers,” said Gabriel Sayegh, co-founder and co-executive director at the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice, which helped develop the bill. “Everyone wants to feel safe in their communities, everybody wants to make sure that people have a real shot at a second chance without that being cut short for some dumb reason. None of us want to be wasting our tax money.”
Technical parole violations include things like missing curfew or failing a drug test. Once individuals are detained and taken to a correctional facility for such a violation, they can wait for as long as three months to see a judge, who will decide if they will be released or sent back to prison, according to advocates.
About 35,000 New Yorkers are currently on parole, and 65 percent of people who return to detention after serving time do so because of technical parole violations, according to the Katal Center.
The law builds on a report on technical parole violations in New York published last year by the Columbia University Justice Lab and led by former New York City probation commissioner Vincent Schiraldi.
The number of people in the city’s corrections system for technical parole violations increased sharply in January, from approximately 620 on Dec. 31 to 720 on Jan. 31.
