Opinion: New York’s crushing parole system snags an activist, deacon and mentor
By Radley Balko Radley Balko Opinion writer focusing on civil liberties, the drug war and the criminal-justice system Email Bio Follow Opinion writer May 23 No one who knows Jerome Wright thinks he actually took cocaine, even though he allegedly failed a drug test and signed a confession.
All of that community leadership has earned Wright several awards, and as well as supporters in high places throughout the state of New York. And yet for almost six months now, he has been incarcerated at a county jail in Buffalo. Reform advocates say his case illustrates how New York’s parole system grants far too much power to individual parole officers who are often overworked and unsupervised, and who operate in a system with perverse incentives.
“She said, ‘Why should I let you go? I don’t know you,’” Wright says, in a phone call with me from an Erie County Jail. “I said check my file. I’ve been doing this for years. But it didn’t matter.” The new officer told Wright his drug tests would increase from twice per year to every other month. He says he was fine with that, since he hadn’t used in decades. But she also gave Wright a 9 p.m. curfew, which officers can impose at will. “That made it nearly impossible for him to continue his activism,” Hart says. “Those meetings are usually in the evening, when people are off from work. You can’t get much done if you have to be home by 9.
“I heard her said something like, ‘I haven’t done any of these before.’ Or maybe it was many," Wright says. “But it seemed clear to me that she wasn’t familiar with the test.”“I said, that can’t be right. I said they should do it again.” Parolees don’t enjoy the same full set of rights as everyone else. Parole is considered part of their sentence. So they’re subject to searches, check-ins and drug testing. New York’s system is particularly punitive, vesting an extraordinary amount of power with parole officers. At an officer’s discretion, a parole violation can mean instant arrest and incarceration. Violators have no right to bail and no right to an attorney.
One parole officer told Gothamist that the state’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision “is interested in only one thing: making sure they don’t get blamed when a case goes bad. So their solution is simply to lock everybody up that you can.” This isn’t how parole is supposed to work. Allegedly, the entire goal of parole is to successfully transition formerly incarcerated people back into society. But on an individual level, parole officers are incentivized to find violations, not to help their clients succeed.
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