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Racial Disparities in Lifer Parole Outcomes: The Hidden Role of Professional Evaluations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2021

Kathryne M. Young  and
Jessica Pearlman
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Abstract

One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these people will eventually be eligible for discretionary parole release. Yet parole hearings are notoriously understudied. With only a handful of exceptions, few researchers have considered the ways in which race shapes decision-makers’ perception of parole candidates. We use a data set created from over seven hundred California lifer parole hearing transcripts to examine the factors that predict parole commissioners’ decisions. We find significant racial disparities in outcomes, with Black parole candidates less likely to receive parole grants than white parole candidates, and test two possible indirect mechanisms. First, we find that racial disparity is unassociated with differences in rehabilitative efforts of Black versus white parole candidates, suggesting that differential levels of self-rehabilitation are not responsible for the disparity. Second, we test the hypothesis that racial disparity owes to commissioners’ reliance on other professionals’ determinations: psychological assessments, behavioral judgments, and prosecutors’ recommendations. We find that reliance on these evaluations accounts for a significant portion of the observed racial disparity. These results suggest that inclusion of professional assessments is not race-neutral and may create a veneer of objectivity that masks racial inequality.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , August 2022 , pp. 783 - 820
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

The authors are grateful for the generous collaboration and feedback of Debbie Mukamal and Bob Weisberg at the Stanford Law School Criminal Justice Center, the advice and guidance of the late Joan Petersilia, and the help and insights of Jennifer Shaffer, Executive Officer for the Board of Parole Hearings at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Alexandra Lampert and Jordan D. Segall coordinated and oversaw the transcript coding process, and Albert Gilbert, Diem Quynh (Cynthia) Ngoc Huynh, Nathan Pearl, Jeffrey Tai, and Jimmy Threatt provided coding and research assistance. This article has been greatly enhanced by feedback from a number of colleagues at workshops and seminars over the past few years, including faculty workshops at Cornell Law School and the University of California, Davis School of Law, and the Five College Legal Studies Workshop at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Support was also provided by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars and by the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. The California Office of the Governor, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and the California Board of Parole Hearings provided the parole hearing transcripts we analyzed.

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