Court Intervention in the Parole Process
![handle is hein.journals/albany36 and id is 263 raw text is: Court Intervention in the Parole Process*
DONALD J. NEWMAN **
At the present time, all states and the federal government have
some form of parole statutes and procedures for the discretionary
release of most adult felony offenders from prisons and reforma-
tories.' The use of parole with misdemeanants is comparatively rare 2
but a form of parole, generally called aftercare, is commonly used
for the release of juveniles from training schools.' All jurisdictions
with felony parole systems have at least nominal methods of super-
vision of offenders released to the community and procedures for
their return to incarceration should they fail, or threaten to fail, in
community adjustment. The actual structure of the paroling process,
including the composition and selection of the parole board, the
case loads, training, and authority of field staff, and procedures used
for grant or revocation, varies markedly from one jurisdiction to
another.' So does the comparative use of parole. Some states even-
tually parole virtually all adult prisoners while in others fewer than
10 per cent of inmates are released on parole.5 These variations in
the structure and use of the parole process, as well as accompanying
variations in sentencing structures from one jurisdiction to another,
account in good part for lack of agreement about the legal status of
parole across the nation. Where parole is the common method of
release from prison it comes to be viewed more often as a right-
indeed it is the norm-than where it is granted reluctantly and rarely.
In jurisdictions characterized by long statutory sentences, infrequent
use of pardon, and lack of other sentence mitigation alternatives,
parole becomes crucially important to inmates and an obvious focus
of litigation. Whether the parole system of a particular jurisdiction
is elaborate or simple, and whether discretionary release is fre-
quently or rarely used, there is little doubt that today parole systems
everywhere are experiencing an increase in appellate litigation which
*'This paper was prepared under Grant No. 70048 from the National Institution of Law
Enforcement, United States Department of Justice, to the South Carolina Division of
Corrections. Views and conclusions expressed here are the author's and do not necessarily
represent the official position of the National Institute or of South Carolina Corrections.
** Professor of Criminal Justice, State University of New York at Albany. B.S. 1949,
M.S. 1952, Ph.D. 1954, University of Wisconsin.
1 See generally PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON LAW ENFORCEMENT AND ADMINISTRATION
OF JUSTICE, TASK FORCE REPORT: CORRECTIONS (1967), 60-71 [hereinafter cited as TASK
FORCE REPORT: CORRECTIONS]; RUBIN, wEIHOFEN, EDWARDS AND ROSENZWEIG, THE LAW OF
CRIMINAL CORRECTION 543-68 (1936).
2 See TASK FORCE REPORT: CORRECTIONS, supra note 1, at 60-81.
3 Id. at 83.
4 Id. at 60-71.
5 Id. at 60-62.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/albany36&div=16&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Court Intervention in the Parole Process
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