(Graph: Wendy Sawyer & Emily Widra, 2020)

This graph originally appeared in When parole doesn’t mean release: The senseless “program requirements” keeping people behind bars during a pandemic.

Parole boards are granting parole contingent on participation in programs that are often not readily available for people behind bars. If states changed their policies to allow for these programs to occur in the community upon re-entry, they would see the prison population drop without making any other significant release policy changes. Studies show that, at least for the therapeutic community model used in many prison systems, there is nothing unique to the prison context that makes these programs more effective than when they are done in the community.