Of prisoners serving life sentences in Maryland, 77 percent are Black, though Blacks only make up a third of the state’s population. Maryland leads the nation in the percentage of lifers who committed crimes as juveniles, at 15 percent, and is tied with Alabama for the highest percentage of juvenile lifers who are Black, at 84 percent.
These statistics are from a recent American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Maryland and Maryland Restorative Justice Initiative (MRJI) report entitled {Still Blocking the Exit.} The report calls for changes to the parole granting process, arguing the current process politicizes parole decisions, causing persons deemed eligible for parole to remain incarcerated at substantial costs to the state, legitimizing a racial approach to incarceration.
“The politics have become so much a part of the release, that it tends to govern decisions,” said Walter Lomax, founder and director of MRJI, and a co-author of the report.
Under Maryland’s current system, a parole commission, whose members the governor appoints, makes parole recommendations. The governor must sign off on the commission’s recommendations before a prisoner deemed eligible for parole is released.
In 2011, the Maryland General Assembly passed a law requiring the governor to act on all Parole Commission recommendations within 180 days. When the law went into effect in 2012, Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) rejected the approximately 50 parole recommendations before his office, says Lomax, “which was a clear indication to us that it was politically motivated.”
O’Malley’s rejections continued a trend that stretched back to 1995, when Gov. Parris Glendening (D) declared that “life means life” and that no parole would be granted to prisoners serving life sentences during his tenure, according to the report. No lifers have been paroled since, says the report, though a small number have seen their sentences commuted, including by O’Malley.
This lack of paroles imposes a substantial human, as well as economic toll, says Sonia Kumar, a staff attorney with the ACLU MD and the other co-author of the report.
“We have people who have fully paid their debt, are ready to come home, ready to be successful, that we are spending thousands – it adds up to millions of dollars every year that we’re spending – to continue to incarcerate them, which obviously has a significant financial impact but also has a huge human cost that extends not only to them but to their families and their communities,” Kumar said.
It costs about $38,000 a year to incarcerate someone in Maryland, says Kumar, a number closer to $60,000 for elderly persons who are generally more expensive to incarcerate. According to the report, the average age of Maryland lifers who have been recommended, but denied parole, is 60.
“The state could be saving millions of dollars by having a meaningful opportunity for parole,” said Kumar. “And that is just in the explicit cost of incarcerating that person, that is not even accounting for all the other costs of having people not be productive members of society when they can be.”
The report also highlights studies finding that paroled lifers have lower recidivism rates than other prisoners, including a longterm study of paroled lifers in California that showed less than one percent were ever incarcerated again for new felony convictions.
Lomax said the policy goal is for final approval of parole decisions to be removed from the governor and resting solely in the hands of the Parole Commission, mitigating the political burden.
“Even though has an investigative unit, he’s really not in any better position to assess whether individual should be released than the people who actually make the initial decision which is the parole commission, whom he appoints to do that job,” said Lomax. ralejandro@afro.com