This chapter discusses the legal and extralegal factors that affect a parole board member’s decision regarding whether or not to release a prisoner on parole. While some states have mandatory parole, others have discretionary parole, which is the most widely cited process for parole release in the US currently. Discretionary parole allows a board to decide if the prisoner should be released based on statutory factors, which are examined in this chapter. However, they might also be influenced by emotions, biases, public/political pressure, and other extralegal factors. The chapter provides an overview of what these extralegal factors are and how they might affect decisions. The chapter also provides an examination of both parole board member and inmate characteristics that influence release decisions, with a focus on if and how they affect risk assessments. The chapter synthesizes this body of research and offers future directions and implications for the legal field. Future research and/or policy implications are discussed.

This chapter begins with more historical discussion, in which we sketch the prehistory of the study of the pragmatics and trace a route in the development of expressive meaning from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Following an expression coined by Nerlich and Clark, we use the term ‘proto-pragmatics’ to refer to those thinkers who were the first to take the role of context and emotion in language use seriously. The point of so doing is to show that our attempt to introduce affect into the centre of theories of utterance interpretation is actually an act of reintroduction, rather than an original move. The sidelining of affect by theories of communication has not happened in the absence of opposition. We also suggest parallels between the work of Charles Bally of the Geneva school and the work of those involved in the so-called ‘Ordinary Language Approach to Philosophy’ going on in the 1940s at Oxford, whose adherents committed themselves to the study of natural language use rather than the logical formulae of formal languages

Recidivism laws, like the three strikes laws discussed in the previous chapter, are one way to eliminate second and third chances, dictating lengthy sentences for repeat offenses. Another way that the criminal law punishes people who have offended one too many times is through probation and parole revocations. While severely understudied, parole and probation revocations generate about a third of prison admissions and possibly more. And perhaps no change better illustrates the change from a criminal justice to a criminal legal system than the increasing volume of incarceration generated through the parole and probation revocation process.

In 1970, there were approximately 200,000 people in state and federal prisons and an incarceration rate of about 96 persons per 100,000 population.1 A variety of steps will be required to get back to these numbers. The previous chapters discuss ways to shrink the pool of people caught up in the criminal justice system by reducing the scope of American criminal law and decreasing offending. This chapter discusses ways to limit the number of people incarcerated from the remaining pool of law breakers. The two basic steps are (1) decreasing the number of admissions to prison/jail and (2) reducing the time served for those who are incarcerated.

The previous chapter discussed the wave of political energy introduced into American politics by a desire to fight crime. The message resonated beyond the “street crimes” Senator Kennedy singled out in 1975, like rape and murder. Politicians also turned to the criminal justice architecture to solve society’s most vexing problems, like drug addiction, gun violence, child pornography, drunk driving, and intrafamily abuse. This approach required two components: new laws and increased enforcement. Legislators changed the laws, and they funded a hiring spree of police officers to catch people who broke those laws, prosecutors and judges to put them in jail, and correctional officers to keep them there.

Due to the historically bourgeoning prison population, how and when offenders re-enter the community has received increased attention. Parole, the discretionary release of an offender to serve the remainder of their sentence in the community, is seen by many as a solution to prison overcrowding concerns. Many jurisdictions call upon paroling authorities to review the prisoner’s case and to assign release conditions intended to assist in the re-entry process and mitigate public safety concerns for both mandatory and discretionary releases. This chapter provides a brief overview of the history and current status of parole. Other areas discussed include how risk assessment is incorporated, and separate from, parole decisions, the various methods by which parole decisions are made, commentary on the existing evidence of parole efficacy, discussions of the role of victims in the decision-making process, and considerations for various offender sub-populations.

That 130,000 Vietnamese evacuated alongside US personnel in April 1975 was neither haphazard nor unanticipated; the Ford administration fought vigorously for precisely this outcome. The sheer horror of the fall of Da Nang in late March shook US officials out of their complacency and forced them to confront South Vietnam’s imminent collapse. From the beginning of earnest, if belated, evacuation planning, administration officials labored to include South Vietnamese allies, which made the process much more contested than it otherwise might have been. In the face of consistent opposition, the administration ensured that it had the authority to use the US military to evacuate South Vietnamese nationals as well as the legal approvals necessary to resettle those individuals in the United States.

Ford argued that the United States had a “profound moral obligation” to its South Vietnamese allies. While depicting the obligation as moral rather than legal permitted the United States to frame the evacuation as a rescue rather than a withdrawal, invoking morality also fashioned the American obligation in ways that did not have obvious limits, temporal or demographic. Future nonexecutive actors seized on this language to successfully expand resettlement opportunities for growing numbers of South Vietnamese.

The Statute does not specify the penalty for specific crimes, leaving it to the Trial Chamber to fix a custodial sentence to a maximum of thirty years and, ‘when justified by the extreme gravity of the crime and the individual circumstances of the convicted person’, life imprisonment. Reflecting developments in international human rights law, the Court excludes any possibility of capital punishment. It may also impose a fine. The main objectives in imposing sentence are retribution and deterrence. Aggravating and mitigating factors are set out in the Rules of Procedure and Evidence. The convicted person may apply for early release after serving two-thirds of the sentence or, in the case of life imprisonment, after twenty-five years. Sentences are served in the domestic prisons of a State Party that has been so designated by the Trial Chamber.

This chapter draws on research into the lives and prison experiences of around 650 male and female convicts who were released on licence (an early form of parole) from sentences of long-term imprisonment in England in the mid- to late nineteenth century. While both men and women were overwhelmingly committed to the convict system for larceny, their treatment differed significantly. The vast majority of convicts were released early on licence from their prison terms, even those committing very serious offences. However, female offenders were released slightly earlier and under different conditions than men. Having offended against their gender as well as society, more moral rehabilitation was deemed necessary for deviant women than for men, leading to requirements such as entering refuges or shelters. Female convicts’ internment in these institutions after being granted a licence reveals the impact of gender expectations on female prisoners in England.

Radical liberalism and natural law theory ground a vigorous critique of the carceral state and of imprisonment in anything like its current form. But a natural law analysis can also serve as the basis of a negative assessment of current practices that does not depend on embracing this critique. Chapter 6 seeks to show why plausible theories of statist criminal justice, even if taken to justify not only imprisonment but also the use of victim testimony to help determine prisoners’ initial terms of confinement, likely do not warrant the use of this kind of testimony in assessing parole requests.