Parole, Extreme Sentences, and Data Transparency
by Matt Matheny
LD178 would have made all adults serving sentences longer than 5 years eligible for a parole hearing. What does this group of people look like, and what would happen if these criteria changed?
In 2023, Maine’s legislature considered LD178, a bill that would not only bring back parole to Maine, but create the gold standard for parole systems across the country. This bill was created in consultation with experts both in Maine and across the country in order to be inclusive, victim-sensitive, safety-oriented, and constitutionally sound. During this process, some eligibility restrictions were considered, specifically limiting eligibility based upon age at sentencing and minimum sentence length. The final version of LD178, if passed, would have made everyone serving a sentence longer than 5 years eligible for parole, regardless of age at the time of sentencing. After compiling the sentence length and age at sentencing for every person under MDOC incarceration, we are able to understand how these eligibility changes would impact incarcerated people in Maine, illustrating the urgent need for an inclusive parole system in Maine.
As of October 2023, here’s how different changes in parole eligibility criteria would affect the proportion of Mainers eligible for parole:
51 women (28.8% of all incarcerated women) are serving sentences at least 5 years long.
29 women (16.4% of all incarcerated women) are serving sentences at least 8 years long.
24 women (13.6% of all incarcerated women) are serving sentences at least 10 years long. Two of these are life sentences.
For men, these proportions are much higher:
804 men (49.1% of all incarcerated men) are serving sentences at least 5 years long.
558 men (34.1% of all incarcerated men) are serving sentences at least 8 years long.
480 men (29.3% of all incarcerated men) are serving sentences at least 10 years long. 60 of these are life sentences.
Clearly, long sentences account for a large proportion of Maine’s incarcerated male population. Data shows that long sentences do little to ensure public safety, promote rehabilitation, or reduce recidivism. What they do do is raise taxpayer costs, further the traumatic effects of incarceration, keep families and communities apart, and remove workers from Maine’s already-dwindling workforce. The parole system proposed in LD178 would have combated these pitfalls by extending the opportunity to apply for parole to about half of the men incarcerated in Maine & over a quarter of the women.
Age at the time of sentencing is another important factor to consider, especially considering that adults aged 18-24 account for 30% of arrests despite being 10% of the US population, and recidivism rates decrease as people grow older. Additionally, neurobiological scholarship has shown that brain development is not complete until (roughly) the age of 25, evidence that has led to resentencing efforts for adults who committed a crime before this age. For all these reasons, gaining a clear picture of age at sentencing - and particularly the number of people sentenced before the age of 25 - is important.
4 women (16.6% of all women serving at least 10 year sentences) who were sentenced under the age of 25 are serving a sentence at least 10 years long.
82 men (17% of all men serving at least 10 year sentences) who were sentenced under the age of 25 are serving a sentence at least 10 years long.
Thus the same percentage of women and men who were sentenced when under the age of 25 are serving long sentences. However, whereas there were no women sentenced under the age of 25 serving a sentence between 5-10 years, the portrait for men is far different:
125 men (15.5% of all men serving at least 5 year sentences) who were sentenced under the age of 25 are serving a sentence at least 5 years long.
90 men (16.1% of all men serving at least 8 year sentences) who were sentenced under the age of 25 are serving a sentence at least 8 years long.
This data illustrates that men are generally more impacted by extreme sentences for emerging adults than women. A parole system would serve as an avenue to correct for these issues in emerging adult sentencing.
Getting this data was a laborious task, and it involved combing through the entirety of MDOC’s adult resident search list, logging the information of all 1,813 people incarcerated in Maine’s prisons by hand (As of March 2024, this number has grown to 1,868). As a result, there may be slight imperfections in the final calculations, or changes over time. While I write this to acknowledge possible shortcomings in data collection and analysis, it also outlines a need for easily accessible public data about who is incarcerated. The public deserves more than a clunky search tool if they wish to know what Maine’s landscape of mass incarceration looks like. After all, our tax dollars are funding it.
As I scrolled through page after page of search results, I saw the faces of every single person incarcerated in one of Maine’s prisons. I saw their birthdays, and for some, I saw how many decades of birthdays had been spent behind bars. And too often, I saw people sentenced to years upon years of prison at an age younger than mine now (31 men were sentenced to 5+ year sentences at 20 years old or younger). For me, this was a stark reminder of the human impact of mass incarceration, a system that functions best (read: most harmfully) when we forget that each person put in a cage is just that: a person. An inclusive, data-driven parole system helps counteract the inhumanity of mass incarceration and moves toward recognizing the humanity uniting all of us.