Thread by @NazgolG

Here's a summary of some research that took me 8 years(!) to complete. It's now a journal article titled "Cell Phones and 'Excessive Contact': The Contradictory Imperatives Facing California’s Parole-Eligible Lifers," and began as a dissertation chapter. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

Punchline: Parole and prison policies in CA create an incentive for parole-eligible lifers to break prison rules by using cell phones and engaging in physical contact with visitors that's deemed "excessive." When detected, these behaviors contribute to parole denials.

To learn this, I spent time with people advocating for loved ones sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. I found that they helped lifers qualify for parole by keeping up their spirits, and much more. Here’s Terrance on his relationship w/ his wife and her kids.

Here’s how else Tiffany (Terrance's husband) helped him to qualify for parole.

Lifers’ supporters also kept them out of trouble. After Winston got stabbed in prison, his wife Sophia convinced him to inform on his attackers and enter protective custody, instead of retaliate. Here’s her ultimatum:

I didn’t realize it at first but eventually I learned that several of these supporters were accepting cell phone calls from their incarcerated loved one, and some would get physically intimate with them during visits.

Here’s an e.g. of how parole board commissioners responded when a lifer got caught using a cell phone. Even though they had granted this person parole at his previous hearing (which the governor overturned), they then denied parole based b/c he'd used a phone to comfort his wife.

And remember Sophia and Winston? She encouraged him to not retaliate. Here's what happened with them, which may have contributed to their breakup.

So although they were doing so much to help improve the parole prospects of these lifers, these supporters were also contributing to their being denied parole.

But it's important to recognize the context in which these forms of misconduct take place.

Excessive prison terms, overcrowding, remote location of prisons, and two key policy choices:

First, banning conjugal visits for lifers. This 1990s reform, recently revised, was implemented despite opposition from the department of corrections.

Second, imposing high-cost phone service on incarcerated people. Here’s more info on that.

“It was a mistake of my own decision,” one of the lifers I interviewed told me. Many blame themselves for getting written up for this misconduct. But some also note that the parole board’s “performance is designed to find us unsuitable, and that’s it.”

Hard to argue that he’s wrong. Here’s a chart showing the growth of prison terms for CA's paroled lifers, from my lifer parole report. sentencingproject.org/publications/d…

Some things have improved. Gov. Brown has reversed a smaller share of the parole board’s increasing number of parole grants for lifers. But governors in CA shouldn’t have this power to begin with, and in most states they don't.

Other good news: CA legislators reinstated family visits for lifers and prison phone costs have gone down.

But as long as we imprison people so many people for so long, let’s have a real understanding of why many are using cell phones, etc. and reconsider how we respond. //