Denied Paroles: Stories From Inside Alabama Prisons
Alabama prisons are the most overcrowded and violent in the nation and an unprecedented drop in the state’s parole system has made the disaster even worse.
BY BETH SHELBURNE, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, CAMPAIGN FOR SMART JUSTICE
Beginning in September of 2019, leaders appointed by Governor Kay Ivey assumed authority over the parole board and the bureau of pardons and paroles. Since then, the number of parole hearings has dropped by half and parole grants have fallen to a low of 15 percent.
Parole is a necessary part of Alabama’s criminal sentencing structure and a crucial way to relieve pressure in a prison system immersed in crisis. People who serve time in Alabama prisons must be given a meaningful chance at parole, apart from politics. Individuals deserve a fair evaluation based on where they are today, not what they did to end up in prison. When making these life altering decisions, a parole system should rely on evidence-based policies and compassion, not fear and retribution.
The people incarcerated in Alabama’s unconstitutional prisons deserve an unprejudiced chance to return home to their families and communities. This cannot happen when a backlog of over 4000 people who are eligible for parole are waiting for their hearings to be scheduled. It cannot happen when leaders engage in inflammatory rhetoric designed to marginalize and stigmatize people who have been convicted of crimes. It hasn’t happened since Alabama’s parole board began routinely voting against release, denying the opportunity of parole in 85 percent of the cases considered in the last seven months.
Thousands of men and women are currently warehoused in a prison system plagued by continual violence and now they face a new threat from the deadly virus COVID-19. Many parole candidates could be released today, but instead they are left at the mercy of agencies stymied by inaction, dysfunction and indifference.
These are the stories of three families recently impacted by Alabama’s parole system. They all wanted to share their experiences with the hope that the system can change, just like the people caged inside it.
Read the full report here: https://alabamasmartjustice.org/report/parole-hearing-backlog
“OVERWHELMED WITH SADNESS”
Rebecca thought 2020 was the year her husband, Thomas, would finally come home. The couple, which asked that only their first names be used, had planned his homecoming for over three years. Thomas would join his wife in the community where she lives, works and worships at an Assembly of God church. They hoped to start a business together where they’d make custom furniture and restore old pieces.
Thomas and Rebecca, 2019
Thomas had served over 30 years of a life sentence in Alabama prisons and they both felt everything was falling into place.
“My whole church was praying for him,” Rebecca told me on the phone. “Everyone I work with was praying for him.” She paused and began crying. “Now everyone keeps asking me ‘what month is he coming home?’ and I have to tell them, it didn’t go our way.”
On February 18, 2020, Alabama’s parole board denied Thomas’s release, along with 22 other parole eligible people who were on the docket that day. The board granted parole to only four people, none with violent offenses on their records.
This follows a pattern of what appears to be a near ban on parole grants for anyone with a violent offense. Since November 2019, only 35 people with violent offenses have been granted parole out of 133 hearings held by the new administration. The majority of those grants were for people with crimes defined as violent, but did not include an act of actual violence. 13 of the grants were for people with third degree burglary convictions, a crime that involves burglarizing an unoccupied building, like stealing a lawn mower from a shed. 10 were serving time for drug trafficking.
Since November, 35 out of 133 parole grants were for violent offenses.
Thomas’s parole application was impressive. He has worked in a prison furniture plant throughout his incarceration and has lived in faith dorms, serving in leadership positions. In more than three decades behind bars, he’s only received one disciplinary citation for failing a drug test at the beginning of his sentence.
“I didn’t have no sense then,” Thomas told me on the phone. “I was doing things my way and still doing drugs, which is what led to all my problems.”
His problems peaked in the early 1990’s before he and Rebecca were married. They split up and she began dating someone else. Thomas confronted her new boyfriend and the two men argued, the incident ending with Thomas shooting and killing the man.
In 1992, Thomas pleaded guilty to murder and accepted the life sentence, with the understanding that he could make parole after serving 10-15 years.
“I still live with what I did every day,” he said. “Somebody lost their life because of what I did and it was a terrible mistake.”
Thomas and Rebecca, 1989
That was a long time ago. Over the years Thomas got sober and began going to church. He developed a reputation as a hard worker and earned the trust of officers, who considered him a “good inmate.”
Thomas told Rebecca the institutional parole officer who interviewed him ahead of his February hearing said he would recommend Thomas for parole, then the two men prayed together after the interview. His parole application included 19 letters of recommendation from correctional officers and prison staff, who described him as “trustworthy,” “positive,” and “a good man.”
“That should count for something,” Thomas told me. “That’s not an easy thing to earn in here.”
Rebecca and 14 other supporters attended Thomas’s parole hearing in Montgomery. She stood before the three board members and read the letter she’d worked on for two months, telling them that her husband was a changed man and it was time for them to have a life together. One of Thomas’s friends also spoke, saying he’d help Thomas find a job and would support him and mentor him once he was released.
The victim’s family did not show up to the hearing, but a representative from the Attorney General’s office announced a short, cursory protest, saying they opposed granting parole due to the nature of the crime.
The board then went into executive session, and Rebecca silently prayed as she watched them whisper in a huddle. She couldn’t hear what they were saying but wondered if they were reading the packet she had put together that included dozens of certificates from programs her husband had completed over the years. She tried to quiet her pounding heart, realizing their entire future rested in the hands of three people who had never met her husband, but would decide his fate in the span of 13 minutes.
The board members separated and board chair Leigh Gwathney announced that they had decided to deny parole, but Thomas could come back and try again in five years, in 2025.
“What?” Rebecca said out loud. “Why?”
Members of Thomas’s support group began to cry. Rebecca felt like she’d been punched.
Without addressing the group, Ms. Gawthney asked the bailiff to escort Thomas’s supporters out of the hearing room, according to Rebecca, and never looked their way.
That night on the phone, Rebecca and Thomas cried together, like someone had died.
“I guess God has forgotten about me,” Thomas said to his wife. She tried to reassure him, but weeks after the decision, they were both still struggling to recover.
“Both of us are overwhelmed with sadness,” Rebecca told me. “I don’t know any other way to describe it. We’re heartbroken.”
This was the fifth time Thomas was denied parole in his 30-year incarceration, but the first time the victim’s family did not show up to protest his release. Despite that, parole board members cited “negative input from stakeholders” as one of the reasons they decided to keep him in prison for another five years. According to the paperwork Thomas received regarding the board’s decision, stakeholders can include the “victim, family of victim or law enforcement.”
I asked the Attorney General’s office for their policy on protesting parole and whether they have ever supported parole in any cases. A spokesperson emailed me the following response:
“The Attorney General’s Office protests parole in cases where the inmate has committed violent offenses and offenses where there are victims. The office looks at the offense committed, the length of time served compared to the court-ordered sentence, and at the behavior during incarceration.”
The parole board also cited the severity of Thomas’s offense, and indicated he hadn’t completed efforts toward his re-entry plan, which he and Rebecca said was not true. The words “in progress” were written next to re-entry on the paperwork from the board, but Thomas said he graduated from the prison’s re-entry program and included the certificate in his packet.
“That tells me they didn’t even read my file,” he said. “They don’t seem like they want to help you get out.”
The only way to appeal a decision by the Alabama parole board is to file something in court and Rebecca said they don’t have money for that. Thomas will be 64 when he’s eligible for parole again and she’ll be 67. Besides the rampant prison violence, Rebecca worries about his health. Thomas has high blood pressure, high cholesterol and frequent migraine headaches and his age puts him at a high risk of death if he is infected with the coronavirus.
Thomas told me that his current situation helps him understand the hopelessness felt by so many incarcerated people who once believed they could work toward parole. With the current board denying parole to almost everyone with a violent conviction, thousands of sentences in Alabama’s overcrowded system are suddenly viewed by those serving them as de facto life without parole.
“There’s no way I could do any better than what I’ve done,” Thomas said. “This decision made me see that they are never going to let me out.”
“I’M NOT THE PERSON I USED TO BE”
Terry Townsend had a bad feeling. So bad, he didn’t even bother calling his brother the day of his parole hearing on April 10, 2019, to find out the outcome.
Mr. Townsend, like every other person incarcerated in Alabama prisons, was not allowed to attend his own parole hearing, but he was lucky. His brother, fiancé and a former boss all went to Montgomery and testified before Alabama’s parole board on his behalf.
Terry’s loved ones told the parole board members that Terry had changed during his 15-year incarceration for a pharmacy burglary. He had not received one disciplinary citation during that time and was sober and ready to come home. Terry had secured a spot in a halfway house called “Fresh Start Recovery Ministries” that included a job and a 12-month re-entry program.
“I’ve come to realize how wrong I was,” Terry wrote in a letter to the parole board. “I hurt my family and my victims. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t regret what I did.”
Terry and parents
Terry’s parole application included over 20 certificates for rehabilitative programs he’d completed in prison and glowing letters of recommendation from prison employees, including counselors that he worked with in the “New Outlook Therapeutic Community” at St. Clair Correctional, considered the most extensive behavior modification program within ADOC. Terry graduated from the program and worked as an aide to staff, serving as a role model for his peers.
“He has truly exemplified what it means to learn from your mistakes,” wrote a program specialist at the prison.
Despite all this, the board denied Terry’s parole and set his next consideration date for 2022. The following day, Terry heard the news from a prison employee, who told him he’d have to serve at least three more years in prison.
Terry learned from his brother that the Montgomery-based organization VOCAL, Victims of Crime and Leniency, protested his parole. Representatives from VOCAL frequently appear before the parole board to argue against releasing people from prison, which they did in Terry’s case, even though the victims from his crime did not attend his hearing or openly oppose his release.
A representative of Alabama’s Attorney General also argued that Terry did not deserve to be released on parole because he had not served enough time.
Terry’s bad feeling about his parole chances developed a month before his parole hearing. An institutional parole officer had given him a risk assessment exam and Terry felt like it didn’t go well. He told me the entire interview seemed to focus on the negative, and he wanted to talk about the positive changes he’d made in prison.
“I know what I did was wrong,” he told me on one of several phone calls. “I deserved to be sent to prison for a substantial amount of time, but I’m 56-years-old. I can’t make my crime less severe. I’ve done every positive thing I can do in prison. I don’t know what else I can do.”
Terry’s parole consideration came at a critical time for criminal justice in Alabama. His hearing was one week after the U.S. Department of Justice released a scathing report that found Alabama prisons likely violate the Constitution, due to overcrowding and violence. The state faced more pressure than ever to address the crisis.
But a separate troubling situation had been unfolding for 10 months prior to Terry’s parole hearing. In July, 2018, three people were murdered in the north Alabama town of Guntersville, including a 7-year old boy. A homeless man named Jimmy O’Neal Spencer was arrested and charged in the crime spree, which tipped off months of political scapegoating and adversely impacted the potential freedom for thousands of people in Alabama prisons.
Spencer had a long criminal record and had been released on parole six months prior to the murders. Governor Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall swiftly blamed the parole board and set in motion a chain of events that would cause parole grants in Alabama to drop almost 60 percent over the following year. Spencer represented the worst possible outcome when someone is paroled from prison, but everyone, including excellent parole candidates like Terry Townsend, would have to pay the price.
“It had a tremendous chilling effect on what the board did,” said Lyn Head, who resigned from Alabama’s parole board in September, 2019, after serving three years. “I know there were cases after Spencer that, because of the pressure, I would have voted for parole had that factor not existed.”
Terry Townsend committed the crime that sent him to prison with his current life sentence in 2003. Townsend, 39 at the time, along with another man, were each charged with multiple counts of robbery, burglary, kidnapping and theft after the pair broke into the home of a local pharmacist and forced her to open the business so they could steal drugs.
Shortly after his arrest, Terry escaped from the Franklin County jail, climbing out a third-floor window and shimmying down a rope made of bedsheets he had tied together. He had already done two stints in prison for several burglaries and a robbery, and he did not want to go back. He made it over the fence and into the woods, where he hid for 10 days before a police task force, complete with dogs and a helicopter, recaptured him.
Prosecutors added an escape charge to the list of felony counts he faced, made all the more damning by Terry’s prior criminal record. They told Terry if he took his case to trial and was found guilty, he would be sentenced to life without parole under Alabama’s habitual felony offender law. They offered him a deal: plead guilty to second-degree burglary, kidnapping and escape and they’d drop the rest of the charges and sentence him to life with the possibility of parole. Terry took the deal.
Terry and sister
When he began his sentence in 2004, his daughter was five-years old. She’s now 22 and they have drifted apart. He also has a 23-year old son who lives in Ohio. They corresponded for a while, but have lost touch.
Over the years, Terry felt like he was losing his entire family. His father died in 2003, followed by his mother in 2011. Two of his sisters passed away, one in 2015, another in 2017. Terry remains close with his younger brother, Charlie Messer, who testified at his parole hearing.
“They didn’t know Terry. They’ve never met Terry,” Charlie told me over the phone when I asked him about the parole board’s decision. “I know he’s worked and rehabilitated himself. He wants to share his story and help people stay out of trouble. They didn’t want to hear none of that.”
Terry’s story of incarceration is typical: family history of abuse and addiction, getting into trouble as a youth, dropping out of high school and turning to drugs and crime. He was in and out of prison between 1984-1995 for robbing a gas station and burglarizing several houses when residents weren’t home.
When he finally got out on parole, he was determined to stay out and stay clean. He began working on a dairy farm -- dehorning cattle, giving them shots, tagging their ears. He worked between 50-70 hours a week, sometimes with only a few days off a month, but Terry grew to like the work, especially the tender task of tending to baby animals.
“Sometimes there’d be 150 calves that I had to bottle feed,” he said. “I really enjoyed that.”
Terry got married and his wife gave birth to their baby daughter. He was sober and for the first time in a long time, he felt happy.
Everything changed in 2001 when Terry was suddenly diagnosed with cancer. He had surgery to remove a mass in his chest and then underwent radiation. The morphine he received in the hospital marked his first exposure to narcotics since his days of getting high. Doctors sent Terry home with pain medication, but it quickly triggered his drug addiction.
“I didn’t want to get off of the pills,” Terry said. “When you’re addicted, it escalates quickly and I started doing a lot of things I shouldn’t have done.”
Before long, Terry was getting high again and hanging around people who were breaking the law. Eight years after he’d last been in prison, Terry committed the kidnapping and pharmacy burglary, which ended the last stretch of freedom in his adult life.
“I have not used drugs or alcohol since July 4, 2004,” he wrote in a letter to the parole board, outlining the many substance abuse and treatment programs he’s completed in prison. He earned a welding degree in the prison’s trade school and told me he finally came to understand why he turned to drugs and how to live without them.
Timothy Bille, 64, served 18 years in prison and knew Terry from working in the prison leather shop. Timothy was released in 2017 after he served his full sentence and now lives in Ozark, where he works at an auto body shop. He told me he asked his entire church to pray for Terry leading up to his parole hearing.
“He was a standout in prison,” Timothy said. “If you don’t have the will to stay clean and straight, you will relapse. The prisons are covered up with drugs, but Terry chose to do the right thing and that’s not easy.”
Timothy was denied parole four times during his incarceration, each time notified by letter. Originally from Wisconsin, he didn’t have anyone to advocate for his release before the parole board, and he was so removed from the process, he wasn’t even sure when his hearings took place. He told me parole was a constant source of despair inside the prison. He even considered suicide.
Terry, 2002
“You don’t even get to speak for yourself,” Timothy said. “They tell you to do all these prison programs to increase your chances for parole, but when they deny guys like Terry, it feels like a lie.”
Legislation in 2015 required the parole board to give written reasons for approval or denial for each prisoner, victim, and any other interested party. A week after he learned he’d been turned down for parole, Terry received a form that stated why the parole board voted to deny his freedom. Board members indicated they believed Terry’s risk of reoffending was high and cited the severity of his present offense. They also noted his prior parole revocations and included one final justification that read like a catchall -- “Release will depreciate seriousness of offense or promote disrespect for the law.”
Terry told me he doesn’t think the board evaluated him based on who he is today.
“I’ve got letters of recommendation from people that know me and are around me every day,” Terry said. “They see me trying to do right, but my past is my problem. I can’t get around it, but I’m not the person I used to be. I’ve just got to keep the faith and think positive. That’s all I really have left.”
“WE’RE IN LIMBO”
On Friday, March 13, Maureen Morris did what she’s done for years. She boarded a flight in Indianapolis, Indiana where she lives and headed south to Alabama to visit her husband Ira, who’s incarcerated in an Alabama prison. Before she left, Maureen checked the website for the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), just in case there was an update about visitation given the growing threat from COVID-19. She didn’t see anything, so she said a silent prayer of thanks and went out the door.
Maureen flew to Atlanta, then rented a car and drove 175 miles to Prattville, Alabama, where she rented a hotel room to get some rest before her scheduled visit at nearby Staton Prison the following morning. Before she went to sleep, she turned on the television and was stunned by what she heard on the local news. ADOC had just announced it was canceling all prison visits due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Maureen and Ira would not get to see each other, and she had wasted over $500 to make the trip.
“I was disappointed, hurt and furious by the lack of communication,” Maureen told me. “They knew visits were scheduled the next day and that people travel to see their loved ones. To me, it was thoughtless, but not surprising.”
Ira and Maureen
Ira and Maureen Morris have grown experienced at maintaining their relationship in the midst of factors beyond their control. Ira Morris has served over 24 years of a 30-year prison sentence, almost 10 years longer than the minimum required to be considered for parole.
He’s been eligible for a parole hearing since November 1, 2019, but the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles (ABPP) has not yet scheduled a hearing for Mr. Morris, and he’s not alone. An analysis by the Campaign for Smart Justice found over 4000 parole-eligible people just like him, waiting inside Alabama’s overcrowded and dangerous prisons, trapped in a terribly backlogged system with leaders who’ve displayed no apparent urgency to fix it.
“I’m beyond frustrated,” Maureen said. “My hope is in Jesus, but this is a hopeless situation. We’re just constantly at the mercy of a system that offers no mercy to us.”
After canceling hearings from March 17 through May due to COVID-19 precautions, ABPP Executive Director Charlie Graddick said April 9 the agency hoped to announce a plan soon to resume parole hearings. The agency faces mounting pressure from elected officials after our April 8 report revealed the enormous parole backlog. Other states, including Georgia and Mississippi, have continued holding parole hearings to get more people out of prisons, considered to be extremely high-risk environments for COVID-19 infection.
“I just feel like with the current leaders at the parole board, more delays and more red tape suits them just fine,” Ira told me on a phone call. “It was no surprise that they cancelled all the hearings because of the way things have been going.”
Mr. Morris ended up in prison after pleading guilty to his part in a murder. In 1996, while he and another man robbed a convenience store, his co-defendant shot and killed an employee. Morris was 19 when he began his 30-year sentence.
He practically grew up in prison, eventually earning an electrical degree, marrying Maureen and working toward a positive future outside the walls. But every time he came up for parole, the victim’s family opposed his release, so Ira was denied, most recently in 2015. When the parole board set his next hearing for four years later, Maureen decided she needed to act.
She helped facilitate reconciliation between Ira, the victim’s family and the prosecutor, who agreed to no longer oppose Ira’s release. Maureen, a social worker, said restorative justice was important to Ira, who wanted to promote healing for the victims of his crime. She also hired an attorney, and in 2018 they succeeded in getting a one-year “parole cut” for Ira after applying with 10 letters of support from family, friends and ADOC correctional officers. His new eligibility date was set for November 2018.
That was derailed when Governor Ivey issued a moratorium on all early parole hearings in response to the triple murder for which Jimmy O’Neal Spencer was arrested. Spencer had not been released on early parole, but increased scrutiny on the parole board revealed that some people with violent convictions had been docketed for early parole. Governor Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall pointed to this as emblematic of a parole system that was “badly broken” and set in motion major changes still to come. Ira’s November, 2018 parole eligibility was put on hold.
Since September, an average of 300 people have become eligible for parole each month in ADOC prisons.
Ira and Maureen did what they always do in the midst of uncertainty. They waited patiently, prayed about it and hoped that Ira’s parole date would be reset. They talked on the phone every day and visited twice a month. They tried their best to remain calm and hopeful, but when Ivey appointed former attorney general Charlie Graddick to lead the parole agency, they knew it wasn’t good for them.
“All these delays and waiting is getting harder,” Ira said. “I have all this gray in my beard now from worrying about getting out of here, to get to Maureen.”
Since Graddick arrived in September 2019, the board has granted only 15 percent of parole applications considered, and only 26 percent of those were for people with a violent offense on their record. No one with a murder conviction has been granted parole, despite many serving decades in prison. Ira’s parole eligibility date was reset for November 1, 2019, and he still has no hearing. Maureen said remaining in limbo might be a better option than going up for parole in the current climate.
“And that’s a sad place to be, that we can’t trust the appointed people to do the right thing,” she said. “We want this group to evolve over time. We hope they grow some wisdom and over time, see people like Ira in a different light.”
Beth Shelburne is an investigative reporter for the Campaign for Smart Justice with the ACLU of Alabama. For investigative reporting on Alabama’s prison and pardons & paroles systems, follow her on Twitter at @bshelburne.