Alabama politicians pushed ahead a bill to reshape the state parole board on Wednesday, looking at ways to improve how Alabama decides who is fit for parole from the state’s overcrowded prisons.

“If you’ve been paying any attention to the news recently, you know the board has no oversight,” Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, told his colleagues on the committee. “This bill would do what the current board has refused to do for the last five or six years.”

The bill, called HB40, calls for the board to create the Criminal Justice Policy Development Council. The 11-member council, according to the bill, would oversee the development and use of a new risk assessment for inmates, parole guidelines, and inmate classification system for the prisons. The council members would not be paid.

It moved to the full House of Representatives for consideration, passing the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon with 8 votes in favor, 6 opposed and one abstaining.

While state law currently requires the parole board to look at their guidelines as an aid in their decision-making process, England’s bill would require the board to actually follow the guidelines. If the three-member parole board deviated from the guidelines in an inmate’s parole decision, the bill would require the board to explain the reason for the deviation.

The bill would also implement a way for inmates to appeal parole denials to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals.

England explained the bill on Wednesday afternoon to his colleagues in the Judiciary Committee, adding that he had introduced it in previous legislative sessions and that, if passed, the bill would not take away discretion of the board. He said parts of the bill come from best practices in other states.

England recalled a contentious Joint Prison Oversight Committee meeting where Alabama Parole Board Chairperson Leigh Gwathney spoke and sparked frustration from lawmakers last fall.

During that meeting, lawmakers grilled Gwathney on why the parole board had all but stopped granting paroles, paroling just 8 percent of eligible inmates in 2023.

“One of the two needs to be adjusted to reality,” Sen. Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville, told Gwathney at that meeting about the difference in the guideline parole rate and the actual parole rate.

“You set the rules. The board sets the rules. They’re called parole guidelines. And I’m just having a hard time understanding conformance to your own rules is in the 20 percentile. I guess that’s my question… Why is that? If you actually write the rules yourself?”

Gwathney admitted to changing some of the scoresheets for inmates, and England said on Wednesday that regardless of what changes were made, those alterations make the scoresheets unusable for data collection.

“It corrupted any information that we could get,” he told his colleagues.

England mentioned the questions that committee asked of Gwathney years ago about “basic operating information.” At that October meeting, Gwathney was told to have those answers to the committee by the end of November.

But England said those answers still have not come.

“A board that lacks oversight, we can’t do anything when they refuse to follow the law. A board that lacks oversight, we also can’t do anything when that board refuses to provide basic information that is requested from the legislative branch of government.”

“So at this point, the oversight is necessary because while you may agree with the results… there may be a point in the future where you don’t agree with the result and it’s been made quite plainly by the actions of the current board that there’s nothing that we can do regardless,” England said.

“This bill would give us the ability to provide some oversight of a board that currently just ignores all.”

Updates to the inmate classification system, which is used by the prisons, the guidelines, and risk assessment would be completed by October 2027 under the current version of the bill.

And the bill calls for quarterly reports to the Legislature, starting this fall.

So far this legislative session, there are eight bills that concern parole—four in the House and four in the Senate. Several of the bills come after similar (or identical, in some cases) attempts in previous legislative sessions failed.

A few of the 2025 bills concern technical parts of electronic monitoring and data sharing in the parole process, while another would make parole officers specified as state law enforcement officers. Another would notify individuals when they could have their voting rights restored, and another would make it harder to be granted medical parole. One bill in the Senate seeks to have inmates appear before the parole board virtually.

Wednesday’s discussion comes after the Alabama Parole Board and its chairperson, Gwathney, came under public scrutiny last year for the board’s record-low parole rates. AL.com spent 2024 delving into Alabama’s broken parole system, a system that had all but stopped releasing eligible prisoners in 2023. In 2023, the parole rate fell to just 8% – despite the parole board’s own criteria showing about 80% of the eligible inmates should be let out. The chairperson even denied parole to a quadriplegic inmate who couldn’t speak and denied another inmate who had died a week before his hearing.

As the reporting continued, the broken system began to change. Two of the three parole board members began to change their voting patterns, opting to let more people out of prison. Alabama’s parole rate rose to 20% in 2024, according to data from the Bureau of Pardons and Paroles. That comes out to roughly 250 more people getting out of prison this year than in 2023. Criticisms and concerns poured in from both sides of the aisle, as lawmakers held hearings and demanded answers.