Alabama may soon let prisoners have a say at their parole hearings, but their original crime will carry more weight under new guidelines.

The three-member Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles voted on Thursday to adopt new guidelines for who should be released from the state’s overcrowded prisons.

The new guidelines are stricter in terms of how they rank an inmate for parole readiness, weighing the inmate’s original crime more heavily than the previous guidelines and putting more emphasis on behavior in prison.

“Alabama already has one of the lowest parole grant rates in the country and one of the highest violent crime rates,” said attorney Lauren Faraino, who has gone before the board many times to argue for clients to be released on parole.

“If endless incarceration worked, we’d be the safest state in America. This isn’t reform. It’s regression. Its fear-driven policy cloaked in bureaucratic language. And it’s going to keep making Alabama citizens less safe.”

State law requires the board to look at the parole guidelines as an aide to decide who to release, but doesn’t require the board to follow the guidelines’ recommendations.

The proposed guidelines were released in May, and Alabamians were encouraged to submit comments to the board for review until July 4. After the review period, the board made several small changes to the guidelines before adopting them. According to the bureau, which supervises the 45,000 people on probation, parole and other supervised release throughout the state, there were 53 responses during the public comment period.

The initial revisions primarily concern how the board should weigh an inmate’s behavior and disciplinary record, their participation in treatment and programs while in prison, and their original offense.

Board members accepted one of the changes that came from a comment asking to add education completed while in prison as a factor.

Another change they accepted was an ask to add status for inmates who were juvenile offenders at the time of their offense.

The bureau also said the board was working on a standardized process for all inmates up for parole to have the option to submit a prerecorded video statement. That change would mean inmates would have a say in their hearing, as currently Alabama doesn’t allow incarcerated people to attend their own parole hearings.

Currently, some lawyers who are familiar with the board’s process do create videos of their incarcerated clients. But it’s rare, and inmates without a lawyer to bring a laptop into the prison aren’t afforded the same opportunity.

The guidelines update comes several years after they were due by state law. But today the Bureau of Pardons and Paroles — a separate entity from the board — said the guidelines were “considered” to be revised in early 2024 but the board “voted to make no changes at that time.”

At a meeting with lawmakers from the bipartisan Joint Prison Oversight Committee in the fall of 2024, then-parole board Chairperson Leigh Gwathney talked about the board’s existing guidelines, which Gwathney said were set in 2018 prior to her appointment and had last been revised in 2020.

At the time, Gwathney said that she didn’t know who set them or their reasoning.

Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, pointed out at the meeting that Alabama law requires the board to review the guidelines every three years, seek public comment and share them on the parole board website. “You’re about two years overdue,” said England at that October meeting.

“Fair enough,” Gwathney replied.

At the time, she said the guidelines revision was an “ongoing conversation.”

Gov. Kay Ivey did not reappoint Gwathney to the parole board when her term expired this summer. Her new man for the job, Hal Nash, had his first day at the board on Tuesday. Nash most recently worked as the former chief corrections deputy for Jackson County Sheriff’s Office.

How the guidelines work

The parole guidelines consist of a scoresheet, with numbers correlating to how someone fits into the score that can show if a person would be a good candidate for parole. The higher someone scores, the less likely they are to be recommended for parole.

The old guidelines recommended inmates with a score of up to 7 be recommended for parole, and over 8 be denied. The revised guidelines make it slightly tougher to get a positive recommendation. They call for a score of up to 5 be recommended for parole, but a score of 6 to 8 would now be considered neutral and could be recommended for either a grant or denial. A score over 9 would be grounds for a denial.

Other guideline changes in the revised version posted on the bureau’s website revolve around behavior in prison. Previously, the guidelines scored an inmate based on if they had no disciplinaries, and how many violent or non-violent ones were accumulated throughout the year. The revised guidelines make a disciplinary offense involving violence within the last 12 months a score of 3, versus the previous score of 2.

The prior guidelines rank the severity of an inmate’s original offense as ‘low’, ‘moderate’, or ‘high’, with ‘low’ scoring a zero and ‘high’ scoring a 2. The new guidelines put more weight on some original crimes, proposing the scoring of a ‘low’ offense as a 1 and adding a ‘very high’ offense level with a score of 4.

Sex offenses will now be considered as ‘very high,’ while any case with a victim must be scored as ‘high’ or ‘very high.’ Felony crimes involving injury will be considered ‘very high,’ too.

Under the previous leadership, the parole board had long ignored its own guidelines. In 2023, the board finished the year with a staggering 8% parole rate — the lowest in recent years. That same year, the board’s own guidelines recommended about an 80% grant rate. In 2024, the parole rate jumped to 20%, but the guidelines still suggested between 75%-90% of eligible applicants be paroled.

The board is on track for a 21% grant rate this year.

Faraino said the new guidelines will not improve the board’s grant rate.

“These revised parole guidelines are nothing more than fear masquerading as policy,” she said.

“This cannot be what the legislature had in mind when it called for a review of the guidelines. In any other area of public life, we would never accept a scoring system this flawed, this slanted, and this untethered from results.”

According to Friday’s press release, there will be a review committee to see how the guidelines work once they’re enacted. The committee was established “to support the Board in analyzing parole data and its relationship to the revised guidelines” and will meet every three months to assess the guidelines and provide insights.