Prisons, Prose & Protest - #41
Rants, Musings and More
I’m taking some much-needed time off this month, though I have a couple of projects I am committed to executing. For the most part, I am going to sleep in and take some long walks.
Over the past few months, I’ve been curating a new exhibition that will open in July 2027. How They Come Home explores different pathways for release from prison (particularly clemency, parole, and defense campaigns). In this newsletter, I offer a short history of parole in the US.
Last year, I co-organized an extensive Communiversity offering. This year, we are organizing a more modest Communiversity focused on healing justice. If you’re in NYC, you are invited to join us in September and October. Registration goes live on August 10. Sign up for IC’s newsletter to be alerted.
Through September 25, the Keeping Community exhibition at the Center for Art and Advocacy in Brooklyn features a dedicated Reading Room curated by Sojourners for Justice Press (SJP), a Listening Room curated by Freer Records, and a Youth Art Space featuring artworks created and inspired by Crossroads Juvenile Center youth through workshops led by teaching artists and creatives. In addition to these core components, the exhibition will also host a variety of other program offerings throughout the course of the summer, including workshops, book clubs, and more.
We invite you to relax and get lost in our Reading Room, a living archive—with space to sit, read, and linger with dozens of rare books and print ephemera spanning centuries of radical Black publishing. The reading room also includes the opportunity to play ”sidechain,” a point-and-click adventure game created by Cameron Granger, and a selection of curated tapes that can be played on VHS and viewed on a CRT monitor, allowing for tactile engagement with various forms of past and present media.
You may also explore a range of print media, from nineteenth-century pamphlets to journals like The Crisis, Jet, Freedomways, and The Black Scholar, alongside more contemporary works, including new releases by SJP and works from Black Zine Fair exhibitors. All of these texts, regardless of era, reflect a shared commitment to Black political education and independent publishing.
Join me on Aug 20 from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at the Center for a conversation about Black bibliophiles in NY with Dr. Laura Helton.
Featured Org to Donate to: Stelton Distro
I met Gold in summer 2023 when they were a participant in the Youth Public History Institute that I co-organized and co-facilitated. One of my greatest joys is to meet and get to know young people who are determined to contribute to our liberation. Gold is one such person. I am so thrilled to see what they have created. Below they share how you can support their wonderful work in Jersey City. I am of course already a member. Please join me if you can:
“Founded in September 2025 by a black queer poet, Stelton Distro is a DIY art space, zine distro, indie bookstore, and mutual aid hub in West Side, Jersey City. We host zine making workshops, community organizing meetings, a free pantry with harm reduction supplies stocked by Food Not Bombs Jersey City and Safe Scene NJ, as well as poetry and musical performances and more. West Side is a neighborhood of Jersey City that is the next target of greedy developers displacing black residents. Stelton Distro is working to establish a community space with abolitionist principles against this rapid gentrification. We have just renewed our lease and will be at our location on Kennedy Blvd for the next two years but we need your support.
The space is primarily supported by monthly donations from members starting at $3/month. Stelton is the only space of its kind in New Jersey. Our small curated in-store selection of books and zines is focused on poetry and the history and future of liberatory social movements. You can also order the books we stock and most other books through our website, steltondistro.com, for pickup or shipping. You can become a member at ko-fi.com/steltondistro and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by sending a blank email to stelton-subscribe@lists.riseup.net. See you at Stelton!”
In this edition of Prisons, Prose & Protest, I discuss a history of parole in the US. I recommend a podcast about Illinois prisons, several excellent essays and articles, and more…
Feature: A Short History of Parole
The term “parole” refers to a system of early release from prison. A parolee may return home to serve the remainder of their sentence as long as they fulfill certain conditions, such as checking in with a parole officer and committing no more offenses.
In general, there are two types of parole—discretionary and mandatory. Discretionary parole is based on behavior as assessed by a parole board. Mandatory parole is generally for people who have been convicted of minor offenses, and is preset. For example, mandatory parole may be calculated at sentencing so that the person automatically serves the last six months of their sentence outside prison.
Parole is similar to probation, except that probation usually refers to home release offered instead of a prison sentence. Parole is home release fulfilling the remainder of a prison sentence.
The beginning of parole
Parole of prisoners of war has been used for thousands of years; armies did not want to feed and clothe enemy soldiers but also did not want them to return to their ranks to fight. In the American Revolution, for example, prisoners on parole would take a pledge not to rejoin combat until they could be exchanged for other prisoners.
The first experiments with civilian prisoner parole began in the 1800s. Alexander Maoconochie, the superintendent of the British penal colonies in Norfolk Island, Australia, instituted a program of parole in 1840 that allowed early release on good behavior and provided for revocation of liberty for failing to obey certain rules. Boston in the 1840s also began a program of conditional release and suspended sentences contingent on “reformation.”
Zebulon Brockway, prison warden in Elmira, New York, instituted an influential parole system in 1876. Paroled prisoners spent six months under supervision, during which they had to provide written reports on the first day of each month to a volunteer guardian. These guardians evolved into modern professional parole officers.
Brockway’s reforms were popular and were taken up across the country. New York was the first state to put in place all the elements of a parole system in 1907; those included, according to scholar Joan Petersilia, “indeterminate sentences, a system of granting release, postrelease supervision, and specific criteria for parole revocation.” Over the next two decades, all states except Florida, Mississippi, and Virginia embraced the new approach. By 1942, every state and the federal government used parole.
Parole boom
The use of discretionary parole ballooned in the mid-20th century. Around 40% of prisoners were released on discretionary parole in the 1940s; that number rose to 72% in 1977.
The enthusiasm for parole had three main causes. First, public officials and researchers put an increasing emphasis on prison as a mechanism for rehabilitation and reform. Second, the promise of parole, and the threat of withholding it, was seen as a powerful tool for disciplining prisoners and encouraging them to comply with prison rules. Finally—and probably most importantly—parole was used as a way to reduce prison overcrowding and manage expanding prison populations.
The contradictory motives for parole, along with the fact that parole boards were often made up of political appointees, led to great inconsistency in parole across and even within jurisdictions. There were serious racial and gender biases in granting parole, and there was generally little or no opportunity to appeal parole board decisions. One 1991 study of the system concluded that “No other part of the criminal justice system concentrates such power in the hands of so few.”
The obvious inconsistency and injustice, along with the public’s punitive biases, may have contributed to the fact that parole was never popular. In 1934, 80% of American adults said that parole was insufficiently strict. That number was basically unchanged in a survey from 1998, 64 years later. By the end of the 20th century, though, parole itself had been transformed.
Parole bust
In the 70s, influential researchers concluded that prison did a poor job of rehabilitation. At the same time, political leaders like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan began a racist fearmongering campaign focused on urban crime in hopes of rolling back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Many people no longer believed that prisoners could be reformed, and criminals were increasingly coded as Black and “other.”
The result was longer sentences for a wider range of behavior now labeled as criminal. Parole was also granted less often. By the end of 2000, 16 states had abolished discretionary parole altogether. (That number remains the same today.) Other states drastically reduced parole eligibility, and the number of people on parole fell and/or stagnated. In 2010, 840,000 people were on parole nationwide; in 2021 the number was just over 800,000.
There have been other important changes in parole as well. Parole officers were viewed in the mid-20th century as social workers whose job was to help make sure parolees did not reoffend. But with the punitive turn, parole officers began to be seen first and foremost as law enforcement personnel, whose job was not to aid parolees, but to enforce discipline and punish infractions. They started to be trained with corrections officers; in the 80s they also began to be armed.
Lists of conditions for revocation of parole got longer and longer: parolees are often barred from using alcohol even when they did not commit an alcohol-related crime, they are drug-tested even when they did not commit drug offenses, they are not allowed to associate with “felons” even though they may have family members who were also incarcerated. Parole in many cases became a way to reincarcerate people rather than reintegrate them. In 2017, a quarter of prison admissions were parole revocations. In 2025, 42% of admissions were due to revocations of parole or probation.
Parole and abolition
Again, reduction in parole has been linked to the rise and victory of mass incarceration. From an abolitionist perspective, however, parole has always been a mixed blessing. Research suggests that prison sentences have actually been longer in states with discretionary parole than in states without it.
Parole has also always been used in part to manage overcrowding, which means that it functions to expand the number of people who can be supervised and subjected to carceral discipline. Without parole, the number of people surveilled and controlled is at least somewhat restricted by prison capacity. With parole, there are no such limits.
Historically, then, parole has functioned like many prison reforms, promising in theory to provide a more humane system, while in practice often (though not always) extending the reach and power of carceral systems. Advocates should evaluate parole and its implementation with care.
Prose
Zarefah Baroud interviewed Palestinian women formerly incarcerated in Israel’s Damon Prison about how they nurtured solidarity and resistance even under prison conditions that became significantly more oppressive following October 7, 2023.
This is a fascinating interview with Lebanese archivist and filmmaker Adeeb Farhat about his life-long work collecting and exhibiting artifacts from Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon and from subsequent periods, including the ongoing Israeli war there.
Another unmissable interview, this one from Amna A. Akbar talking in Jewish Currents to Silky Shah about the next steps of the fight against Trump’s detention and deportation acceleration. Shah speaks to how this fight maps on to the larger struggle against prisons and policing.
A harrowing report by Sam Hsiaomei Lee on what it’s like to be incarcerated inside Newark’s Delaney Hall immigration detention center.
Please read “Liberation Day at the Tombs,” an incredible work of speculative fiction by Suzy Subways that is part of Project 2052. I was transfixed.
Shereen Yousuf writes about her time visiting with the members of the Muslim community at Statesville Prison in Illinois before the prison’s closure, and about the role of religion in general and Islam in particular in abolitionist movements and practice. In Critical Resistance’s The Abolitionist newspaper.
I appreciate Inquest publishing this manifesto of an excerpt from the excellent How to End Family Policing: From Outrage to Action, edited by Erin Miles Cloud, Erica R. Meiners, Shannon Perez-Darby, and C. Hope Tolliver.
Read Akin Olla of Convergence Magazine in conversation with Nailah Summers-Polite, the co-executive director of Dream Defenders, about the challenges of organizing young Black people in Florida in this historical moment.
This excerpt from John Washington’s book How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention offers a clear and thorough history of how the US immigrant detention system took on its current brutal form. Which is necessary information as we fight to dismantle that system. You can buy the book here or request it from the library.
I appreciate this reported essay by Colin Hanner on what the preservation and use of one former prison site—Old Joliet Prison outside Chicago—has looked like and meant.
Inquest celebrates the release of a new anthology of writings by Martin Sostre—edited by my comrade Garrett Felber—by publishing a 1976 speech of Sostre’s alongside a brief contextualizing essay by Felber. You can buy the book here or request it from your local library.
I love Sarah Thankam Mathews’s N+1 essay about her experiences getting to know NYC’s neo-Luddite scene.
Podcast
WBEZ’s Prisoncast! is a wonderful resource “made with & for people incarcerated in Illinois & their loved ones.” The latest episode, reported by Shannon Heffernan, tells about an Illinois mental health prison facility with conditions so terrible, they have driven many inmates to set their cells or their own bodies on fire.
Poems
Lee Herrick’s “Courage” reminds us that “we are made of love /and therefore larger than their terror.”
Potpourri
I am pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 Stevie Wilson DIY Young Artists Residency. Under the leadership of Rachael Zafer, 14 young artists, ages 16–24, who are directly impacted by criminalization, policing, or punishment received $2,500 grants to work on creative projects. You can learn a little about each of them here.
We first launched an iteration of this program at Project NIA in 2022. Rachael coordinated that too. This year we are proud to host the DIY Artists Residency at Interrupting Criminalization.
I am so happy to say that Stevie is out of prison for this iteration of the residency and directly participated in selecting the artists. Other wonderful people with lived experience of criminalization were also part of the selection committee. Thanks to Rachael and the selection committee.
I want to also thank the Mellon Foundation for funding this project. I am happy to say that we will do one more round in 2027.
In anticipation of One Million Experiments’ new zine, Noisemaking, Eva Nagao has put together a gorgeous annotated playlist of “early noisemaking in song form.”
The Assata Shakur Archives are a new project “dedicated to gathering, preserving, curating and sharing the digital and physical archives of activist, artist, mother, grandmother, poet, writer, revolutionary freedom fighter Assata Shakur. We are creating a living memorial to document the life of Assata Shakur with the aim of remembering and preserving her legacy—and our own.”
Through August 15, you can see Evidence of Becoming, a free exhibition in Brooklyn by the artists of Assembly, an organization and community founded in 2016 as an inroad to art for system-impacted young adults.
This is a wonderful know your rights comic from NYC Public Schools about what to do in encounters with federal immigration police.
How to Protect Your Community from Incarceration and Detention: An Everyday Guide to Freedom is a rich resource from FWD.us. They say, “We’re lifting the tactics and technologies ordinary people have created to protect each other from incarceration in all its forms (jails, prisons, and detention centers). We hope that these stories spark your sense of what’s possible and remind us that waiting for a bill or a court decision to save us is leaving too much freedom on the table.”
It’s so wonderful that a resource as useful as Reading Black Reconstruction Today—edited by Yousuf al-Bulushi, Geo Maher, and Damien N. Sojoyner—is available in a free, open access e-edition.
I adore Current Editions’ Class Set Prints. Buy some for the educators in your lives and read about the origins of the series here.
This open-access Black Teacher Archive is such a gift to researchers and to anyone who wants to better understand US educational history.
I enjoyed the BBC’s World Cup closing montage.
Watching these talented small people is such a delight.
Cool Library Thing of the Month
The staff of the NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture put together a centennial playlist of Black music from around the world to celebrate the center’s 100th anniversary: Soundtrack to 100 Years. .
Absolutely brilliant. Well done.