What The Hell America!

Calvin Alexander thought he had done everything the Louisiana parole board asked of him to earn an early release from prison.

He had taken anger management classes, learned a trade and enrolled in drug treatment. And as his September hearing before the board approached, his disciplinary record was clean.

Alexander, more than midway through a 20-year prison sentence on drug charges, was making preparations for what he hoped would be his new life. His daughter, with whom he had only recently become acquainted, had even made up a room for him in her New Orleans home.

Then, two months before the hearing date, prison officials sent Alexander a letter informing him he was no longer eligible for parole.

A computerized scoring system adopted by the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections had deemed the nearly blind 70-year-old, who uses a wheelchair, a moderate risk of reoffending, should he be released. And under a new law, that meant he and thousands of other prisoners with moderate or high risk ratings cannot plead their cases before the board. According to the department of corrections, about 13,000 people — nearly half the state’s prison population — have such risk ratings, although not all of them are eligible for parole.

Alexander said he felt “betrayed” upon learning his hearing had been canceled. “People in jail have … lost hope in being able to do anything to reduce their time,” he said.

The law that changed Alexander’s prospects is part of a series of legislation passed by Louisiana Republicans last year reflecting Gov. Jeff Landry’s tough-on-crime agenda to make it more difficult for prisoners to be released.

While campaigning for governor, Landry, a former police officer and sheriff’s deputy who served as Louisiana attorney general until 2024, championed a crackdown on rewarding well-behaved prisoners with parole. Landry said early release, which until now has been typically assumed when judges hand down sentences, is a slap in the face to crime victims.

“The revolving door is insulting,” Landry told state lawmakers last year as he kicked off a special legislative session on crime during which he blamed the state’s high violent crime rate on lenient sentences and “misguided post-conviction programs” that fail to rehabilitate prisoners. (In fact, Louisiana’s recidivism rate has declined over the past decade, according to a 2024 department of corrections report.)

The Legislature eliminated parole for nearly everyone imprisoned for crimes committed after Aug. 1, making Louisiana the 17th state in a half-century to abolish parole altogether and the first in 24 years to do so. For the vast majority of prisoners who were already behind bars, like Alexander, another law put an algorithm in charge of determining whether they have a shot at early release; only prisoners rated low risk qualify for parole.

That decision makes Louisiana the only state to use risk scores to automatically rule out large portions of a prison population from being considered for parole, according to seven national criminal justice experts.

That was not how the tool, known as TIGER, an acronym for Targeted Interventions to Greater Enhance Re-entry, was intended to be used. Developed as a rehabilitative measure about a decade ago, it was supposed to help prison officials determine what types of classes or counseling someone might need to prevent them from landing back behind bars — not be used as a punitive tool to keep them there, said one of its creators.

Criminal justice advocates and civil rights attorneys say the new law could disproportionately harm Black people like Alexander in part because the algorithm measures factors such as criminal history where racial disparities already exist. The law’s opponents also contend that the unique step Louisiana has taken to curtail parole is deeply problematic — and potentially unconstitutional — because it does not take into account the efforts of prisoners to better themselves while incarcerated.

“They deserve that opportunity to show they’ve changed,” said Pearl Wise, who was appointed to the parole board by Landry’s Democratic predecessor and served from 2016 until 2023. “You demonstrate over time the changes that you made and that you are not the person that was sentenced on that day.”

An Immutable Risk Score

Alexander is like thousands of prisoners who have previously appeared before the board — repeat offenders accused of nonviolent crimes, often mired in addiction with limited education or learning disabilities. Alexander can’t read or write, having dropped out of school as a fourth grader in the early 1960s. He needed to help support his family in deeply segregated Mississippi and turned to selling crack cocaine as a child. That period was also the start of his own lifelong struggle with narcotics that resulted in multiple arrests and extended stints in prison.

The department of corrections would not allow an in-person or phone interview with Alexander. Instead, Verite News and ProPublica mailed Alexander written questions, which a fellow inmate read to him and then wrote down his responses. Alexander admitted he was reckless in his youth and that he had violated his parole — related to a 1994 drug possession conviction — by drinking and staying out after curfew. That mistake would prove devastating three decades later because a prisoner’s history of parole violations plays a significant role in their TIGER risk score.

Louisiana’s TIGER scoring system was born out of a 2014 federal initiative to help states reduce their prison populations. The risk assessment tool, developed by the state department of corrections and Louisiana State University researchers using a $1.75 million federal grant, was meant to “treat criminal thinking,” said Keith Nordyke, one of the creators of TIGER. For populations with the highest risk of reoffending, he said, the prison would flood them with services — addiction counseling, therapy, job training — to help keep them out of trouble once they were freed.

“The whole purpose of this was to slow down the revolving door,” Nordyke said.

Louisiana corrections officials started using the TIGER scores as part of the parole determination process in 2018, but it was only in 2024 that they became the sole measure of parole eligibility.

Similar algorithms are used throughout the country in the parole decision-making process, but legal scholars say the way such risk tools calculate a person’s odds of reoffending is among the reasons why no other state exclusively uses them to bar individuals from parole. While algorithms like TIGER can predict on a group level that 40 out of 100 people will reoffend upon their release, they can’t pinpoint exactly who those 40 people will be, according to experts.

The Louisiana department of corrections declined multiple interview requests and did not respond to questions about the state’s use of the risk tool.

The reliance on a TIGER score to potentially block a prisoner’s bid for freedom is especially concerning, experts on risk assessment tools say, because most of the factors considered by the algorithm — the crimes they committed, work history, age at first arrest, whether they had any marijuana-related convictions, prior parole revocations — are from a prisoner’s past, which cannot be changed; they do not include anything related to what people have done in prison to rehabilitate themselves.

Criminal justice scholars say that when scores based on immutable facts are weighted so heavily in parole decisions, prisoners from impoverished, racially segregated communities are more likely to be hurt.

Take the algorithm’s use of prior employment data: People raised in low-income communities do not have the same work opportunities as those brought up in more affluent neighborhoods, said Megan Stevenson, an economist and criminal justice professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Using such an algorithm to determine someone’s chances of parole, she said, “suggests that poor people should be less eligible for parole than wealthier people.”

Factoring in prior drug convictions, too, is more likely to impact Black prisoners, Stevenson said. Black people use illegal drugs at roughly the same rate as white people, but are arrested and convicted for it in greater numbers because their neighborhoods are more heavily policed, she said.

In using these data points to produce a risk score, “you’re going to create a biased algorithm to make biased decisions,” Stevenson said.

Already, Black people account for nearly two-thirds of Louisiana’s prison population, more than double their share of the state population.

The Landry administration did not respond to requests for comment regarding potential racial biases in the way the TIGER scores are used for parole.

Louisiana’s legislation might also violate the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits laws that retroactively increase the severity of a person’s criminal sentence, according to several legal scholars. Tying parole eligibility to a computerized risk score that can’t be lowered by an inmate through good behavior or other actions appears to do just that since the opportunity for parole has traditionally been considered part of a sentence, said Sonja Starr, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

Some former Louisiana parole board members also bristled at the idea of an algorithm superseding human judgment.

“It doesn’t make much sense to me that a score generated by a process that the inmate has no control over takes away the authority and the power of the parole board,” said Keith Jones, who was appointed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards and served on the board from 2018 to 2020. “Why have a parole board?”

Jones and two other former parole board members said the introduction of the TIGER tool as part of parole determination wasn’t in itself a bad thing, as long as it remained just one factor to be considered among many.

Although some board members did refuse to parole anyone with a moderate or high risk score before the law took effect, the state’s parole board had much more discretion in determining when a prisoner was released, former board members said.

Tony Marabella, a former East Baton Rouge criminal court judge who served on the parole board until last year, said he had placed greater emphasis on a prisoner’s disciplinary record and completion of self-improvement programs. He also took into account whether the warden or victims supported their release when deciding whether to grant parole.

“If someone was a moderate risk, I wasn’t going to throw them out,” said Marabella, who served on the board for four years under Edwards. “I was more concerned about what they had accomplished.”

That’s exactly what Alonzo Allen was able to show.

In 2021, three years before the new law went into effect, Allen succeeded in convincing the parole board that he was worthy of release — despite having the same TIGER score and a similar criminal history as Alexander.

Allen had been sentenced to 40 years behind bars in 2012 on multiple drug charges and carrying a gun. While in prison, he was written up for possessing contraband, including a pencil sharpener and $2 worth of sugar, and he previously had his parole revoked twice, according to Allen and the parole board.

As a result, he was marked a moderate risk.

During Allen’s parole hearing, Jerry Goodwin, then warden at the David Wade Correctional Center in Homer, where Allen was being held, lauded Allen for his tireless work overcoming his drug addictions and improving his communication skills. Goodwin noted that Allen took classes even when he knew he had reached his limit for “good time” credits, time shaved off a sentence for good behavior.

“He’s worked hard for this opportunity,” Goodwin told the parole board, “and I think he’s really got his best foot forward.”

Alvin Roche’ Jr., then a member of the parole board, questioned the accuracy of Allen’s TIGER score. “Is it possible that this instrument might be wrong?” Roche’ asked during Allen’s hearing. “You think you are rehabilitated to the point where you can prove that assessment wrong?”

“Yes, sir, very much, sir,” Allen responded. “I do think that is wrong.”

The board unanimously voted to parole Allen.

Speaking by telephone from his home in Mansfield, just south of Shreveport, Allen, 61, said he was grateful for the second chance. He’s stayed sober, works full time as a truck driver and has not violated the terms of his parole in the nearly four years since his release.

“God has been good,” he said.

Steeply Declining Parole Hearings

Lawmakers who supported Louisiana’s push to place strict limits on parole have maintained that relying on the algorithm over human judgment was the most efficient way to clear a backlog of parole applications.

State Sen. Patrick McMath, R-Covington, the bill’s author, claimed during a Senate committee hearing in February 2024 that so many unrealistic parole petitions were coming before the board that prisoners most deserving of early release were not being prioritized.

“What I’m really trying to do here is make the system run more efficiently and effectively,” McMath said.

But data from the parole board doesn’t support his assertion. According to the parole board’s annual reports, the number of cases heard by the board actually dropped by 40% between 2016 and 2023.

Prison reform advocates and civil rights attorneys say McMath’s bill was never anything more than a Trojan horse designed to kill parole, given the law’s other requirements that make parole substantially harder to achieve, including a unanimous board vote before parole is granted and an increase in the number of years prisoners must maintain clean disciplinary records.

McMath declined to be interviewed and did not answer questions concerning the impact of his legislation.

Landry, who signed the legislation into law in March 2024, appointed five new people to the seven-member board. None of the seven were permitted to comment about the use of TIGER to deny prisoners parole, according to Francis M. Abbott, executive director of the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole, citing board policy. Instead, he provided a statement from board chair Sheryl Ranatza: “We believe Governor Landry’s reforms passed in the special crime session will enhance public safety.”

The average number of people paroled in Louisiana has already dropped from 32 per month in 2023 to six per month since the law went into effect in August, according to Department of Corrections data. And at least 70 parole hearings, including Alexander’s, were canceled between Aug. 1 and Dec. 13 because of the prisoner’s risk score, according to the parole board.

Opponents of the bill predict the new restrictions on parole will swell the state’s prison population, costing taxpayers billions of dollars to build new corrections facilities and leading to more violence behind bars as inmates have fewer incentives to behave.

For Alexander, that means he will not have the same opportunity Allen did to show the parole board that he had heeded their advice to improve himself.

With his health rapidly deteriorating, his family fears he will not live to see the end of his sentence in five years. “He’s got one eye. He’s diabetic. He’s got poor circulation,” said Alexander’s daughter, Sabrina Brown. “I don’t want to have to go to a funeral for him.”

Instead of moving into Brown’s New Orleans home as planned, Alexander will be able to see his daughter only when she makes the 85-mile trek north to the Rayburn Correctional Center.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, he said.

“They told me once I received my risk score there is nothing I can do to change it,” Alexander said. “It’s like walking into a brick wall.”