Legislation supporting parole reform in New York State is gaining momentum, signaling good news for advocates who are seeking to reduce deaths through releasing incarcerated people before their maximum sentence if they can demonstrate their rehabilitation. As the Amsterdam News reported recently, 2026 marks the deadliest start in Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) facilities in the past six years and how some advocates are fighting to ensure recent oversight laws are enacted. Other organizers, however, want a new set of bills passed to reduce the prison population.
Recently, one bill, the Fair & Timely Parole Act, advanced past the New York State Senate Committee on Crime Victims, Crime, and Correction and will now go through the finance committee before it can hit the floor.
“Our legislators are really slow-walking stuff,” said Jose Saldana, campaign director for Release Aging People in Prison. “I know this is [an] election year, but that doesn’t mean that necessary legislation doesn’t get passed. There’s a crisis in the prison system and people are really feeling despair and hopelessness.”
The Fair & Timely Parole Act would mandate the parole board to adhere to “its original purpose” of gauging someone’s readiness to return to society, rather than centering an evaluation on their original conviction.
“When I was on the Parole Board, I had the opportunity to meet many people who had transformed their lives and deserved the respect of a parole system that recognizes who they had become,” said former NYS Parole Board Commissioner Carol Shapiro in a statement. “That is the fundamental purpose of parole: to promote rehabilitation and evaluate people’s current readiness for release. It was never intended as an added layer of punishment.
“Sadly, the way it operates now leaves little hope for countless people who have done everything imaginable to make amends and prepare for their release, because commissioners so often deny people based on the one thing they cannot change; namely, their crime of conviction.”
The advocates also back the Elderly Parole bill, which helps older incarcerated New Yorkers — who make up a substantial portion of people who die in prison, particularly from natural causes — get in front of a parole board for a potential pathway to release.