Parole 101
Parole Board Chairman Terry Barnard guest lectured at Georgia State University in February. Associate Professor Eric Sevigny, Dept. of Criminal Justice & Criminology, invited Barnard to speak to his Criminal Justice Policy Analysis class. Chairman Barnard and staff informed the students about Georgia's effective and efficient parole process.
"My students are learning about how criminal justice policy is made and ultimately evaluated. I believe the students got a lot out of learning the nuts and bolts of Georgia's parole process. Chairman Barnard and his staff did a good job relating their information to our material," Sevigny said.
"This was an opportunity to inform the students about Georgia's scientific, data driven parole process and how it produces evidence based and informed parole decisions, keeping Georgians safe," stated Barnard. "It was an opportunity to help the students see that parole board decisions are not arbitrary, but are guided by a scientific, data driven approach using evidence based information designed with public safety in the forefront," added Barnard.
Executive Director of Parole Chris Barnett and Deputy Director of Clemency Scott Reaves assisted Chairman Barnard.
Photos; on campus of Georgia State University
The Guidelines System accounts for the severity of the crime and the offender's risk to reoffend. The offender's risk to reoffend is determined by weighted factors concerning the offender's criminal and social history that the Board has found to have value in predicting the probability of further criminal behavior.
While state law requires the Board to adopt and use guidelines in the parole decision making process, Georgia’s parole decision making guidelines are advisory in nature. Though advisory, the Board’s confidence in its guidelines is demonstrated in the members’ 82% compliance ratio when voting cases for Fiscal Year 2016.
A vast majority of states use guidelines as a tool in decision making for a variety of reasons to include structure in decision making, to assure proportionality in terms of incarceration, to minimize sentence disparity and promote sentence uniformity, and to help aid in the predictability and outcomes of plea bargains.
The Board has the discretion to deviate from the recommendation to either increase or lower the time to serve prior to parole or vote to deny parole.
Updates to the guidelines included raising the crime severity level of certain conviction types. The higher the crime severity level, the more serious the offense and the likely result is a recommendation to serve a longer period of time. On the risk to reoffend scale, the Board will now include prior arrest episodes in place of conviction history for the offender, which through research has proven to be a better statistical predictor of future criminal behavior.
The Board partnered with Applied Research Services (ARS), Inc., to update the guidelines. ARS used statistical data from more than 26,000 Georgia parole cases to recommend updates to the guidelines.
For a review of the changes adopted by the Board go to https://tinyurl.com/koc2ttr.
Guidelines
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Georgia Parole Review