BILL NUMBER: S5078
SPONSOR: SEPULVEDA
 
TITLE OF BILL:
An act to amend the executive law, in relation to reporting voting rates
for parole commissioners
 
PURPOSE:
This bill requires the board of parole to report each parole commission-
er's release rate annually.
 
SUMMARY OF PROVISIONS:
Section 1 amends Executive Law § 259-c (13). Section 2 establishes an
effective date.
 
JUSTIFICATION:
In an effort to make the parole process more transparent, we passed a
law in 2018 saying that the board must track the demographics of people
appearing before it and report such demographic data to the legislature,
with release rates for each demographic group. This bill is an addendum
to the new law, asking the board to also inform the legislature of each
parole commissioner's release rate. The board used to track such infor-
mation, but it stopped doing so within the last few years. While release
rates tend to vary by facility for a number of reasons (e.g. almost
everyone should be released from shock facilities, thereby driving up
the release rates of commissioners who routinely sit on those boards),
commissioners should have roughly similar rates of release for similarly
situated prisoners if the process is objective. If the process is not
objective, we should reevaluate our parole statutes.
 
LEGISLATIVE HISTORY:
S.3314 of 2023-2024: Referred to Crime Victims, Crime and Correction;
S. 2795 of 2021-22: Committed to Crime Victims, Crime, and Correction;
S. 4953 of 2019-20: Committed to Rules, Advanced to Third Reading
 
FISCAL IMPLICATIONS:
None.
 
EFFECTIVE DATE:
This act shall take effect immediately.

Statutes affected:
S5078: 259-c executive law, 259-c(13) executive law