The Facts of Life
This short book is all about the lost opportunity of men sentenced to life in prison. For these men, the only way out is to die in prison, which I call “toe tag parole.” The option of commutation is a possibility, except that it rarely occurs in Pennsylvania. Why are commutations so rare? While some state legislatures constrained or eliminated parole in the 1990s, in most states, the parole board still has enormous power to offer second chances to incarcerated people. But most parole boards—including for many years, Pennsylvania’s and Connecticut’s—have refused to do so. As the criminal justice scholars Kevin R. Reitz and Edward E. Rhine note, parole board members are risk-averse political a