Cover is half white, half red with black type. It shows two silhouetted figures with long shadows, one standing in the white and the other in the red.
Credit: Courtesy Flatiron Books

Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, opened its doors in 1829. Often considered the world’s first true penitentiary, its hallmark six-spoked, wheel-shaped design radiates outward from a central tower, where guards could keep watch over some 500 prisoners. The prison’s creators believed that, through penitence and solitude (now widely considered a form of torture), people would reflect on their moral failings and could thus be rehabilitated.

Eastern State’s creation was a departure from the historical concept of prisons, which existed to perpetuate forced labor and physical punishment (though both are still fundamental to prisons today). It sparked a conversation: How do we hold others accountable? What purpose does incarceration serve? Who deserves to be free?

These same questions are at the heart of Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change, a forthcoming book from Chicago journalist Ben Austen, due out this November from Flatiron Books. Through vignettes of two men incarcerated in Illinois, interspersed with detailed historical analysis, Austen pulls back the curtain on parole, which he views as central to understanding both justice and the crisis of mass incarceration.

Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change by Ben Austen
Flatiron Books, hardcover, $29.99, 336 pp., us.macmillan.com

In the two centuries since Eastern State opened its gates, the U.S. has become the global leader in incarceration. In 1880, just under 31,000 people were in prison. Today, there are nearly 1.2 million people incarcerated, in addition to 850,000 people on parole, under vague promises of public safety or retribution or old-fashioned vengeance. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, that hasn’t stopped harm or violence. In fact, the prison population continued to grow even as the rate of crime remained steady.

If prisons don’t make us safer, what purpose do they serve? Even now, Austen notes, there is no consensus on what constitutes retribution or atonement. For perhaps the first time ever, calls to abolish prisons and police are finding footing in mainstream dialogue. As communities across the nation grapple with very real questions about harm and accountability, Austen presents parole as a salient site of study, “an extraordinary pivot point in the country’s shifting conceptions of justice.”

Parole is unique within the legal system in that it’s one of the only avenues to consider who a person is today after three, four, five decades behind bars. Parole hearings, though opaque and riddled with injustice, are venues to challenge entrenched ideas around crime and consequence. “Parole presupposes that change—a correction—is possible,” Austen writes. Through the lens of parole, Correction traces the rise of mass incarceration and presents possibilities for a way out.

The Reader spoke with Austen ahead of the book’s launch. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The author stands outdoors and looks at the camera. He wears a lavender plaid shirt and has short brown hair. The background is out of focus.
Ben Austen
Courtesy Flatiron Books

Shawn Mulcahy: What first interested you about parole?

Ben Austen: I’d finished writing [High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing] and Ted Pearson [of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression] reached out to me. He said, “You wrote about Johnny Veal in the book. He’s innocent.” 

It was interesting to me. But, I gotta say, I don’t do that kind of work. Those kinds of injustices are important and terrible. But it’s individual, rather than structural. And then Ted said, “Yeah, and he’s coming up for parole.” And I thought, “Huh. Certainly I know about parole. But do I really know about it?”

So, I decided to go to a parole hearing. And you go into this tiny room. There are no other reporters. There are four or five guests, and there are 12 or 14 people sitting around a table. And they’re just regular-ass people who are making decisions of the greatest consequence: Does a prison term end? Is this person ready to go out?

The first hearing I went to, it was “denied,” “denied,” “denied,” “denied.” And then there was this one case. People were re-creating the crime from so long ago—it’s so visceral when you talk about the crime. Finally, someone says, “He said he didn’t do it. And we let out his rappy [codefendant] seven years ago. He had said he didn’t do it, but then he admitted to it and we let him out.” 

Somebody speaks up and says, “Can I suggest something? Maybe his rappy took the advice to just say you’re guilty, because then you’ll have a chance to leave.” And you hear this collective sigh, and then they voted to let him out. 

To be there for that, seeing a life altered, seeing history happen, I was emotionally and narratively hooked. I’d been thinking so much about prisons, and was already teaching at Stateville [Correctional Center], and asking myself, “How do we talk about what we’re doing?” There’s this vast injustice that we’re all living with. And I thought, “This is that pathway.”

You talk in your book about how prisons are purposely opaque. We as society are generally aware of their existence, but not what goes on inside them. That makes it easier to degrade and dehumanize the people incarcerated in them. Do you see parole as a mechanism to combat that?

If you have a long prison term, you only have parole or clemency. It’s a result of 50 years of law and policy. People have incredibly long sentences without much point to them. They’re now middle-aged or older and are now completely different people. [Parole] is a pathway to be seen and heard. To tell your story and be evaluated as a real person decades—a lifetime—after whatever happened. 

Is it the antidote to all those harmful policies? Probably not. The real goal is not to make more parole but to make it unnecessary. 

So much of the rhetoric even post-2009, when we reached the peak of mass incarceration, is about “nonviolent offenders” or “nonviolent drug offenders”—people that we could live with so we could focus on the “real criminals.” That’s not the conversation to have at this point. We need to have a harder conversation about our values. What do we believe? If we say what prison is supposed to do, how long does it take to do that? 

Many states abolished parole because the process was rife with inequity. Are you concerned that, if we reinstate parole, many of those same failures will repeat themselves?

I wrote about what happened in the 1970s, where after the Attica [prison uprising] and others, there was this moment of total opportunity. Suddenly people in prison were being seen like never before, and the country was having a conversation about these huge structural issues. It permeated the entire culture. Even [President Richard] Nixon talked about closing prisons. And what happened is this judo move, and suddenly it’s the exact opposite. 

So now I’m in that parole hearing and, even in the [President Donald] Trump era, there’s a different conversation happening. The most conservative people on the board, the “tough-on-crime” sheriffs and others are talking about leniency and really looking at people who have committed violent crimes and having conversations. And then George Floyd happens. There’s this opportunity, this opening, and I’m writing in this moment where it feels like change is really possible. It felt powerful. And then to experience this retrenchment with such speed. The same rhetoric, disproved by 50 years of fact, can have traction. You can get away with that. There’s no real political cost.

So I say all that to say: Am I worried that you can make something and it would be worse? Fuck yeah. We just saw it. But I also think the attack is on every form of release from prison. It’s not rational, it’s emotional. It’s about fear.

Definitely. And I think it also plays into this binary view of crime. We’re conditioned to think of people as either victims or perpetrators, but we know that harm is cyclical. But there’s no room for that in the legal system.

The whole Victims’ Rights movement, which I write about in the book, was fascinating. But to think about how illogical it is in the sense of who we think of as victims and how there’s an origin to that. You can trace it as a political movement from the grassroots people who’ve suffered to Republicans taking that over and funding it. You could look at the numbers. Who are the vast majority of victims? They’re not the people creating these organizations. 

All this talk about [being] “tough on crime” isn’t even about protecting the people who are victimized. In Chicago, most victims of homicide and sexual assault are in the Black community. It’s such a racialized and dishonest conversation. Even going through all these [victims’ rights] laws, like Megan’s Law, every single one of them is named for a white person.

Has the U.S. always led the world in incarceration?

We’ve always been worse. But something happened starting in 1973 that was different even from our own history. In the 19th century, we still had slavery. And for most of the 20th century, [incarceration] rates were relatively stable. And then they went up massively. It’s connected to the movement for civil rights—and a response to it.

Sometimes I vacillate whether this is hopeful or despairing. If this is a new phenomenon, does that mean it could change? It was created and built up. Could it be built back down? Or is it another way to get at the same part of our violent, racist history? It turns out prisons were a way to [continue] doing what we were doing in other ways before.

Have you seen these 51 women?

If there wasn’t a serial killer who picked off dozens of victims without detection for decades, then the city was broken in a way that gave off the illusion of one.

by Ben Austen