At the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City, at least 91 people had been waiting for March 1 to roll around. On that date, most aspects of New York state’s new parole reform law went into full effect, and those who had been held on warrants issued by the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), which runs the state’s parole system, were expecting a shot at freedom.
Among other provisions, the new law, known as the Less Is More Act, makes it significantly more difficult for DOCCS to jail people after they commit certain parole violations, and it mandates a hearing within 24 hours to give people whom the parole agency has ordered jailed a chance to argue for their release.
But March 1 came and went, and the 91 people–as well as dozens or hundreds more across the state–remain in jail. According to DOCCS, because they were jailed on alleged parole violations before that date, they aren’t grandfathered into Less Is More’s protections, so the department didn’t go about releasing them.
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Judges weighing in on this debate have come to varied conclusions. In one decision in December, a Bronx judge characterized DOCCS’s interpretation as “no more than an adherence to a scrivener’s numerical error,” and thus ordered the person who brought the lawsuit, who was jailed on a technical violation, released. But the following month, a judge in Binghamton wrote that he “disagrees with that analysis,” and concluded that, if the legislature wanted “sweeping, substantive changes” to parole law to take effect immediately, it would have asserted it more clearly than by a perplexing reference to one subparagraph.
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lennyesq 