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In 1870, parole emerged as a progressive-era reform to a growing problem. Disillusioned with the spectacle of punishment, parole would return lawbreakers to full citizenship once they could prove they had changed. Their logic was simple. How could a judge at trial know a person’s capacity for change? If prisons were meant to rehabilitate those inside, shouldn’t someone else decide when they had ultimately reformed? The idea of parole systems spread across the country, and penitentiaries rebranded themselves as correctional facilities in tune. But nearly a hundred years later, protesters inside and outside prisons would decry the parole board decisions as inconsistent, unjust, and beyond reform.
In Correction, Chicago journalist Ben Austen charts the history of parole in the United States—how reformers pushed it forward as a compassionate and rehabilitative, how people in prisons would come to revolt against it for being systematically unfair, and how tough-on-crime politicians effectively did away with it. His writing follows two men—Johnnie Veal (who also goes by Khalif) and Michael Henderson—and their journeys through the criminal justice system. Both entered prison in the early 1970s, and both are part of the Illinois C-Numbers, an aging prison population sentenced to impossibly long, indeterminate sentences meant only to be ended by the Prisoner Review Board.
Telling their stories becomes a window into the rise of mass incarceration and perpetual punishment in the United States. Johnnie Veal finds himself in a dreaded “innocent prisoner’s dilemma” before his parole board. The police officer murders that he was convicted of transformed Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects, but after over fifty years behind bars, he still claims his innocence. Every time his case is reviewed, his parole board asks how he has held himself personally accountable for a crime he didn’t commit. As Henderson makes the case for his release, his board gets caught up in the sheer intensity of his original crime, so much so that they ignore how much he has changed since his actions. When he wins release halfway through the book, he faces up against all the ways citizen reentry is set up to fail.
Second chances are rare and restricted to a small subsection of our prison population. Some of the most life-altering decisions come at the whims of parole boards and politicians. In our conversation, Austen talks about how parole often devolves into a competition of storytelling, how victims and past perpetrators of violence lose out in our criminal justice system, and what we should do with parole now, which, for all its shortcomings, is too precious for people to lose.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Reema Saleh
What first inspired this project? You talked a little bit in the book about it coming out of your last book, High Risers.
Ben Austen
When High Risers came out, somebody reached out to me and said, “Hey, that guy that you wrote about in that crime from 1970, Johnnie Veal? He’s still in prison. He’s innocent of the crime, and he’s coming up for parole.” This was one of those sensational crimes that changed the trajectory of Cabrini-Green and became a cause célèbre in Chicago. I wrote extensively about it, but it had never crossed my mind that a teenager nearly 50 years later would still be sitting in a cell. So, I reached out to him, and I reached out to his lawyer.
I also drove down to Springfield to someone else’s parole hearing to see what it was all about. I was astounded and blown away. It was a storytelling contest. Who could tell a more convincing story—the crime, of victims, of rehabilitation, of innocence? Parole offered this window into not just the criminal justice system but, as a country, why we imprison people more than anywhere else.
Reema Saleh
What did the research process look like? In the book, you talk about going to parole hearings and interviewing Johnnie and Michael a hundred times.
Ben Austen
I went to parole hearings, and mostly in Illinois. We offer parole eligibility to a tiny sliver of the prison population. You had to be convicted before 1978. Even states that haven’t officially abolished parole offer it to only a small percentage. The reporting was going to parole hearings and interviewing Khalif. Then COVID hit, and it even picked up. I started following another person whose journey through the prison and parole system. I chronicle this guy, Michael Henderson. He was paroled to a halfway house on the West Side of Chicago called St. Leonard’s House. I spent a lot of time there, and I was able to report with him on his life outside of prison.
To learn everything about the history and practice of parole from across the country—that also involved other states, like California, New York, and Oklahoma, and talking to people who had been involved in the system and coming up for parole in other places, and who are parole board members, who set policy, and who wrote about this academically. I took one trip to prisons in Finland and Norway to see how prisons operate differently. There isn’t the equivalent of parole there because it’s unnecessary. In those countries, the prison system is geared towards reentry from day one. Most people are being sent back, and everything works towards not institutionalizing people like they are here.
Reema Saleh
Did you always see the book as this two-person narrative structure?
Ben Austen
The writing I love doing is about people’s stories. It’s narrative-driven and driven by people and, through them, approaching the really big ideas. Johnnie’s story came to me early, and I knew I would focus on him. But I wanted to focus on other people, too. I met Michael a month after he got out at a lawyer training to help others coming up for parole. His story also tells what happens when people make parole and the ways that somebody on parole is set up to fail. Most people don’t think of parole boards when they hear parole. They think of supervised release—somebody wearing an ankle bracelet and somebody having to check in with a parole officer. In the two-person structure, I could follow Khalif’s story from beginning to end to a parole hearing and capture this energy of what will happen to him. Then, it also switches to Michael, who, about halfway through the book, gets out and thinks about what’s the other side of the coin.
Reema Saleh
There’s a lot that surprised me about parole—I didn’t know it was restricted to such a small population.
Ben Austen
Most people don’t. There was this debate team at Statesville prison, just about an hour outside of Illinois, and they were debating bringing back parole for everyone in the prison. They brought about twenty legislators in, and after the debate, these legislators came up to them who set the laws in Illinois. And they were all like, “We had no idea there wasn’t parole.”
The idea of it is so central to our values, whether you think of them in terms of religion, or you know, a second chance, forgiveness, atonement, or even how we like to think of America—that you get a second chance. You don’t think there’s such an enormous population, such a high percentage that has no opportunity to do anything productive or get their release.
This is a book, in some ways, about mass incarceration and about that history, this fifty-year history. At the beginning of when Johnny and Michael entered prison, there were 200,000 people in prison throughout the country, in every state and the federal government. Right now, we have 200,000 people who have life sentences—the worst of the worst. That sentence should be reserved for the people we think are irredeemable or the most dangerous. The idea that we believe that 200,000 people are like that, the entire prison population fifty years ago, shows how abnormal it is. We must accept that this is not normal.
Reema Saleh
You cover a great deal of history on parole and how it’s evolved away from something with the hopes of rehabilitation, but also how many parole boards became arbitrary decision-making bodies. People wanted to do away with it because it had many shortcomings. Can you walk me through some of the history of parole?
Ben Austen
Parole started in the United States in the late nineteenth century, around 1870. This guy with the amazing name Zebulon Brockway introduces the idea in America, and it’s so commonsensical when you think about it. If we believe in correctional institutions and that one of the major functions of prisons is to correct people or rehabilitation, the idea that a judge at trial would be able to predict the future doesn’t make sense. Why not leave that up to people who will check in with that person periodically and can see who that person has become and can make a more objective decision when that person is reformed and ready to reenter society? Brockway compared the previous system to having a doctor decide on an operation before he even examined the patient. It’s so logical that it spread throughout the country. Parole became the norm. We renamed every prison in the country a correctional facility. We’re in the business of correcting people. But that wasn’t the case.
By the early 1970s, people in prison were revolting against the parole system. They think it’s racist, biased, unfair, subjective, and completely opaque. It has no checks, and they feel like they’re just being warehoused. If you’re a Black woman in prison, and you come up for parole, and you get denied—why were you being denied by these white men because they don’t see your humanity or think you’re worthy of freedom? After the Attica Prison Riot and other things, one of the chief demands was to get rid of these kinds of sentencing, get rid of parole, and replace it with flat time. We trust that more—like, “Give me a sentence of fifteen years and let me just know exactly what it is,” rather than that a parole board could keep you in prison forever. Tough-on-crime conservatives quickly took that up. They also wanted to get rid of parole for a different reason—to make sure nobody got out and got a second chance.
In a way, this spurs mass incarceration. What replaces parole is truth in sentencing, mandatory minimums, and even crazier things, like three strikes, you’re out. Those suddenly are not in the hands of either judges or parole boards but in the hands of politicians, who must set those requirements. Politicians are subjected to all kinds of craziness and pressures, and there’s no upside to being labeled soft on crime. That’s how that’s how we get to mass incarceration. Sentences become more definite and longer. More people are sent to prison for longer periods. Then, sixteen states eventually abolished parole, and so did the federal system, and tough-on-crime laws make many types of crimes ineligible for parole because this idea of freeing and giving anyone a second chance becomes an anathema. That gets us to the present, where many people in prison are saying, “We need parole. We have this aging prison population, we have people who have been through these extremely long sentences without much purpose, like give us a chance to prove our worthiness for a release.”
Reema Saleh
Seeing parole as a policy almost come full circle again is interesting.
Ben Austen
I’m a little conflicted about the message when I write about this in the book. I feel certain that we need more parole. We need more opportunities for another chance. We have hundreds of thousands of people serving extremely long sentences who should have another chance to prove their worthiness for release and have a reconsideration of their sentences. It’s a release valve when we have the largest prison population in the world when we’re incarcerating a quarter of the world’s prison population. We need to draw down those numbers, and people who commit violent crimes also need to be seen. Punishment needs to serve some purpose beyond just saying you’re gone forever.
At the same time, it doesn’t make sense to do it if there aren’t other reforms to a system that is incredibly subjective, fickle, and prone to being unjust. I hope parole will be expanded and reintroduced in many places with a whole raft of other reforms to the point where it’s unnecessary. If our prisons work towards reentry and rehabilitation, then you wouldn’t have to rely on a parole board because that’s what everyone is invested in.
Reema Saleh
Parole boards have so much discretion on how they operate. It is strange to see the gravity of the original crime being the thing that has the most sway over it when it doesn’t influence their likeliness to break the law again. Corrections is very much a story about how two people present their story before a parole board, right? It made me think about what the power of narrative is when the powers that be expect a certain narrative to give relief and release you.
Ben Austen
I love that you say that and pick that up—that sense of how you tell a story. This is like what you and I are both doing. How do you make all kinds of decisions? How do you avoid cliches or what somebody is expecting? How do you break through somebody’s preconceptions? And you’re also right—no one thinks that’s justice. If, on this day, you tell a more convincing story, if you have a speech impediment or speak a different language, or if you aren’t a good storyteller, you shouldn’t go free. That’s not justice.
On the flip side, you’re in prison for this extremely long sentence, and nobody is reconsidering you. And you have a moment in front of a body that could change that. You have a moment to talk to them and for them to ask you questions. Your humanity can be on display. People change, and you can show that. We want human beings to be seen. So much in our prison system is like, forget people. Disappear them. That’s completely tied in with race and racism in the country.
This is where parole reveals the entire criminal justice system and how it operates, in all its flaws too. And some of its potential, some of its promise. I hope also people see that there isn’t an easy answer because our system is so flawed, and we’re so far down the wrong path.
Reema Saleh
It’s amazing and terrible to see what Johnnie and Michael overcame. Prison is a very abusive environment for people, and it’s surprising to see someone inside mentor people and do all these positive things for other people despite it. There are many quotes from Michael where it’s hard for him to talk about his past crime as a different person doing it. That makes so much sense to me—how else would I characterize it? It’s such a struggle to think about how to present yourself.
Ben Austen
Even today, Michael sometimes slips into the passive voice, talking about the crime he committed. He was eighteen and drunk, and he was hanging outside a club. Some kids showed up, wanting him to buy beer for them. He wanted them to give them a tip, and when they said no, he had a gun on him. Of course, he wanted to pull that gun out. It gave him a sense of power and was exciting. The kids backed up, and he said, “The gun goes off,” not “I shot him.” That’s a way of telling a story that doesn’t feel like accepting responsibility. But it’s actually a sentence construction. He’s trying to tell what it was like to be eighteen and drunk and doing all that—what his actual state of mind was. In that story, the consequences were of the gravest kind. Another child lost his life. His family grieved forever.
But also, what should happen next is our discussion. Parole is one way to think about it and also about how it doesn’t work. That story is going to be told again and again and again, and Michael, because of parole, can revisit it and rethink it. He had to come back and retell that story year after year. But also, the most powerful story was passed down year after year from the prosecution and the trial.
We’re also making a podcast version of a piece of the book about Johnnie’s story, who goes by Khalif. It’s another way to think about storytelling, also how to tell the story and have him tell his own story. To experience this competition of stories and to wrestle with this bigger idea of what do we do? What do we even want? How do we enter changing this system?
Reema Saleh
You go through a lot of the history of the rise of the victim’s rights movement in criminal justice and its impacts. I feel like many victims of violence felt left out of the judicial process before, but also, their interests can’t factor into someone’s likelihood to commit a crime again. There’s also such a binary between who is a victim of crime and a perpetrator who has experienced violence. What should be the role of victims in these processes? Should they be in it at all?
Ben Austen
The story of the rise of the victims’ rights movements is fascinating. It started mostly with women’s rights and even domestic abuse and rape victims and people who felt doubly victimized by trying to report their crimes. Then there are these grassroots movements like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Victims of Violent Crimes to create their groups, which is both a way for people who’ve experienced the worst possible thing to find like-minded people to spend time with and make sense of something almost impossible to make sense of and then to advocate. And often, you advocate for protections in the legal process but also more punishment for the people who harmed you. This became picked up by the right and a conservative movement and became a powerful tool in pushing tough-on-crime legislation.
There is this sense of a binary, and it masks the reality that many people who commit crimes are also victims of crimes. Hurt people hurt people, which is just a truism. Much of the victims’ rights movement imagines that most of the people who are involved in it were white and often women in more affluent or suburban areas, and what does it mean, then, that the vast majority of people who are victims of crimes are people of color and in poor areas? It doesn’t think about that kind of victimhood. I don’t even mean people who are committing crimes. We’re in Chicago, and if you look at the percentage of Chicagoans who are the victims of homicide, it’s 75 to 80 percent African American. If we really have a victim’s rights movement, what do we think about that? What are those kinds of protections? What do we need to do? The Victim Rights Movement ignores that.
It’s so powerful to hear a victim impact statement. It’s so powerful to hear from somebody whose life has been altered. I’m not sure it’s justice to always go back to the original crime and not think about everything that happened since. But from going to all these parole hearings and speaking to victims, the system fails them. After years of somebody being punished, you still feel like that punishment has given you nothing of value, that you don’t feel any sense of relief, that all you have at your disposal is to press that button again, to say, “I need more punishment”—that’s a failure of the system to provide something that people need. It’s almost an argument for restorative justice, which is at least a way to get some closure and something to express something that you, as a victim, need to feel whole.
At a lot of these hearings, people would say, “My mother or my daughter or my grandfather wasn’t murdered for forty years. He was murdered forever, and therefore, this person should also have a forever punishment.” That’s not justice. It’s the feeling of something, the eye-for-an-eye feeling of vengeance, which is what’s most raw at trial at that time. If that’s still felt forty and fifty years later, we’re not providing something essential to people or even on the victim side.
Reema Saleh
With the Severin family, the relatives of one of the victims of the Cabrini-Green shooting, it was like a duty to show up at parole and do their part to deny it. There’s something almost comical about Chicago Police Department officers repeatedly showing up at Johnnie’s parole hearings, some of which were never related to it.
Ben Austen
They’re trying to live the police creed of a fallen officer is never forgotten—that memorializing is powerful. But if the system of corrections doesn’t believe in corrections, you’re undermining something else. This book is also a product of these last four years, meaning the political twists and turns of the last four years. This momentum has been going on since at least The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s book. We had reached a peak in 2009 of 1.6 million people in prison, and we had to do something about it. We’re more easily thinking about what we call nonviolent drug offenders or people whom we could wrap our minds around that we shouldn’t be imprisoning so many of them for such a long period of time.
But it felt like something was changing. People were talking about crime differently and punishment differently. Then, George Floyd happened, and in the first months after it, that felt supercharged, rethinking these institutions, rethinking these long-standing practices, and it’s in that small window that Johnnie Veal gets out. I didn’t realize that then, but that window was just briefly open. It slammed shut. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the recoil reaction of the tough-on-crime rhetoric felt like a relic of the past.
When you talk about the Severin family and some of the responses, part of this world of Donald Trump and this era where I think they felt like the world had become way too merciful and lenient—everything was changed, and police were suddenly the victims. They saw Johnnie Veal only as this thug. I remember I heard a radio show that one of the family members did where she described all his supporters as wearing gang paraphernalia at the hearing. I have pictures of them. They were wearing “free Johnnie Veal” T-shirts, but I don’t think she was lying. Her vision could only see that these, for whatever reason, Black people supporting this man who was convicted of killing a police officer—she could only see them as gang paraphernalia.
I’m not sure where we are now, but it was surprising. I’m chronicling that experience of these movements of possible change and blowback, and in the end, saying, we can’t have these little pendulum swings. We’re in a world of abnormality that we’ve normalized, so we can’t just swing back and forth from reform and then some punitive backlash, which we’ve experienced in the last two years. There must be something significant and cultural.
Reema Saleh
Going back to 2020, do you think that window has closed for good? It feels like people were really thinking about the carceral state, prisons, and things like abolition, and then, there was just as big a reaction the other way.
Ben Austen
The window of when I think Johnnie Veal could have gotten released closed. He would not have gotten out if his hearing occurred six months later. I believe that firmly, and it bears out with his codefendant’s parole hearing, which didn’t succeed afterward. We saw a huge swing back the other way. The parole board that released Johnnie Veal and another person was torn apart—they were attacked.
Do I think that’s permanent? No. We ended up passing bail reform in this state, which is a huge deal and one of the most substantive reforms of the George Floyd era. That’s real. But I think we’re also in a moment where there’s traction again for irrational talk about punishment. I mean, Donald Trump’s a presidential candidate—talk about how far we are from 2020. We are moving in a new direction where a huge portion of the populace thinks that’s okay.
Reema Saleh
What should the future of parole be? And what role should the public play?
Ben Austen
There are movements to expand parole and reinstate state parole in places where it’s been eliminated. Hundreds of thousands would get a second look, not freed indiscriminately, just a second look and reviewed to see their worthiness for release. After this era of the last thirty years of excessive punishments, that seems like a needed recourse. But it must come with other reforms. Parole boards can make arbitrary decisions and change depending on very small things that don’t feel like justice. To change it, you need to change what goes on inside prisons. There are abolitionists, obviously, but prison is also supposed to be reserved for the most serious offenses. We’re a country that says in his Declaration of Independence that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are valuable. Taking away someone’s liberty is such a huge deal. There are all kinds of ways to hold people accountable before prison. We must get back to that, too.
Reema Saleh
It’s interesting to hear people talk about restorative justice. I think there’s a way sometimes criminal justice reform looks away from the problem of violence by focusing on drug sentencing or nonviolent offenses. It almost ignores bigger questions, like what do we do about violence and how it affects people?
Ben Austen
I mean, that’s the Obama administration era. He would talk about as a reformer at that moment—we could focus on releasing nonviolent offenders to focus our energies on the real criminals, the violent offenders. Still, he would never change the prison system in any fast way. The majority of people are there for violent offenses. We must consider their reform and rehabilitation, the people they harmed, and how to help them. Prison for long periods creates so much other residual damage to communities and families that creates more crime and makes us less safe. It’s easy for us to keep pressing the button of saying tougher on crime will do something, but mostly, it’s doing the wrong things.
Reema Saleh
What have Johnnie and Michael thought about your writing? Or having their stories out there?
Ben Austen
When you’re out on parole, a part of you wants to have a low profile and not be seen because there are so many pitfalls and to bring the attention of the tough-on-crime people and the police. In Khalif’s case, he’s still scared of that. Others have controlled you for so long that you feel like that could still happen. At the same time, you’re driven by a sense of wanting justice for more people and wanting to change the system. They’ve said it outweighs any sense of wanting to disappear and not be seen to try to change what happened. And Khalif said this to me throughout the process—it was like a legacy. He worried he would never get out and wanted to leave a legacy. A deeper, more humanistic, fuller picture of who he is, with an honest investigation of what happened.
NONFICTION
Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change
By Ben Austen
Flatiron Books
Published November 7, 2023
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