Sen. Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville, speaks with another member of the Joint Prison Oversight Committee during a meeting on Wednesday, May, 28, 2025. (Ralph Chapoco/Alabama Reflector)
Legislators at a meeting of the state’s Joint Prison Oversight Committee Wednesday expressed mixed feelings about proposed parole guideline changes from the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles earlier this month.
But lawmakers said they believed the committee’s discussion of the issue brought the Legislature’s attention to it and eventually compelled the parole board to produce the guidelines.
“What I want to say is that you are being heard,” said. Sen. Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville, the chair of the Joint Prison Oversight Committee. “Does that mean we change everything overnight? No, but you are being heard.”
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Since 2023, the Joint Prison Oversight Committee has hosted public hearings that had regularly been attended by friends and family with loved ones incarcerated with the Alabama Department of Corrections.
Members of the public described brutality in the state prisons as well as parole board rejection of applicants.
Legislators from both parties have grown increasingly frustrated with the Board’s delay in delivering new parole guidelines, which were due in 2022, as well as its deviation from existing guidelines in making parole decisions. Last October, lawmakers from the Joint Prison Oversight Committee peppered Leigh Gwathney, chair of the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, with questions regarding the parole rates and the rationale for some of the decisions made by the parole board.
Legislators became increasingly frustrated with her as she hesitated at answering their questions, oftentimes giving long-winded answers without a direct response.
Near the end of the 2025 session, Chambliss amended the state’s General Fund budget to make funding for the parole board contingent on producing the guidelines. Several days later, the parole board published a proposed update to the guidelines.
The proposed changes would use a point-based system like the current guidelines, with more points making parole denial more likely. But the revisions would add weight to the severity of the offense and place more emphasis on an applicant’s behavior closer to the date of the parole hearing by assigning points for any disciplinary infractions, violent or nonviolent, that occurred within the past 12 months of the hearing date.
Lawmakers on the committee offered a range of reactions to the proposed updates. Some wanted additional time to review and evaluate the updated version before forming an opinion.
“I am a little bit behind them on the curve of knowing and understanding what it means, because of their background in the legal world,” Chambliss said in an interview following the meeting with the media.
He referred to others on the committee who offered their opinions on the guidelines.
“Having done some of this for a living, they understand it quicker than I do. It takes me a little bit longer to figure out where they are headed,” he said. “I am in the process of doing that and look forward to understanding it better before I answer that fully.”
Others offered praise for the parole board.
“I think the parole board is taking the step to try and put the guidelines into a place where they accurately reflect the individuals before them,” said Rep. Matt Simpson, R-Daphne, in an interview after the meeting. “Not everyone should get out. It is not the intent for everyone to be released early, and the parole board is doing what they can to make sure that the people who are supposed to stay in, stay in, and that those numbers are reflected through the guidelines.”
Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, remains skeptical of the proposed updates as well as the parole board.
“I think the way that this happened is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever witnessed,” England said. “We have had several years of opportunities to assess what those guidelines were going to produce, and instead of using that data, it seems like this came out of nowhere because there was a threat of losing funding.”
The data was supposed to reflect data collected from decisions made by the board regarding parole. During the Joint Prison Oversight Committee meeting in October, Gwathney told the committee members that she changed the score sheet to favor the applicant all while denying many of them parole.
“The data is corrupted, so I really don’t know what the new guidelines are based on,” England said during the committee meeting.
He also said the updated version does not include a section that considers a risk assessment from the Alabama Department of Corrections, which would know the applicant the best.
Jerome Dees, policy director with the Southern Poverty Law Center, also criticized elements of the proposed guidelines. Dees disapproved of the weight assigned to the underlying offense, saying that the original offense is not related to the rehabilitation that applicants pursued while incarcerated.
“There should be greater weight to programs that a participant has participated in during the course of their confinement,” Dees said. “Not just a neutral, plus zero point, but actually incentivizing individuals to engage in that.”
England said that updated parole guidelines are less about public safety and designed to increase the conformance rate, the frequency that the decisions of the parole board match the guidelines.
“It is the equivalent of taking a pop quiz, failing, and instead of digging deeper and seeing what changes you need to make, you just rewrite the question to the quiz so that it aligns with wrong answers,” Dees said.
Members of the committee signaled further changes in the future.
“The guidelines ought to be something that we consider,” said Rep. Jim Hill, R-Odenville, regarding the parole board abiding by the guidelines. “If we get to a point where we decide on something other than the guidelines, I think there ought to be an explanation.”
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Author: Ralph Chapoco