Guest Commentary written by

Keith Wattley

Keith Wattley is founding executive director of UnCommon Law

Re: “Reform that re-traumatizes: California’s elderly parole program burdens victims, frightens the community“

When a parole decision gains public attention, the conversation too often stops at the crime. That’s especially true for California’s elderly parole program, which deserves to be understood on its merits, not defined by its most extreme cases.

The evidence shows that elder parole is working. The people it covers pose minimal risk. The process that evaluates them is rigorous. Ignoring all of this comes at a huge cost to taxpayers, to victims and to any honest definition of public safety.

To qualify for elder parole, someone must be at least 50 and have served at least 20 years. Roughly 20% of California’s prison population is past age 55 and the number grows every year. It costs $128,000 a year to incarcerate a younger person, and two to three times that for someone over 80. 

A growing number are living with dementia. California has opened memory care units in two prisons for people who attend parole hearings and cannot remember why they are there. 

Elder parole grants a hearing, not a guarantee of freedom. Fewer than 10% of first-time elderly parole hearings result in parole grants; 16.4% overall. When the board grants parole, it’s because the evidence supports it. 

Parole grants for people with sex offenses are even rarer. Sex crimes receive the most scrutiny at parole hearings, and those individuals must clear sex-offense-specific risk assessments before they can be found suitable. Those who are released are placed on the sex offender registry and are subject to sex-offense-focused supervision, often including GPS ankle monitoring and mandated treatment. 

Victims have the right to be notified about parole hearings, to attend, speak, and have their safety considered. 

What happens when people are released? There hasn’t been a single reported case of sexual reoffense by someone granted elderly parole. In fact, the rate of this group committing any reoffense is just 1.8% (and it’s 0.6% for any violent reoffense), while the average reoffense rate for all people released from California prisons is nearly 20 times higher at 39%. 

For those over 65, recidivism nationally approaches zero, which holds across offense types. “Aging out of crime” is one of the most established findings in criminal justice research. 

Ignoring that data does not make anyone safer. It just costs more.

California prisons spend roughly a third of their $17.5 billion budget on healthcare, driven largely by the aging population. While the prison population is projected to decline through 2030, we spend more every year to incarcerate people the evidence tells us are safe to release — money that could go toward what actually keeps communities safe: trauma recovery for victims, mental health treatment, housing and programs that prevent harm before it happens.

The single strongest predictor of whether someone can safely return to their community is time served and age. There is no cumulative beneficial or deterrent effect of incarceration after 20 years. Elder parole candidates have, by definition, already crossed that threshold.  

When survivor outrage fueled by misleading rhetoric drives legislation, we end up with thousands of people condemned to die in prison regardless of who they have become since committing their crimes. 

Ironically, such knee-jerk legislation drove up the prison population in the 1980s and 90s, causing the Supreme Court to declare our prisons unconstitutionally overcrowded. Elderly parole became California’s release mechanism that instills hope that a person’s rehabilitation matters and will be recognized.

The law requires release if a person no longer poses an unreasonable risk. For elderly parole candidates, the evidence overwhelmingly says they do not. 

Californians deserve real public safety, not the expensive illusion of it.