I

Parole was a central element of early twentieth-century penal reform in the United States. Building on systems of supervised early release for juveniles, it was widely introduced during the Progressive Era, along with indeterminate sentencing. In contrast to fixed-term sentences determined at the time of prisoners' initial conviction, penal reformers argued that parole promised more effective rehabilitation by adjusting prison terms according to convicts' readiness to re-enter society as law-abiding and productive citizens and enabling state authorities to monitor and supervise parolees' conduct in the community. Beyond these rehabilitative ideals, however, there were also more practical incentives for states to adopt parole as a mechanism of prisoner release. As David Rothman argued, parole served the interests of several influential stakeholders in the criminal justice system. It helped prison wardens to maintain discipline by rewarding prisoners' good conduct; district attorneys to manage their caseloads through plea bargains, and politicians to reduce the cost of penal administration by releasing the pressure for expensive prison building programmes.Footnote ² At a cost of less than $50 per year in the mid-1930s, supervising a parolee was more than eight times cheaper than holding him or her in prison, while parolees who reoffended could be returned to jail without the need for a costly and slow new prosecution.Footnote ³ Parole was also consistent with the labour demands of America's industrialized society. Notwithstanding penal reformers' talk of rehabilitation, the main criterion according to which parole boards assessed applications for early release were convicts' employment prospects. As Jonathan Simon has argued of parole in California, the ability to hold down a job became the test of a criminal's rehabilitation, while the prospect of being returned to custody acted as a form of labour control.Footnote ⁴ At a time when convict labour was the subject of widespread criticism that resulted in state and federal legislation restricting trade in convict-made goods, parole offered a new means to coerce profitable labour from convicted criminals.Footnote ⁵

All states operated a parole system by 1942, and in several states it was the most common form of prisoner release. There was, however, great variation in parole legislation and administration across the nation. Histories of race and parole have primarily focused on the South, where parole differed little from earlier, explicitly discretionary forms of release such as pardons.Footnote ⁶ Whereas parole was conceived by late nineteenth-century penal reformers as a progressive and modernizing system of release, Stephen Garton argues that in segregation era Georgia it functioned to ‘maintain older economic relationships and traditional social ethics, habits and customs that underpinned forms of Southern authority’.Footnote ⁷ Black convicts hoping for early release required the endorsement of reputable white patrons and, to this end, prisoners and their families engaged in ‘complex relationships with whites’ that were often marked by displays of white paternalism and black subjugation. As in Simon's conception of California, therefore, parole in Georgia was not part of a process of reforming or rehabilitating convicted criminals. Black parolees were invariably required to work for whites who sponsored their release and, with parole easily revoked, the system served as a powerful mechanism of labour control for white employers. In contrast to California, however, parole in Georgia was not designed to fit with cultural assumptions regarding labour in an industrial age. Instead, it was a system that primarily served the rural South, enabling the state to grant mercy on a discretionary basis as and when it suited white citizens and without compromising the overall capacity for brutality and capriciousness integral to the white supremacist assumptions that underlay the operation of the South's courts and penal regime.Footnote ⁸

A 1940 study suggested that the intersection of race and rural labour demands was similarly the basis of parole in Alabama where the system operated with even less regulation than in Georgia. Between 1935 and 1938, Alabama governor, Bibb Graves, granted 2,194 paroles without ‘any investigation of the prisoner, or supervision during the parole period.’ By contrast, the parole board oversaw only 133 parole releases during the same years. Among these cases, eighty-seven parolees were black, of whom eighty-five were employed as farm hands on their release. Letters to the parole bureau underscored that these prisoners were released in response to labour demands. One white farmer wrote: ‘I am in need of a negro farm hand and I am depending on one from you. And if you have one for me, you may write what prison I can get him and when. If an interview is required I will be glad to do so.’Footnote ⁹ Peter Taylor, an African American man paroled in Alabama in 1942 after serving nineteen years for murder, described the system as a form of slavery that bore close resemblance to peonage. Taylor was paroled to Lamar King, a ‘Big Shot Political Farmer’, who, Taylor alleged, had a total of fifteen paroled men working on his land in Midway, Alabama, in a state of perpetual indebtedness that prohibited them from seeking alternative employment.Footnote ¹⁰

The racial control functions that parole served in the South discouraged the development of professional and heavily bureaucratized release and supervisory procedures. Southern distinctiveness in parole should not, however, be overstated, for as late as 1939 only nine states anywhere in the nation had a full-time board of parole and just eight maintained regular supervision over parolees. Among these states was New York, which had long been at the forefront of penal reform and, in 1907, was the first state in the nation ‘to formally adopt all the components of a parole system: indeterminate sentences, a system for granting release, postrelease supervision, and specific criteria for parole revocation’. Following riots at Auburn and Clinton penitentiaries in 1929, the state legislature established a new, independent Division of Parole with a substantial budget and a large staff headed by three commissioners based in district offices in New York City, Albany, and Buffalo. Competitive salaries and civil service exams were designed to ensure the appointment of well-qualified parole officers whose work was to be facilitated by limited caseloads and extensive administrative support.Footnote ¹¹

New York's new state parole system came into operation on 1 January 1930. Conscious of public scepticism of parole, administrators and politicians praised the new arrangements as a model for the rest of the nation that would improve the process of convict rehabilitation and make the public more secure from crime.Footnote ¹² In a New York Times article in 1936, Joseph Canavan, one of three men who sat on the state parole board, stressed the system's bureaucratic rigour and the legal, as opposed to discretionary, basis of parole board decision-making. He also noted the extensive investigations made into parole applicants' criminal, medical, personal, and employment histories, their conduct in prison, and the home and work environments they would experience if released. Based on these factors, Canavan claimed that 55 per cent of parole applications were rejected and he also noted the strict regulations imposed on the minority of applicants freed from custody. These included regular meetings with a parole officer, restrictions on voting, driving a car, changing job, and even personal relationships and marriage, for which parolees required formal approval.Footnote ¹³ New York state parole commissioner Sanford Bates concurred, citing low rates of recidivism among parolees to refute the criticism of German criminologist, Hans Von Hentig, that parolees in New York were held to unrealistic standards of behaviour and returned to prison with excessive haste for violating conditions of their release.Footnote ¹⁴ Parole board members also spoke about their work at community meetings intended to reassure the public that parole increased ordinary citizens' security from crime. In February 1931, seventy-five judicial, religious, civic, and charitable leaders attended a luncheon in Syracuse at which the commissioners of the State parole board outlined the importance of the outside community to the success of parole. Likewise, when Rev. R. J. Booth, chaplain at Clinton Prison, addressed the Au Sable Forks Rotary Club in upstate New York in 1932 on the subject of parole, he spoke of the training that convicts received in prison to prepare them for life on the outside and the ‘watchful care the board takes of men given their liberty’.Footnote ¹⁵

The relative merits of parole in New York were echoed in most contemporaneous criminological research. From a comprehensive nationwide study, Wilbur La Roe, an attorney and parole board member in Washington DC, concluded that New York was ‘the leader among the States in the parole field’. Edward Cass, of the Prison Association of New York, an organization that had worked for parole reform for several decades, similarly argued that New York had ‘one of the most effective parole systems in existence’.Footnote ¹⁶ This assessment was based on a five-year study that found a consistent decline in rates of parolee recidivism that Cass attributed to improved parole officer working conditions, training, and management. In 1940, average caseloads remained above the official maximum of seventy-five parolees per officer, but there had been a marked improvement from more than 150 cases per officer in the mid-1930s to less than a hundred by the end of the decade. Officers' annual salaries had also increased to $3,000, believed to be sufficient to attract ‘a high type of person’, and all appointments were made ‘under the high standards and rigid requirements of the civil service law’.Footnote ¹⁷

II

In 1940, almost 1,000 African Americans were on parole in New York and there were a further 2,500 black men and women in state prisons who would fall under the authority of the parole division on release.Footnote ¹⁸ Amidst the many studies of parole published in the 1930s and 1940s, there was limited commentary on the significance of race, but available statistical evidence indicated that African Americans were less likely to be paroled than whites and more likely to be returned to custody for violating parole conditions. This was the finding of a survey of over 80,000 prisoners made by the attorney general in 1939 and was also evident in release data from state and federal penitentiaries in the period 1933–6, when almost 60 per cent of whites, but less than 40 per cent of African American prisoners were discharged on parole, the remainder serving their entire sentence.Footnote ¹⁹

Securing at least an offer of work was a prerequisite for a successful parole application in New York. Despite difficult economic conditions at the time, New York's parole officials claimed in the early 1930s that there were ample job opportunities for prisoners seeking early release. In 1933, the chairman of the New York parole division claimed that ‘[s]omeone nearly always comes forward to get a man a job when he is ready to leave [prison]. It shows that men in prison have good friends.’Footnote ²⁰ As the economic depression of the 1930s continued, however, employment opportunities for prisoners became scarce. The New York City parole commission called employment ‘one of the most important conditions of parole’, but although a job offer remained necessary for release, by 1937, the scarcity of work was such that ‘willful and continued idleness’ on the part of parolees was often overlooked once they had left prison.Footnote ²¹ In 1941, both houses of the New York state legislature passed a bill that would have required parole applicants only to make a conscientious effort to seek employment, rather than secure a job, but the measure was vetoed by Governor Lehman, allegedly with the support of the Board of Parole.Footnote ²²

Employment prospects for African American parole applicants in New York were especially bleak. Racial discrimination in the workplace was endemic and exacerbated by the depression. In manufacturing and mechanical industries, African Americans were poorly paid and mostly employed as unskilled labourers, and they were similarly excluded from all but the most menial positions by public utilities, including gas, electric, telephone, and railway companies. Even the service sector in Harlem – home to more than 200,000 African Americans by 1930 – was dominated by white business owners who reluctantly employed black workers mostly to placate their predominantly African American clientele. In the early 1940s, preparations for America's involvement in the Second World War spurred economic recovery, but the expansion of the defence industry was initially of benefit primarily to white workers. African Americans, by contrast, remained heavily dependent on New Deal relief programmes, such as the Works Progress Administration, and consequently suffered disproportionately from cuts and new restrictions on eligibility introduced in response to increased private sector job creation.Footnote ²³ It was in this context that, among 618 African American prisoners denied parole by New York's state parole board in the year to 1 June 1939, more than 40 per cent were refused release because they did not have an offer of employment. By contrast, lack of work was responsible for less than 30 per cent of the 1,728 unsuccessful parole applications made by white prisoners in the same period.Footnote ²⁴

For African Americans aiming to secure parole, the NAACP was a potential ally in their struggle. Established in 1909 to challenge the ‘evergrowing oppression of our 10,000,000 colored fellow citizens’, the NAACP was the largest civil rights organization in America. Although it had not previously worked on parole cases, the NAACP had a record of successful campaigning and legal intervention in criminal justice affairs and had also played a prominent role in the ongoing campaign to secure passage of a federal anti-lynching law.Footnote ²⁵ Between 1940 and 1950, at least 212 parole cases were brought to the attention of the NAACP's national office in New York City, mostly in the form of letters written by individual prisoners seeking a job offer to secure early release. These letters offer an unusual perspective into prisoners' attempts to win parole. Though subject to prison censorship, they are mostly unmediated by the bureaucratic procedures of official parole records and they reflect views expressed by black men and women to an organization of their own race, rather than to white officials. 61 per cent (130) of cases concerned prisoners incarcerated in New York prisons and 53 per cent (112) were submitted between 1940 and 1942, a concentration that could be a record-keeping quirk, but is possibly also explained by the relative scarcity of job opportunities at a time when the lingering aftermath of the depression had not yet given way to the economic recovery instigated by America's entry into the Second World War. Just seven cases involved women, a figure that is consistent with gender ratios among black prisoners at the time, but which might also be read as evidence that female applicants for early release depended more than men on family support or that parole boards were less concerned with employment prospects when dealing with women.Footnote ²⁶

Irrespective of where the cases originated and the identity and circumstances of the convict and crime, the NAACP declined to intervene in almost all parole applications. Most prisoners who contacted the Association received a reply based on a standard form drawn up in 1941 by Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel for the NAACP. ‘Our budget is very limited and we have a small staff’, Marshall explained. ‘For these reasons we are forced to restrict our activities and are unable to secure employment for individuals.’ In correspondence with prisoners, Marshall and other NAACP lawyers outlined more fully why the Association would not take up parole work. First, parole support was deemed beyond the NAACP's constitutional remit to work only on cases involving ‘racial discrimination or denial of civil or constitutional rights’ that would set precedents with resonance beyond the particular case at issue.Footnote ²⁷ Furthermore, parole board decision-making was understood as an entirely discretionary process and hence difficult to influence from a legal standpoint using the tactics that the NAACP pursued, often successfully, to appeal convictions of black defendants denied due process on grounds of race and to challenge segregation. When Roosevelt Henderson was returned to prison after violating his parole, for example, he was told that the NAACP was ‘not able to give assistance in your case … as such matters are largely left to the sole discretion of the parole officers’.Footnote ²⁸ Lee Jankin, a Georgia prisoner, was further advised that ‘a letter coming from an organization or individual who has no knowledge whatever of your case or of you personally would have very little weight with the authorities upon whose discretion you must rely for your release’. Marshall did hope that the NAACP's work to secure equal rights would have a positive influence on black prison and parole experiences, particularly in the South, but at best this would be a long-term process and change would only come when African Americans secured equal voting rights. Without that political leverage, Marshall explained, ‘we have found that Negroes, especially in the southern states are unable to get any consideration from the executive authorities’.Footnote ²⁹ Correspondents from the South were similarly realistic about the limited assistance the NAACP could offer convicted prisoners in the region. In 1945, Gertrude Coffin wrote to the NAACP about Charles, a black prisoner in Florida whose parole had been revoked at the request of his former employer, a politically influential man who had threatened to return Charles to jail if ever he sought a new job. Coffin asked not for direct aid, but instead enquired if the Association knew a lawyer in Florida who could work on the case so that ‘it might be handled as a matter of state reform from within’.Footnote ³⁰ On another occasion, when black convicts at Raiford prison farm in Florida called on the NAACP to investigate the violent and racist circumstances of their incarceration, they apologized that their letter was not typed and pleaded ‘dont [sic] send this letter back because it will get us in bad. You understand how it is here’.Footnote ³¹ Amidst such fears, it is unsurprising that overall only twenty-six parole letters (12 per cent) received by the NAACP originated in the South.

In the short term, the best the NAACP could do, even for parole applicants in northern states like New York, was to refer them to another charitable, civil rights or prison, organization. Reflecting the national office's location and connections in New York City, African Americans writing from New York prisons were most often directed to alternative organizations, including the Urban League, the Prison Association, the Osborne Association, and the Salvation Army. In practice, however, as Thurgood Marshall regularly acknowledged to parole applicants, the NAACP had been unsuccessful in its efforts to get these ‘other organisations to take up this problem’.Footnote ³² Periodically through the 1940s, Marshall received enquiries about support for parolees from local NAACP branches, prisoners’ aid societies, and correctional institutions, but while he did offer to bring together diverse parties with an interest in the issue, the national office's policy of non-intervention in parole remained essentially unaltered throughout the decade.

Though the NAACP did not support parole applications, the reasons why African American prisoners wrote to the Association in search of work illustrate that they considered their identity as black Americans to be important to their prospects for early release. Prisoners wrote to the NAACP mostly because of its prominence as the leading black civil rights organization of the time. This was significant for both pragmatic and ideological reasons. Most letters were addressed to Thurgood Marshall or the NAACP's executive secretary, Walter White, men whose names were well known nationally. There is evidence in many letters that prisoners simply did not know where else to turn other than the NAACP headquarters in New York, the address of which was published in the Association's monthly magazine, The Crisis.Footnote ³³ When Absom Pettiway sent a letter from a prison camp in Florida in 1948, he explained that he had ‘wanted to write you for a long time, but I did not know your address’, while Charles Hankins ‘conceived the idea of writing you from reading the various colored news papers’ and Robert Jefferson, incarcerated in Pennsylvania, wrote to the national office as he did not know the address of the local Philadelphia branch.Footnote ³⁴

Other prisoners depicted the NAACP as their only hope of finding work after alternative avenues had been closed. Repeatedly in correspondence, prisoners explained that they had unsuccessfully sought work through family, friends, and former employers or that they had lost contact with relations and acquaintances during their incarceration. Charlie Smith's relatives, for example, were ‘so scattered throughout the nation’ that he did not know where they were. Similarly, Ethel Williams wrote that she had tried, but failed, to find work for her son, Leroy, who had been eligible for parole for six months, and was left not knowing ‘which way to turn but to you [the NAACP]’.Footnote ³⁵ Options could prove even more limited for immigrants with few contacts in the United States, such as Oscar Martinez, a black Puerto Rican prisoner who had served fourteen years at Attica penitentiary when he wrote to the NAACP in 1947. He did so as his mother had moved to the Dominican Republic, the governor of Puerto Rico had not replied to his pleas for assistance, and he had no relatives in New York.Footnote ³⁶ The assumption that, in ordinary circumstances, prisoners would find work through their families, reflected the centrality of black community ties to the parole process, yet with a majority of the population of Harlem by the 1930s comprising immigrants from the West Indies and migrants from the South, this posed a major obstacle to the release of many black prisoners. It was also contrary to the impression promoted by state authorities that parole was a well-resourced system that managed the early release of prisoners according to evidence of rehabilitation, including psychological examinations, and in the interests of protecting the public.Footnote ³⁷ For the prisoners who contacted the NAACP, parole application success was less dependent on their readiness to re-enter society than on the extent to which they maintained connections to the outside world during their incarceration.

There is limited evidence in the NAACP papers concerning prisoners' political views, but a small number of correspondents were engaged with race issues and familiar with the NAACP's civil rights work. Prisoners' references to particular NAACP activities were doubtless crafted partly to appeal to the sensibilities and politics of those who would read them. Nonetheless, although few parole applicants claimed that their own convictions and prison experiences had been explicitly affected by race, many could apparently conceive of their individual struggle to find a job and secure early release as part of a larger fight for racial justice in America, or, at least, they considered it advantageous to encourage that impression. Janice Monica, a young woman serving time for grand larceny, spent much of her time in prison writing about race issues. Her fictional works included Native girl, a homage to Richard Wright's Native son, that traced the tale of ‘the average southern, Negro girl who goes to a metropolis to make good’.Footnote ³⁸ William Jones had ‘read all about the good work you and your organization are do [sic], in help out, one in their time of need’, while John Dean had ‘heard of the wonderful work your organization is doing’. James Holmes referred to the ‘great work that your organization has been doing for other unfortunate victims of my race’ and James Johnson hoped ‘your organization continues to have success in the fight for rights for American citizens regardless of race creed or color’. Prisoners also noted their personal connections to NAACP members. Benny Hill, writing from Folsom Prison, commented that his parents had been members of the NAACP for years; Langston Williams was a former member, and Mary Turner, who wrote on behalf of her imprisoned brother, Le Roy, a current member.Footnote ³⁹

Following the NAACP's widely publicized campaigns against lynching and discriminatory practices in criminal trials during the 1930s, prisoners had high expectations that the Association would assist them in their own struggles with the prison system. Isaac Mosley, imprisoned in the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, criticized the NAACP's refusal to provide him with a lawyer to support his parole application and contrasted the decision with the Association's work in the Scottsboro Boys case that made international headlines throughout the 1930s: ‘Sir; is you all sopose to help your People when they in trouble and when they haven got no one to help them or just help the People than on the other Chard [charge - rape] like Scotch Buar Boys.’ Mosley was perhaps more accurate than he could have realized in accusing the NAACP of a preoccupation with newsworthy interracial rape cases; one of the very few occasions that the NAACP did petition in support of a parole application was in the case of Will Wright whose death sentence for assaulting a white woman in Georgia had been commuted to twenty years’ imprisonment following the NAACP's intervention in 1936.Footnote ⁴⁰ The NAACP also failed to meet the expectations of Joseph Jackson, imprisoned in Maine, who wrote to Thurgood Marshall in search of work in 1942. Marshall referred the case to Ray Guild of the NAACP's Boston Branch, but though Guild sent two letters to Jackson, no progress was made on the case and Guild stopped replying to Jackson's letters. A frustrated Jackson wrote once more to Marshall: ‘I am pleading and fighting for the freedom which is due me. However, I am force [sic] to feel that the association haven't [sic] thus far supported my untiring efforts. You said you wish me success in obtaining my freedom. I took that for granted.’Footnote ⁴¹

Other African American prisoners held black employers and civil rights organizations responsible for their failure to secure parole. In 1931, a prisoner from the Washington State Prison claimed he had been eligible for parole for six months but needed $15 to fund his journey home before he would be released. He accused the black community of abandoning him and other black prisoners, noting ‘[t]here are two or three organizations that help white convicts in like condition but not coloured’.Footnote ⁴² In a New York Amsterdam News article the following year, a former prisoner similarly called on black citizens to ‘rise to the task of helping offenders to take their places in society again’. This prisoner claimed to have written countless letters to prospective employers on behalf of fellow black inmates and complained that job offers were rarely forthcoming. He criticized black businesses and contrasted the neglect of African American prisoners by the wider black community with the strong relationships that other prisoners were able to maintain with the outside world: ‘[w]hen the Irish, the Jews, the Italians and plain American whites go to prison, all their contacts with the outside are not lost. They get letters, their relatives visit them, they talk with representatives of outside organizations.’ By contrast, ‘[i]n many cases Negro inmates never receive a visit or a letter or a package. The church, civic and uplift organizations forget them.’Footnote ⁴³

Coming from prisoners themselves, there is good cause to consider these claims self-serving and disingenuous, though the bitterness of unsuccessful parole applicants was doubtless real. The prisoners' views were shared, however, by W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis, who complained that religious and community organizations ‘continually and systematically neglect Negroes who have been arrested, or who are accused of crime, or who have been convicted and incarcerated’. Prefiguring the prisoner Isaac Mosley's analysis more than ten years later, Du Bois acknowledged the efforts made to secure justice for black defendants and convicts in a small number of ‘spectacular’ cases that had made newspaper headlines and generated support for civil rights organizations, most notably Scottsboro.Footnote ⁴⁴ But in the majority of cases, he claimed, ‘the whole black world is dumb and acquiescent; they will not even visit the detention houses where the accused, innocent and guilty, are herded like cattle’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Criticisms of the black community for neglecting convicted criminals are at odds with evidence of the persistent struggles of working-class African Americans to support men and women on probation after their lives became entangled with the machinery of New York law enforcement. Research on 1920s Harlem, for example, has found evidence that black men on probation could maintain strong ties to their families, communities, and neighbourhood clubs and organizations that played a crucial role in their struggles to reconstruct their lives. Such bonds were severely strained, however, by time away from the community in prison, and even probationers struggled to secure the sort of steady jobs that would have satisfied the parole board's employment requirements. Instead, they depended on a variety of income streams, including irregular and part-time labour, renting out rooms to lodgers, and the financial support of parents, partners, and even children.Footnote ⁴⁶

Without personal ties to the incarcerated, there were numerous factors to discourage African American engagement with the penal system and support for prisoners and parole applicants. First, African Americans in New York were routinely in conflict with the city's discriminatory and repressive institutions of criminal justice. Black hostility towards the New York police, for example, was pronounced. In Harlem, unlawful searches, assaults and arrests by white officers were commonplace and engendered a ‘deep-seated’ sense of injustice that, in 1935, led to rioting when rumours spread that police had beaten, and perhaps even killed, a sixteen-year-old black youth who had stolen a knife from a store on 125th Street.Footnote ⁴⁷ Second, at a time when associations between race and criminality remained firmly entrenched in white American culture, middle-class African Americans in particular might have sought distance from prison inmates who could be seen as compromising the progress of the race.Footnote ⁴⁸ Indeed, Cheryl Hicks found evidence of black women parolees in 1930s New York returned to custody by their families on account of conduct that threatened family respectability, ranging from drug abuse to disobedience.Footnote ⁴⁹ Third, with nearly 50 per cent of black families in Harlem dependent on relief by the mid-1930s, and discrimination in employment and welfare endemic, convicted criminals were surely a low priority for limited community resources and jobs.

Aside from overt support for civil rights campaigns, prisoners also connected the pursuit of freedom to their identity as men, Christians, and Americans. They promised never to give the NAACP cause to regret aiding their release and invoked the language of racial uplift through hard work and commitment to family, God, and country. Repeatedly, parole applicants wrote of wanting to grasp the opportunity to make men of themselves on the outside, an aim they mostly equated with performing a patriarchal role as providers for their mothers, wives, and children, but which some also associated with education and labour. A small number detailed how they had prepared for release during their incarceration. Percy Hudson had saved his scarce prison earnings so that he might ‘make the proper appearance for any job’ and Calvin Coleman, who could not write his own name at the time he was imprisoned, had gone to school and now identified himself proudly as ‘an American coloured man’. Louis Anderson, meanwhile, claimed to have ‘exchanged rong [sic] for right, I have took my masters hand and gain [sic] that Christian land’.Footnote ⁵⁰ These sentiments were consistent with the commitment to racial uplift – ‘helping black communities to improve themselves’ – and respectability that recent legal historians have identified as a central tenet of the NAACP's philosophy through the 1930s and early 1940s and suggest that prisoners were familiar with aspects of the Association's political thought.Footnote ⁵¹ They reiterate, moreover, that men who wrote to the NAACP did not believe that parole officers held the key to their successful reintegration into society. Instead, their letters suggest that prisoners saw their futures as dependent on their own efforts and the support of African Americans on the outside.Footnote ⁵²

III

While black prisoners were looking to the NAACP to support parole applications, New York's parole board was also placing race and the black community at the heart of its work. In the 1930s, a number of black parole officers were appointed to the New York Division of Parole and, in August 1941, Samuel Battle became the first African American to serve on the New York City parole commission, replacing former New York Yankees first baseman, Lou Gehrig, who died just eighteen months into a scheduled ten-year term in office. It was another pioneering achievement for Battle who, in 1911, had become New York City's first black police officer and, later, became the first to be promoted to the rank of lieutenant where he commanded both black and white officers. After thirty years' service, Battle was a well-known and respected figure in New York and his appointment to the parole commission was, in public at least, broadly and warmly welcomed. Both the black press and white politicians considered Battle's police background an important qualification for his new role, but, more particularly, approved of his deep connections within the black community. The leading black newspaper, the New York Amsterdam News, described the appointment as recognition of the ‘community and people’ of Harlem, while both The Crisis and the Chicago Defender highlighted the numerous community organizations of which Battle was a member, including the NAACP, the Young Men's Christian Association, the New York Urban League, and the Odd Fellows. St Martin's Episcopal Church in Harlem arranged a testimonial dinner to commemorate Battle's appointment.Footnote ⁵³

The press coverage and political rhetoric that accompanied Battle's appointment reflected a broader conviction among both race leaders and parole administrators that rates of reoffending were lowest when parole officers and parolees shared similar racial, religious, and gender identities. In the early 1930s, this idea was expressed forcefully in relation to probation by Beulah Mitchell Hill in her regular column for the Atlanta Daily World, ‘From a woman's point of view’. Hill described the sacking of the only black probation officer in Atlanta as ‘a paralyzing blow to the Negroes of the city’. She had little faith in the abilities of white probation officers to deal with black juveniles, and claimed that ‘no white man or woman in the world can understand or guide black children who have strayed from the beaten path of rectitude. They haven't the experience, the background, nor the interest’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Similar attitudes – reflecting a commitment to intraracial work rather than integration – were apparent among African Americans in New York who canvassed the NAACP's support for the appointment of a black parole commissioner in 1941. Nat J. Humphries of New York City's Welfare Equity Association had worked with parolees for many years, and could ‘think of nothing that would mean more than the designation of a qualified Negro to this position’. John Newton Greggs, a black attorney, believed that ‘a colored man has a more intimate knowledge of the problems of his people, than those of the other race’. Henry W. Pope put his own name forward for the position and hoped that Walter White might recommend him to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Pope was secretary of the Welfare Council of New York City's Committee on Negro Welfare and explained that he had worked with ‘the State Division of Parole in an effort to develop some community resources to meet the problem of Negro prisoners who are eligible for parole but cannot be paroled because of lack job [sic] opportunities or community ties’.Footnote ⁵⁵

White politicians and parole administrators were equally supportive of an African American appointee to the city parole commission and agreed on the importance of the black community to the workings of the parole system. For Mayor La Guardia, Battle's community ties were integral to his suitability for his new appointment. Responding to a perceived increase in black crime rates – particularly among the young – La Guardia described Battle as a man who ‘has been in close touch with the problem for many years … knows all the children in Harlem from the time of their birth and has been very active in social work’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Meanwhile, Joseph J. Canavan, chairman of the State parole board, made a direct appeal to African Americans to support parole work, arguing that the system brought tangible benefits to the black community. Writing for the black readership of the New York Amsterdam News, in 1940, Canavan depicted the parole system as a bastion of racial equality that worked with the black community to reintegrate parolees successfully and to secure public safety. Canavan drew attention, for example, to New York City's four black parole officers, stressing their qualifications, including social work experience and the competitive civil service appointment process that they had successfully negotiated. He also noted that parole officers worked closely with local community agencies in New York that had close ties to the black community, such as ‘[t]he Out-Patient Clinic of the Harlem Hospital, the Harlem Health Centre, [and] the New York Urban League’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Promoting the role of parole in fighting crime, and perhaps hoping to exploit divisions within the black community, Canavan explained that the parole board removed one in four black prisoners to the South upon their release and argued that the best method of returning prisoners to society from the perspective of public safety was under the supervision of trained officers and with a job offer in hand. These sentiments were aimed at the self-consciously respectable black middle class and drew on long-standing prejudices against the supposed criminal tendencies of southern black migrants to the urban North to counter the widely held impression that New York policing and criminal justice failed to protect law-abiding black citizens.Footnote ⁵⁸

The appointment of black parole officers and Canavan's rhetoric of racial equality belied a more complex reality. For example, the philosophy that parole success was facilitated when officers and parolees had a shared racial identity was applied selectively and could restrict opportunities for African American candidates for parole appointments. In 1931, when Miss Alice Robbins, an African American woman, sat the New York parole officers' examination, she ranked thirty-ninth, but was overlooked for appointment, despite a white woman ranked one hundred and first in the exam securing a position in Buffalo. Frederick A. Moran of the state parole division justified this disparity on the grounds that black women comprised just five of the eighty women on parole in New York at the time, but the NAACP attacked this explanation and called for appointments to be based on merit.Footnote ⁵⁹ Fifteen years later, discrimination continued to structure parole work in New York. A report commissioned by the NAACP in 1944 found that it was parole board policy for parolees to be supervised by officers of the same religion, race, and gender but, in practice, this applied only to restrict the work of African American parole officers. As Samuel Battle explained, ‘no Negro can supervise white parole cases in any form whatsoever’. Nor could black parole officers transport white parolees within New York or across state lines, yet ‘white parole officers do supervise Negro parolees, transport Negro parolees within the state from one place to another and return Negro parolees from other states’.Footnote ⁶⁰

The racial ideologies on which these policies were based fed into the day-to-day workings of a parole system that, as Cheryl Hicks has argued for women parolees, routinely extended a more repressive form of control over black convicts than whites, sometimes with the complicity of the black community and despite the efforts of black women themselves to shape their lives after prison. In one case that came to the NAACP's attention, Arthur Burton, Jr, had his parole revoked in light of accusations of an improper relationship with a white, married woman, Veronica Hall. Denying any wrong-doing, Veronica Hall explained that her husband, John, had invited Burton to the family home, which was always ‘open to fellowship and charity’. While there, Burton was never alone with Veronica and ‘conducted himself as a gentleman’, though he did not reveal his status as a parolee until questioned one day about ‘how he stand in the draft’. In a scathing letter, Veronica Hall described how she had lost faith in society and her home had been ‘stigmatized’ after she was forced by parole officers to endure an ‘examination by the board of health to see if I was infected’. She proceeded to compare the parole division to the Gestapo for returning Burton to custody on false pretences.Footnote ⁶¹

Efforts to involve New York's black community in parole work were also motivated by the scarcity of jobs available for prisoners. All of New York's state prisons were overcrowded, making efficient release procedures imperative. As Joseph Canavan readily and publicly acknowledged in the Amsterdam News, however, the parole division, like black prisoners themselves, could not find work for many African Americans eligible for parole and instead leaned on black employers and civil rights organizations to make jobs available: ‘The State Parole Board has presented to some of the outstanding leaders of the Negro community the serious employment problem facing both Negro prisoners and those now on parole but this condition needs to be more widely known and combated.’Footnote ⁶² Prompted by similar concerns, George Loughlin of the placement bureau at Elmira Reformatory wrote to the NAACP in August 1940 asking if work could be found for the ‘young coloured boys in this institution who are eligible for release’ and similar enquiries were received from Reverend Charles P. Johnson, chaplain of the New Jersey State Mental Hospital at Marlboro, and T. A. Flynn of the Social Service Department at the Penitentiary and Workhouse of the City of New York.Footnote ⁶³ Flynn was anxious to avoid implying that his department was neglecting its responsibilities to black prisoners. He stressed that ‘a considerable number of our releases are of the Negro race’ and that efforts made on behalf of African American prisoners were as ‘sincere and unflagging as those exercised on behalf of all the men’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Like Loughlin and Johnson, Flynn nonetheless received the same negative response to his request for aid that the NAACP sent to individual prisoners.

IV

Writing about parole in the 1930s and 1940s, criminologists focused on policy, emphasizing the significance of the variations that existed in release decision-making processes and post-release monitoring in different states. From this perspective, New York led the nation in adopting professionalized and well-resourced parole procedures, but there is little indication that policy distinctions mattered much to the prisoners who requested NAACP support for parole applications from across the United States. Beyond the Deep South, where parole existed in name only, the concerns of correspondents from New York penitentiaries, like those of prisoners in other states, mostly focused on the availability of work which, in practice, was rarely accessible to those without support on the outside. For African American prisoners in New York, race was a central factor structuring connections across prison walls and the black community was a critical resource in the quest for early release. This partly reflected African American political influence which drove the appointment of black parole officers, but it was more specifically a consequence of white parole administrators' pragmatic efforts to spread the burden of employing black former prisoners.

Further research is required to trace the employment of African Americans whose applications for parole were successful and the community connections they maintained on the outside, but it is apparent that black influence on parole decision-making in New York was not automatically beneficial to African American prisoners who still struggled to secure the jobs needed for early release and were sometimes subject to particularly repressive supervision on account of race. This reflected the broader conditions of black life in New York, particularly widespread poverty and workplace discrimination, as well as the destabilizing personal experience of imprisonment itself, which left black prisoners – most evidently those who wrote to the NAACP – with few economic resources and limited social connections and cultural capital. Arguably, it was actually in the South that black parole applicants had most chance of securing work, precisely because of the oppressive influence that white employers exerted on the system below the Mason–Dixon Line. In a study of the vocational readjustment of ex-prisoners in 1930s Washington DC, Helen Hurley related the story of Stephen, a fifty-seven-year-old ‘uneducated Southern Negro’ convicted of assault with a dangerous weapon. On his release, Stephen was employed by a construction company and though the work was seasonal, he easily found new jobs despite his criminal past, which he had never needed to conceal from racist white employers who considered criminality to be an inherent characteristic of African Americans that was not limited only to those who happened to have served jail time. According to Hurley, Stephen was typical of countless African Americans in the South whose criminal records had little impact on their vocational futures.Footnote ⁶⁵

In the decades after the Second World War, prisoner release and parole supervision developed in new ways influenced by changing ideas about treatment, rehabilitation, and psychiatry.Footnote ⁶⁶ For the NAACP, the prisoners' rights movement of the late 1960s and 1970s spurred interest in parole. In 1972, the Association's first prison branch was established at Lewisburg federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania. Ten years later, there were twenty-five NAACP prison branches, including eleven in New York, with a total of more than 4,000 members. Parole was an important part of these prison branches' activities. Prisoners' participation in NAACP organized education classes, leadership training and crime prevention seminars correlated positively with parole success and reduced rates of recidivism. Meanwhile, local NAACP branches on the outside formed support committees that liaised with the prison branches and supported parole opportunities for African Americans by ‘canvassing communities across the country attempting to get firm job commitments from prospective employers’. This work remained as necessary in the 1970s as it had been in the 1940s. As William Jackson testified in 1972 to the McKay Commission, established to investigate the Attica prison riot in New York the previous year, job offers rather than rehabilitation were still essential to a successful parole application and remained difficult to secure.Footnote ⁶⁷

Building on the McKay Commission's findings that disparities in the administration of parole had exacerbated tensions at Attica, a Citizens' Committee reported in 1975 that parole in New York was ‘oppressive and arbitrary’, ‘totally ineffective in reducing recidivism’, and ought to be abolished.Footnote ⁶⁸ Parole survived in New York, but in subsequent years it was subject to fundamental reforms of its purpose and administration consistent with a repressive turn in American criminal punishment after the civil rights movement and attacks on the rehabilitative ideal by critics on the political left and right. Beginning in 1973, New York restricted discretionary early release for various drugs offences, violent felonies, repeat offenders, and juveniles, introduced written guidelines to address disparities in parole board decision-making, and eventually embraced determinate sentencing that saw parole supervision reformulated as a period of compulsory post-release monitoring for prisoners who had completed fixed terms of imprisonment. In line with nationwide trends, parole in New York became, in Loïc Wacquant's terms, a ‘policing program’ that prioritizes ‘intensive surveillance and punctilious discipline’ rather than rehabilitation and the reintegration of parolees into society.Footnote ⁶⁹

The impact of these developments has resonated disproportionately in black communities. In 2005, African Americans were imprisoned in New York at more than nine times the rate of whites – substantially above the national average – and by 2008, they accounted for 51 per cent of men and 44 per cent of women on parole in the state.Footnote ⁷⁰ Typically released into racially segregated, post-industrial urban neighbourhoods blighted by entrenched poverty, endemic unemployment, and the myriad social, cultural, and economic effects of mass incarceration, for most black parolees the very idea of reform through community reintegration has become, according to Jonathan Simon, conceptually incoherent.Footnote ⁷¹ Yet even amidst destabilized environments that are more conducive to criminality than rehabilitation, family ties and community resources remain central to African American parole experiences. According to recent ethnographic research, for example, black men on parole in twenty-first-century New York City, like their forebears in the 1940s, have little faith in institutionalized parole processes and are commonly dependent on racially structured connections beyond the penal system, including the financial assistance of women in their lives, from grandmothers to girlfriends, and the support of charitable, religious, and recreational organizations.Footnote ⁷² Parole policy has been revolutionized and surveillance expanded, but personal relationships, racial inequalities in wider American society, and the political economy of local black neighbourhoods persist as primary influences on the experiences of black former prisoners.