Introduction

Why Do You Deserve Parole?

In the former rail hub of Galesburg, near the border with Iowa, Johnnie Veal sat in the prison’s school building, between flags of the United States and the state of Illinois. He was wearing a surgical mask and an oversize short-sleeved blue shirt, his bare arms rested innocuously on the lacquered desk in front of him. Across from him a monitor was perched atop a rolling AV tray. Johnnie concentrated on making his body a statue. He had been locked up since he was a teenager in 1970; he was now past the age at which most people retired. A half century of incarceration. A lifetime. The screen in front of him flashed white and recomposed into a grid of panels, faces at different angles and distances filling each box. Inside one of them was Johnnie’s pro bono lawyer. In others, his fiancée, his grandson, a reporter. The most important face belonged to a delegate from the Illinois parole board, who was on the video call to interview Johnnie and make a recommendation whether to release him from prison.

“Johnnie, can you talk about why you believe you are deserving of parole,” his lawyer prompted.

Johnnie took his time to reply. He reminded himself to stay relaxed. He wasn’t supposed to sound rehearsed. He shouldn’t overthink his answers. What could he possibly say after all these years that would equal free?

I was one of the people on the call; Johnnie’s lawyer had asked me to serve as an expert witness. It was November 2020, eight months into the Covid-19 pandemic, and by then most of us were experienced with Zoom or some other online videoconferencing. Not Johnnie. He had prepared for the interview by watching a thirteen-inch television in his cell. Studying the people on TMZ, he noted how the remote hosts of the celebrity gossip show engaged one another despite their separate isolations. He analyzed guests of news programs who appeared from their home setups. Johnnie saw that speakers who looked away from the camera tended to come across as shifty or insincere. “Like a hunting dog each time a rabbit jumps out of a bush, chasing it,” he’d say. So he trained himself. Peering at a mark on his cell wall, he practiced speaking without breaking eye contact.

“I have done everything possible up under your guidelines, up under your old law, to rehabilitate myself, to show that I am worthy of a risk parole assessment, to show that I am trustworthy enough,” Johnnie told the official from the parole board. He locked his sights on the camera affixed to the monitor in front of him. “I have earned the right to be paroled.”

A parole hearing isn’t a trial. A trial is where a court determines guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Where the convicted are sentenced. Parole board members are like a jury without a judge, civilians appointed to decide whether a long prison sentence should or shouldn’t come to an end.

Not only is a person’s fate in the balance. But parole, at the back end of the criminal system, also tells the story of everything that came before it. The stories of a crime and decades in prison. Of victimization and rehabilitation. Of childhoods and lives ruined. Parole is a result of each preceding decision and policy choice. It contains the whole of criminal justice. Parole conveys the story of the country in all its fevered conceptions of safety and punishment.

This book tells the prison and parole sagas of two men: Johnnie Veal and Michael Henderson. It is interested not only in whether their long prison terms will—or even should—come to an end. The book is also a history of American incarceration. And it tells the stories of several other people embroiled in the corrections system or trying to change it.

Like Johnnie, Michael Henderson entered prison in the early 1970s, at a time when the United States incarcerated a total of 200,000 people. In 2023, with mass incarceration in America turning fifty, that number seems quaint. The prison population has increased nearly sixfold. Two hundred thousand doesn’t even amount to the number of women the country currently locks up. In federal and state prisons today, there are more than 200,000 people alone serving life without parole or sentences so long that they amount to the same thing. The United States, a single country, locks up a quarter of the world’s incarcerated people.

Despite our gross overreliance on prisons, it’s not clear what a prison term is supposed to accomplish. We don’t actually know why we punish. Apart from clichés—paying a debt to society; you do the crime, you do the time—there is no consensus in America on what constitutes retribution or atonement. What must someone who commits a violent crime do to get a second chance?

Parole hearings are opaque and riddled with inequities. They also wrestle with the most profound questions underlying the country’s values around crime and consequences. Parole presupposes that change—a correction—is possible. Parole is this extraordinary pivot point in the country’s shifting conceptions of justice. By studying the parole process, we can see how the United States created the crisis of mass incarceration, and how we might find a way out.

I had researched Johnnie for High-Risers, a previous book I wrote about Cabrini-Green—the crime he was in prison for had transformed the Chicago public housing complex. But while reporting and writing that book, I didn’t think to contact him. Some fifty years had passed since the crime. The truth is no one I spoke to even talked about a seventeen-year-old from 1970 as a person still sitting in a prison cell. The American criminal system fosters that disconnect. Prisons are remote and largely inaccessible, communication is made difficult and sometimes forbidden, and the tough-on-crime rhetoric that became ubiquitous during Johnnie’s and Michael’s incarcerations normalized the erasure of people like them. People were taken “off the streets,” “sent away,” tossed “out.” They were given “life.”

The delegate from the parole board asked if Johnnie wanted a message conveyed to the other board members. Johnnie pondered the question for a few moments.

“I ask the board to look at my totality of experience, my totality of growing from a seventeen-year-old to a sixty-eight-year-old.”

“I could do that,” the board member told him.

They said their goodbyes, and the boxes on the screen disappeared.



1The Ideal of a True Prison System

Michael Henderson borrowed the .38 snub-nose revolver from his younger brother. He tucked it into a pouch cinched around his waist, but all that evening the gun beckoned him like a secret he couldn’t keep. This was in the summer of 1971, on a Friday night, in East St. Louis, Illinois, a declining industrial city across the Mississippi from its Missouri namesake. Michael was eighteen and, at that point in his life, rarely thought beyond the next distraction. Some days he toted a briefcase to the local community college and pretended to study, a ruse to talk to female foreign exchange students. Once, he and his buddies found a Ford Galaxie with Florida plates and keys still in the ignition. They filled the tank and took turns racing the streets of East St. Louis, teasing whoever was behind the wheel that the police were around every corner. When a state trooper really did appear, Michael dashed off with the other boys. The officer fired at Michael’s back. One of the shots caught him in the thigh, passing clean through his leg, and he limped home. Michael had escaped the finality of the trooper’s extrajudicial justice. Later, at the hospital, he was arrested and eventually sent to juvenile detention.

On that summer night in 1971, with the juvie stint behind him, Michael and two friends ended up in front of the Delisa Lounge, a tavern that opened its basement on weekends for parties. By midnight, he was drunk on cheap wine. The occasional car zipped along State Street in front of them. The lounge’s parking lot was full but the crowd was downstairs, and Michael could hear the music thumping inside. A lone DJ on break leaned against his Cadillac, smoking a cigarette. Then a white kid pulled into the gravel lot in a black-and-red car with two Black teenage passengers. White people in that part of the city were increasingly rare, and Michael didn’t know the three boys. They said they were partying with friends and ran out of beer. Would Michael buy them more if they gave him the money? Here was the next distraction.

Michael purchased two six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a pack of Juicy Fruit. He passed the beer and the gum through the open car window. Then he asked for a tip. At least a couple of bucks. One of the passengers had gone inside to check out the party. The other one in the back seat said no. For Michael, that was the only cue he needed. It was reason enough to reveal his secret. He pulled the small gun from its pouch and held it inside the driver’s window.

“You going to pay me or what?” he snapped, hard-boiled.


Copyright © 2023 by Ben Austen