Juneteenth 2026: The Parole Board’s Chains

Why the New York State parole board has everything to do with Juneteenth

On June seventeenth, I sat in Central Synagogue in Midtown Manhattan watching an improv group called Drama Club perform. They work with systems-impacted youth, kids who could have ended up where I just came from. The room was alive. Everyone was laughing, celebrating. I recognized two young men from a performance I’d seen months earlier in Brooklyn. What struck me wasn’t just their talent. It was how much more comfortable they’d become on stage, how they’d grown in such a short time. I know something about that growth. I did prison theater myself, fifteen years into my sentence, and it changed me. After the show, I found them in the lobby and told them I recognized them, that they were amazing, that I was watching them get better. They were so happy to hear it.

Two days later, it’s June nineteenth. My first Juneteenth as a free man. I won’t equate myself with the freed slaves of Juneteenth. I’m a white dude who grew up privileged on Long Island’s North Shore. But today I think about my friends still inside. One friend in particular has served his minimum. He’s gone before the parole board again and again, only to be denied. Over and over. He’s done amazing things since his conviction. The nature of his crime was horrific, tragic. That won’t change. But he has changed. The board doesn’t see it that way.

Juneteenth exists because Texas refused to act. The Emancipation Proclamation came down in 1863. Enslaved people in Texas didn’t find out until June 19th, 1865, two years later, because the state simply wouldn’t honor it. The order had come. Texas just didn’t comply. My friend is living that same refusal. He’s served his minimum. The legal threshold has been met. But New York’s parole board keeps citing the nature of his crime, something that happened, something that cannot change, as the reason to deny him. Just like Texas. The proclamation means nothing if the people in power refuse to honor it.

That refusal is baked into the machinery. Parole release rates in New York collapsed from 42 percent in 2018 to 33 percent in 2022. The gap between white people and people of color getting released jumped from 19 points to 32 points in just a few years. But the rot goes deeper than the numbers.

I’ve read parole transcripts. I’ve sat with men who came back from the board shaking. Commissioners literally ask applicants: what do you think the local politicians will say if we release you? I watched a man who’d transformed himself get denied because his victim’s family had a louder voice than his decade of work. Who the victim is matters more than who the person has become. A white man who kills a homeless person might get two to six years and walk. That same man, drunk driving, kills a high school girl: denied, denied, denied, denied, denied. I have examples of both. It’s not justice. It’s theater. But unlike Drama Club’s improv, the ending is already decided before anyone walks in the room.

The system also runs on an algorithm called COMPAS, made by Northpointe, now Equivant. The company claims it doesn’t use race as a variable. But bias doesn’t work that way. It seeps through the data the algorithm does use, prior records, social factors, all of it correlated with race. Black defendants are nearly twice as likely to be misclassified as high risk. We’ve replaced human bias with algorithmic bias and called it progress.

Two major reform bills have sat in the New York State Legislature since 2022. The Elder Parole bill and the Fair and Timely Parole Act. The Fair and Timely Parole Act just advanced out of committee in May. Now it’s in finance. Slow-walking it while people rot inside.

The system marked me in ways I’ll carry forever. The parole board especially. But I know what to do with that now. Every tool I learned inside, every tactic, every way I’ve learned to read a room and move through a system, plus the new tools available to me now, the AI, the platforms, the networks I’ve built on the outside. I deploy it all against this machinery. Going feral on it. That’s purpose.

But purpose doesn’t dissolve the weight. When my phone rings and it’s someone calling from inside, I drop everything. Every time. There’s a tightness that comes with it, something that lives in my chest and doesn’t fully leave. I’m eight months free. I’m building. And every single day I carry the fact that he’s still waiting. That the order has come down. And Texas still won’t move.

AUTHOR BIO: Artist, writer, and dog nerd. Home after 26 years. Documenting it all. Author of Concrete Carnival (Permanent Press, 2016). Currently writing The Squeeze Machine. 2026 Haymarket Books Writing Freedom Fellow.