IN NEW YORK AND NATION, CHANCES FOR PAROLE SHRINKS

It has become a familiar story: a felon is released early from prison
and commits another crime, prompting calls for the elimination of
parole. But in New York parole is already tougher than it was just a
decade ago.

Inmates have a much smaller chance of being released on parole now
than they did in the early 1990's, state figures show, and for the
most violent inmates, the chance of early parole has almost been eliminated.

Nationwide, parole has been tightened or abandoned as prison policies
have shifted from rehabilitation to punishment and prevention. In the
last 15 years, 27 states have modified their systems, and 14 have done
away with early parole release altogether. Nationwide, states are
requiring prisoners to serve more of their sentences.

New York falls squarely in the middle of this trend, eliminating
parole for violent crimes, but maintaining it for other types of offenses.

Gov. George E. Pataki, a Republican, has said he would like to join
other states in doing away with early parole for all felons. And while
his legislation to do so has been blocked in the Democratic-controlled
Assembly, Mr. Pataki has used his appointment powers to put people on
the State Parole Board who believe in greater scrutiny of felony
offenders, especially violent ones.

Since 1995, while calling for tougher prison policies, the governor
has named 15 of the board's 16 members. "Those are people that share
that philosophy," said Katherine N. Lapp, the governor's chief adviser
on criminal justice.

Through the 1990's, the board approved first-time applications for
parole at a lower rate each year, a trend that accelerated after Mr.
Pataki took office five years ago. Before then, New York State law
provided minimum and maximum sentences for all inmates. When the
minimum sentence was reached, the inmate was allowed to apply for
parole. The board had discretion to grant it based on good behavior in
jail and other evidence of rehabilitation.

In 1991, the New York board granted parole to 66.7 percent of the
22,604 inmates who applied when their minimum sentences were up, and
when Mr. Pataki took office in 1995, the rate was 63.5 percent. By
1999, it had dropped to 46.6 percent of inmates seeking parole for the
first time.

After a denial, the parole board can require an inmate to wait up to
two years before reapplying. The approval rates for later appearances
have fallen by similar amounts.

Parole has dropped most sharply for inmates convicted of violent
crimes like murder, assault, rape and robbery. For these criminals,
the releaserate fell from 24 percent of applicants at initial
interviews in 1991 to 8 percent in 1998 (the latest year for which
detailed figures were available from the parole board). For other
categories of violent crimes, the drop matched the overall decrease
for all inmates.

For nonviolent felons, the decrease has been slight: 76 percent of
people convicted of drug offenses were paroled after an initial
interview in 1991, compared with 73 percent in 1998; parole rates for
property offenders dropped a similar amount.

In 1994, Congress helped to encourage tougher state parole release
rules when it approved additional financing for prison construction
and later provided more money for states that changed sentencing rules
to require inmates to serve 85 percent of their sentences.

According to a report issued last year by the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, 27 states, including New York, have passed laws that
require violent felons to serve 85 percent of their sentences, and 13
more have passed different versions of the laws.

The bureau also reported that parole has been tightened in states that
have not moved to fixed-length prison terms. It found that parole
boards were requiring inmates convicted of most types of crimes to
serve a greater proportion of their sentences and that the percentage
of inmates released early on parole decreased through the 1990's.

In 1990, slightly more than 40 percent of inmates leaving prison were
released early by a parole board. By 1997, the last year reported to
the bureau, 27 percent of prisoners left by order of a parole board.

New York has made two major changes to its parole laws since Mr.
Pataki took office. In 1995, the Legislature passed a law that
requires all people convicted of a second violent felony to serve 85
percent of their sentences. And in 1998, the Legislature passed what
is known as Jenna's Law, which requires all violent felons to serve 85
percent of their terms.

Those laws were not retroactive, so their true effects have not yet
been seen. Most of the felons sentenced under the new rules have yet
to reach the upper range of their sentences, and most prisoners
appearing before the parole board were sentenced before the laws took
effect.

Ms. Lapp said the governor would like to replace the sentencing ranges
for all crimes with fixed sentences. Under such a system, similar to
the one used in federal courts and other states, like Virginia, an
inmate would receive a fixed sentence and could reduce prison time by
up to 15 percent through good behavior.

James B. Flateau, a spokesman for the State Department of Correctional
Services, said the state planned to allow parole rates for nonviolent
inmates to remain steady, while creating greater restraints on violent
criminals. In the long run, the policy is intended to increase the
proportion of violent offenders in the state prison system, he said.
Statistics from the department, however, do not indicate that any such
shift has yet occurred. The percentage of violent offenders in the
prison population has remained relatively constant, 52 percent to 54
percent, from 1990 to 1999.

Prisoner advocacy groups have criticized the governor's parole policy,
saying it increases tension in the prisons and does little to increase
public safety. Last winter, inmates in several New York prisons
distributed literature calling for prisoners to stop working in prison
jobs to protest changes in the state correction policies. Complaints
about the state'sincreasingly strict parole standards were foremost
among their grievances.

While incidents like the planned strike would seem to indicate greater
tension, state statistics do not show increases in violence or
disciplinary infractions on a per capita basis. Likewise, in federal
penitentiaries there has been no corresponding increase in problems
since parole was eliminated for federal crimes, according to the
United States Bureau of Prisons.

But some prison experts say New York may be in the more delicate
position of keeping parole while making it more difficult for inmates
to receive it.

"In some ways, the worst position to be in, in terms of morale and
prison management, is to have the theoretical possibility of parole
but not use it," said Michael P. Jacobson, a professor at John Jay
College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan who has served as both city
correction commissioner and commissioner for probation and parole.

Prisoner advocates also say that parole systems originally held out
the possibility that inmates who had changed their lives in prison
could be released early without endangering the community. Claudette
R. Spencer, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society's Prisoners' Rights
Project, said, "Parole recognizes rehabilitation; it recognizes
forgiveness."

The advocates point to people like Theodore Haywood, who was 25 when
he went to prison for robbery and murder. Mr. Haywood served 25 years
in prison before he became eligible for parole in 1998. In that time,
he had earned three college degrees and worked for four volunteer
groups. He also completed a master's degree from the New York
Theological Institute. At his parole hearing, the warden asked the
board to let Mr. Haywood out.

"From the person who had committed the crime to the person who went
before the parole board, I was totally different," said Mr. Haywood,
who now works with prisoners for Episcopal Social Services in
Manhattan as a conflict resolution specialist.

Julio Medina, who runs a program that works with former inmates, said
there were prisoners who had made great strides during their sentences
who found it difficult to obtain parole because of their original
crime. "They are denied for the one thing they will never be able to
change: the nature of their offense," he said.