ABSTRACT
In Pennsylvania, offenders sentenced to maximum prison terms of 2 years or longer are considered for parole under the authority of the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole after they have completed half of their maximum sentence. The decision to grant or withhold parole is based on a four-step procedure beginning with a summary recommendation from the correctional staff, proceeding through a “parole case analyst” and then to a “parole interviewer.” This interviewer is either a board member or a specialized hearing examiner who has access to the previous reports of the staff and the analyst, and who makes a final recommendation to the parole board, which has the ultimate responsibility for the decision. One thousand thirty-five prison inmates were interviewed for parole between October 1977 and May 1978, yielding 743 cases in which the parole board made final decisions, of which 84.7% were to grant parole. In all but one of these cases, the decision of the parole board was identical to the final recommendation of the interviewer, who also made four- or five-point ratings on: (a) prognosis for supervision, (b) risk of future crime, (c) risk of future dangerous crime, and (d) assaultive potential. On the basis of a 1-year follow-up study, J. Carroll, Winer, Coates, Galegher, and Alibrio (1982) were able to compare the prediction of the parolee’s behavior based on the interviewer ratings with its prediction based on simple background factors, such as number of previous convictions. (These factors also were available to the interviewers and were shown to be correlated with their clinical judgments.)
