California parole grant rate falls below 25% as hearing opportunities expand

California’s Board of Parole Hearings approved fewer than one in four incarcerated people who appeared before it in 2025, a sharp decline from a 39% approval rate in 2018, according to a CalMatters analysis distributed by the Associated Press on Wednesday. The drop came even as the state expanded parole eligibility and increased annual hearings from 5,226 in 2018 to a peak of 9,017 in 2022, settling at roughly 8,000 annually by 2023.

The trend runs counter to California’s stated goal of shifting its prison model toward rehabilitation and reintegration. Experts consulted by CalMatters said no single cause explains the decline, pointing instead to a rapidly aging incarcerated population, reduced urgency among younger offenders without life sentences, the particular difficulty sex offenders face in demonstrating transformation, and a growing digital record — including trust-account activity tied to restitution avoidance — that parole commissioners now examine with increased scrutiny.

An aging population that struggles at hearings

The share of California parole hearings involving people aged 60 or older has grown from 19% in 2013 to 32% currently, said Lilli Paratore, director of legal services for UnCommon Law, an organization that represents parole candidates at no cost.

“The number of people who are now elderly parole-eligible is going up in a significant way,” Paratore said. “In 2013, only 19% of hearings were 60-plus, but now 32% of hearings are people who are 60-plus, and of course that just mirrors the aging prison population.”

About 19,000 California prisoners are 55 or older, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s state budget proposal released this month. Many of these individuals began serving their sentences decades ago, when parole opportunities were scarce, and were held at remote facilities with limited rehabilitative programs. As a result, they may struggle to articulate to commissioners the insight, remorse and accountability that a parole grant requires — and repeated denials can leave them more discouraged rather than better prepared.

Less urgency for some younger offenders

For offenders who committed crimes before age 26 without a life sentence, expanded parole eligibility allows them to appear before the board after 15 years. But those prisoners also have a predetermined release date, which parole experts said reduces the urgency some feel to pursue rehabilitation during their early years of incarceration.

People serving life sentences for juvenile offenses, by contrast, typically must serve at least 20 to 25 years before their first hearing, giving them more time to mature and a stronger motivation to prepare. Their parole opportunity functions as the sole path to freedom rather than a chance at an earlier exit.

High bar for sex offenders

Sex offenses generate more scrutiny at parole hearings than other categories of crime. Jennifer Shaffer, former executive officer of the Board of Parole Hearings, told CalMatters that rehabilitative programming within prisons rarely addresses the specific psychological dynamics underlying these offenses.

“There’s so many different types of people who commit sex crimes for a large variety of reasons and successful programming for those folks has to be tailored to that specific issue,” Shaffer said. “So you’ll have, for instance, sadists, people who actually get physically turned on by torturing people. That’s very different from somebody who has anger issues and expresses them through basically sexually dominating somebody.”

Sex offenders face greater difficulty clearing the psychological risk assessments that parole commissioners rely on, making it harder to satisfy the board’s public-safety standard.

Digital monitoring and restitution avoidance

California began providing free electronic tablets to prisoners in 2021, enabling digital monitoring of phone calls and text messages. Parole commissioners now have access to a broader set of records — including visitor logs, medical records and trust-account activity — than they reviewed in prior years.

Paratore said the expansion of information the board examines has outpaced any clear framework for interpreting it. “In the last few years, the world of information the board is looking at is growing — even though that information isn’t necessarily related to violence risk,” she said. “What they think they need to consider has just grown without any guardrails and resulting in more people being denied parole because the board does not know how to properly interpret that information. This is especially true of medical records.”

Trust-account activity has drawn particular scrutiny. Courts can order restitution payable from prisoners’ wages and incoming funds, with 50% deducted from any payment until the debt is satisfied. Some prisoners have directed incoming money through other inmates’ accounts to reduce that deduction — arrangements that are now more visible through digital records. Because parole commissioners expect prisoners to demonstrate remorse and awareness of their crimes’ impact on victims, evidence of restitution avoidance undercuts that showing.

Vanessa Nelson-Sloane, director of Life Support Alliance, an advocacy group for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people serving life sentences, said she believes restitution avoidance is the central factor behind the declining grant rate.

“The restitution issue is the only thing I can think of to really explain the decline in the grant rate,” Nelson-Sloane said. “I am so sure that this is it because that’s all I hear about from people who are getting denied — restitution, restitution, restitution.”

Context

Despite the declining grant rate, California’s paroled population has a recidivism rate of less than 3%, with fewer than 1% returning to custody for crimes involving violence against another person, according to the state. The state’s overall prison population has fallen significantly over the same period, from 128,000 in 2018 to approximately 90,000 as of early 2026.

The annual number of parole hearings remains well above its 2018 level, and California has continued to incentivize rehabilitative programming, substance abuse treatment and higher education for incarcerated people. The declining approval rate indicates that expanded access to hearings has not translated into a higher rate of releases.