By Jennifer Gonnerman, The New Yorker, November 25, 2019
Earlier this year, the Parole Preparation Project put out a call for volunteers, and more than a hundred people applied. Many were law students and lawyers, but there was also a Planet Fitness employee, a pediatric I.C.U. nurse, a professor of philosophy, a software engineer, a waiter, and a translator. Parole Prep invited them to an orientation, and, one Wednesday evening last April, some eighty people assembled in a lecture hall at New York University School of Law. Most were in their twenties or thirties. Three-quarters were female. A few people carried reusable water bottles; one older woman walked in with a cane.
Michelle Lewin, who is thirty-two years old and the executive director of Parole Prep, stood at the front of the room, wearing a loose-fitting brown dress and worn work boots. She explained that Parole Prep requires an eight-to-twelve-month commitment. Each volunteer is assigned to a team of two or three people, then matched up with someone who has been incarcerated for decades, whom the team helps prepare for an upcoming interview before the parole board. Lewin talked about Parole Prep’s “values as a project.” “Nobody should be judged by the worst thing they’ve ever done,” she said. Then she introduced two men, Kevin Bartley and Anthony Dixon, whom she called “my uncles and my dear friends.”
Bartley, a sixty-seven-year-old man with a shaved head and a confident demeanor, spoke first. “I’m not a law student, like some of y’all,” he said. “But I am an expert on corrections. What makes me an expert? I did thirty-seven years. I came home nine months ago. I went in at twenty-eight, came out at sixty-five. I was denied parole twelve times.” He talked about his experience with Parole Prep. “I had two of the best volunteers. They were extraordinary,” he said. “I think I would still be inside if not for Parole Prep. This would’ve been my thirty-eighth year.”
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