MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles denied parole for three out of four people deemed low-risk by state assessments in 2025, according to a report released by the ACLU of Alabama on Wednesday.
Those with a low-risk assessment were granted parole at a rate 7.9 percentage points higher than those classified as high risk in 2025, the smallest gap in recent history, the report said.
The ACLU of Alabama’s Parole Watch Report took data from the board’s monthly and annual statistical reports as well as information collected during in-person parole hearings to analyze Alabama’s parole system. The report released this week was a follow-up to one from 2023.
The three-person board determines the risk of paroling Alabama inmates through a set of guidelines that take into account several factors, including the severity of the person’s conviction and behavior while incarcerated, such as infractions and participation in risk-reduction, education and employment programs. These guidelines have been recently updated, with a revision in 2025 and legislation in 2026 that added educational participation, employment and expectations of low recidivism into the calculation.
But the guidelines aren’t binding, and board members do not have to follow the recommendations they produce.
Alison Mollman, legal director of the ACLU of Alabama, said that though it’s sometimes uncomfortable to attach numbers to parole decisions via the points system, the board should focus more on the quantitative data and less on the opposition that shows up to parole hearings.
“It’s very, very reliable data that tells you about someone’s likelihood to reoffend,” Mollman said. “When a parole board member is looking at someone’s risk classification score and is saying that they’re a low-risk person, that they’re a person that’s incarcerated at work release, that they’re regularly going into our communities every day to work, they should have confidence that those people are safe to return home, and they should have confidence in voting to grant them parole.”
Although many low-risk offenders were denied parole, the organization recognized in the report that parole rates have increased in the past three years.
The board came under fire in 2023 as the parole grant rate hit a recent low of 8% under former board chair Leigh Gwathney. Parole rates have more than doubled since then but fell 3 percentage points between 2025 and 2026, Mollman said.
“Those few percentage points mean dozens and dozens of people,” Mollman said. “While it might not be statistically significant, it’s absolutely significant for the family members who don’t get to bring their loved ones home when they’re denied parole, so I think that’s a big piece we wanted to highlight is there’s improvement, but it’s still not where it needs to be.”
The Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles, which manages the board, said in a statement that the report “fails to provide a full picture of parole data” available on its website. Six hundred thirteen inmates were granted parole in fiscal year ’26, a 4% increase from fiscal year 2025 and 8% from fiscal year 2024, the bureau said.
The bureau also highlighted that it has adhered to its own guidelines a majority of the time.
“The Board maintains a concurrence rate, or the percentage of cases where the Board’s decision matched that of the suggested outcome from the parole guidelines, above 85 percent for FY 26,” the statement said. “This indicates the Board is indeed considering the revised parole guidelines as part of its parole decision making process.”
The report also mentions that racial disparities between white and Black incarcerated people have improved over time but remain.
White inmates had a parole grant rate of 20.9% in fiscal year 2026 compared with Black inmates’ at 18.4%. Those rates were both down from fiscal year 2025’s rates of 25.8% and 20.3%, respectively.
Individual voting records
The ACLU also published in the report the individual voting records of several board members over the last five years.
The report does not include a voting record for two of the three current members. It only notes that board member Gabrelle Simmons has a parole grant voting record of 28%. Board Chair Hal Nash was appointed by Gov. Kay Ivey in July 2025, and board member Jennifer Conway joined the board in July. Simmons has served on the board since August 2023.
The bureau, in its statement, noted that most of the members listed are no longer on the board.
“The data presented in the ACLU’s Parole Watch Report fails to account for current composition of the Board — failing to include two sitting members, one of whom is the current board chairman and has served for over a year,” the statement said.
Gwathney, the former board chair, had an overall grant rate of 7.6%, which the report called “abysmally low.”
Mollman said that the ACLU of Alabama started cataloguing data in 2023 because it was difficult to obtain information about the specifics of parole decisions.
“They do not provide public data about how individual board members vote,” Mollman said. “It’s not coalesced in an easily digestible manner and board minutes (do not list) who the opposition and support is. So we found it incredibly valuable in the summer of 2023 to attend every parole hearing, and though we couldn’t keep up with that level of staff involvement, we made a commitment to make sure someone was there weekly over the last three years.”
The presence of opposition
Beyond the risk assessment and individuals’ voting records, the report highlights how the presence of opposition at parole hearings makes incarcerated people much less likely to be granted parole.
Across 892 parole hearings between June 2023 and November 2025, the board’s grant rate when opposition was present was 12.7%, compared with 47.5% when opposition was not, the report said.
The lack of a speaker in support also hurts potential parolees’ chances. One person out of 109 was granted parole when no supporters testified, per the report. Those incarcerated in Alabama’s prison system cannot serve as their own supporters, as the state is one of only two nationwide that does not allow inmates to attend their own parole hearings, the ACLU says.
Sen. Will Barfoot, R-Pike Road, carried legislation during this year’s legislative session to allow inmates to attend their hearings virtually. The bill passed unanimously in both chambers of the Legislature but died after lawmakers didn’t act on an executive amendment on the last day of session.
The report highlights similar legislation as “common sense reform.” Mollman said it will be a top legislative priority for the ACLU of Alabama heading into the 2027 legislative session, which begins in February.
“I think it would go a long way to ensure that we’re in line with the rest of the country in terms of how we ensure that incarcerated people are able to appear at their important proceedings, but beyond that, I think it would go a long way to ensure reliability and better confidence in parole outcomes,” Mollman said.
The report also recommends that the state incorporate restructured entry programs similar to ones operating in Iowa and Texas into Alabama’s correctional system.