A new Republican-backed bill to reorganize the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles won Senate committee approval Wednesday after the sponsor said board leadership ignored for more than a year lawmakers’ questions and misled them about parole guidelines.
Sen. Clyde Chambliss’ Senate Bill 324 expands the board membership from three to five and requires Senate confirmation of each member. It also requires the board to select its chair. Currently, the governor does that.
“To me, this is probably the most important thing,” Chambliss told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. “The chair needs to be working with the board in conjunction with the board, not given this position and it doesn’t matter what anyone else on the board says.”
Chambliss is the chair of the Joint Legislative Prison Oversight Committee, which has had a series of public meetings in the last year about dangerous and crowded conditions in state prisons. In October, the committee called on Leigh Gwathney, the chair of the pardon and paroles board, to answer questions about parole rates.
That meeting was a “fiasco,” Chambliss said Wednesday. Gwathney didn’t answer questions that had been supplied to the board in January of 2024. It was only late last month, after inquiries from the Alabama Attorney General, that the oversight committee started getting answers, he said.
“If we’re going to have oversight committees, we need to be responded to directly, without delay,” Chambliss said in committee.
The bill received an 8-3 committee vote and moves to the Senate with eight legislative days remaining in the session.
The bill also adjusts the amount of time between parole hearings if parole is denied. For those convicted of Class A violent felonies, it would be 10 years.
“There people in prison that we know we’re not going to let out, yet victims and families have to go through this (parole hearing process) every five years,” he said.
The board is separate from the Bureau of Pardons and Paroles and is part of the legislative branch of government. It’s the sole legal authority under law to decide who receives parole. The bureau is an executive branch agency.
The board ended fiscal year 2024 with an average parole grant rate of 20%, its highest rate since 2019 after four consecutive years of declining rates.
Chambliss isn’t concerned about the parole rate — if offenders are violent and a risk to reoffend, they shouldn’t get out.
“My issue is that the board’s conformance with their own guidelines, guidelines which they can write and they can change, their conformance is 20% to their own guidelines,” he said. “… If we write the rules, we need to abide by the rules.”
Chambliss said Gwathney was not forthcoming in the October meeting about the board’s ability to revise the guidelines and the board is actually several years delayed in revamping them.
He said the board needs to do their job as directed by law.
“If they’re not going to do that and they’re not going to follow up with our Joint Prison Oversight Committee and they’re going to think that they can do whatever they want, here we are,” Chambliss said.
There was not a public hearing on the bill Wednesday and no one from the board spoke before the committee. The board did not return requests for comment on Wednesday.
Gov. Kay Ivey appointed Gwathney board chair in 2019.
“The governor’s No. 1 priority this session is public safety,” Ivey spokeswoman Gina Maiola told ADN when asked about the bill. “She will carefully review each bill that reaches her desk with that priority in mind.”
Sen. Lance Bell, R-Riverside, called last October’s meeting with Gwathney an “embarrassment,” but also said he’s seen other boards and agencies skirt the Legislature’s authority. He voted no on Chambliss’ bill and said he’s considering a broader bill for next year’s session.
“If we appropriate money, there should be oversight,” Bell said. “When they come and they won’t answer your questions, there has to be consequences.”
Sen. Bobby Singleton, D-Greensboro, is on the prison oversight committee and thanked Chambliss for his bill. He said the October meeting was frustrating and something needs to be done.
Sen. April Weaver, R-Brierfield, was one of the no votes. She said she supported the concept of more accountability, but some parts of the bill might be “a vehicle to get a more lenient board, which I don’t agree with.”
Chambliss is not the first lawmaker to attempt to reform the parole board. Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, has attempted to address its low parole grant rates in several sessions. His latest bill was approved in committee but has been pending in the House without a vote since mid-February.