Parole Denied Over
Affection For Wife
By: Downing Keyworthy

We’ve received the following email from the distraught wife of one of the thousands of Pennsylvania prisoners who has been unreasonably denied parole by the clowns1 on the Parole Board. We’ve taken the liberty of keeping the individuals’ names private and of slightly editing the wife’s letter. We’ve added a few footnotes to help to explain more about the Pennsylvania parole/prison system. It’s cruel and unreasonable.

My husband2 is incarcerated at SCI-Coal Township.3 He’s been incarcerated for 6 years on a technical parole violation4 when he was sentenced to do only 1 year.5 His original charge was burglary and conspiracy of burglary for which he was sentenced to 3 to 20 years.6

Every year when he comes up for re-parole, he’s denied because of some dumb write-up.7 He was write-up free for 2 years, but in April they wrote him up for being overly affectionate with me, his wife! He spent 45 days in the hole for that. I must stress to you that we weren’t caught having sex or anything like that.

When did being "overly affectionate" with your wife become a crime?

My husband saw the Parole Board in August. He had completed all of their programs. The Board had received handwritten letters from his family and me stating that he would have family support on parole. He had a $16/hour job awaiting him and, also, he was accepted into Computer Tech where he would have been studying visual communications.

They sent him his Green Sheet8 back in September denying parole once again because of the write-up he got in April for being overly affectionate with his wife. He won’t be reviewed again for a year. They claimed that they wanted his clearance9 to come down.

What’s mighty funny is that his clearance did dome down and, a few days after his parole was denied, he was offered a job working outside the prison. So, in other words, my husband is good enough to work for them outside the prison, but he isn’t good enough to be home with his wife and family.

We have a son who suffers from epilepsy. The Make A Wish Foundation was going to send us to Disney World. Now that my husband isn’t getting paroled, our son doesn’t want to go. And, I’m having so many problems with him.

We've been through so much with the prison system and it’s getting worse every year. If you can offer any support on how to get my husband out of that hell-hole, it will be greatly appreciated.

Footnotes

1 Sorry, they aren’t really clowns. They’re arrogant, irresponsible extremist political hacks and bullies. The Chairman, who gets $95,000.00 a year in our tax money for failing to do his job, is William F. Ward, 3101 North Front Street, Harrisburg, PA 17101-1661.
2 The names of the individuals are being withheld in deference to their privacy. If you wish to contact the writer, email us and we’ll pass along your message.
3 SCI-Coal Township is a prison with an extremely bad reputation for brutality, racial and religious bigotry, mismanagement and the poor caliber of help to prisoners. The staff is even worse than at some of the other prisons.
4 A “technical” violation of parole is a violation of one of the MANY conditions of parole such as changing address, changing job, entering a bar, and so forth. It is not the commission of another crime.
5 The writer means that following his technical violation, the man was slapped back into prison for a year, but that punishment has grown into 6 years; a fairly typical injustice by the Board.
6 With a sentence like 3 to 20 years, it’s clear that the sentencing judge wanted the man to do a little prison time followed by a lengthy period under parole supervision, where (the judge falsely thought) he would get practical guidance as opposed to imprisonment.
7 A "write-up" is a charge of violation of any of the hundreds of obscure prison rules.
8 A "Green Sheet" is the report from the Parole Board to the prisoner. It’s actually green paper, not green as in a green light to go home. Seven times out of ten, the Green Sheet denies parole or re—parole.
9 The prison system has a scheme of custody levels from 1 (best) through 5 (worst). The theory, but certainly not the practice, is that a prisoner works to become a "Level 1" where he can work in the community. Of the more than 36,000 prisoners in the state only about 250 (about one half of one percent are Level 1.

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