By rssfeeds-admin 
Andre Carroll started representing Philadelphia’s 201st district in the Pennsylvania General Assembly on September 20, 2024, following a special election to fill a seat vacated by state Rep. Stephen Kinsey. In the 18 months since he took office, the 35-year-old Democratic state lawmaker has wasted no time proposing changes he believes would have made a difference in his own life and in the lives of his fellow Pennsylvanians.
Carroll maintains that electing people with lived experience in poverty, the criminal justice system and public education is important to assuring that the commonwealth makes wise choices and favorably impacts the lives of everyday people.
A primary focus for Carroll is the Department of Corrections.
“Recognizing that a person like myself, who had experience, who had trauma as a kid, having my father be incarcerated the first 20 years of my life. I’ve always felt compelled and interested in how we reform the criminal justice system.”
Carroll refers to himself as “a product of the war on drugs.” His father’s long prison sentence dates back to the last century when Regan era minimum sentences coupled with Clinton era “three-strikes” legislation disproportionately locked urban offenders away for lifetimes.
Consequently, in addition to lengthy prison sentences, Pennsylvania’s parole statutes keep individuals under state supervision for inordinately long periods of time. So much so that, according to the ACLU of Pennsylvania, adults in the state are three times more likely to be under criminal justice supervision – probation or parole – than their counterparts across the nation.
“It hinders people’s ability to be able to get housing and be able to get employment, which hinders a person’s ability to be able to move forward in their life.” – State Rep. Andre Carroll
Consequently, the Keystone State – with the highest incarceration rate in the Northeast – has the nation’s second highest percentage of persons (second only to Georgia) on probation and parole.
One of the bills Rep. Carroll’s proposed this first full term, HB 605, deals with the drag Pennsylvania’s punitive system puts on people who have been released from jail earlier in their sentence. “One of the things that I recognize is that things like probation or parole, it hinders people’s ability to be able to get housing and be able to get employment, which hinders a person’s ability to be able to move forward in their life.”
And probation and parole doesn’t just look bad to prospective landlords and employers – who may or may not choose to work with a parolee – it literally limits where people can live or work.
Kurt Danysh, Director of Cumberland House – a peer led re-entry program for recently incarcerated men, explains the barriers to work that paroled individuals face. “I’ve had people that find jobs at places that have a bar. They got a job, and it’s not in the bar that they’re going to work, but the [business] has a bar, so they can’t work there. They can’t work in casinos.” Not even as a janitor, Danysh says. And, in addition to working restrictions, there are living restrictions.
Some parolees can’t return to the county where they lived before confinement, others are ordered to return home and not allowed to leave.
And because parole is considered a privilege – at any moment, a person’s parole could be suspended, and the individual returned to prison. That includes Danysh, who is on parole himself – even though he runs a multi-million dollar re-entry program.
The advocate explained how simple a violation could be. “If you have a box cutter because of your job, and you come home from work and put that box cutter on your nightstand, if your parole agent comes by and finds that on your nightstand,” the parole officer could immediately return that worker to prison. “Because it should be in a toolbox, if it’s a tool.”
Reuben Jones, Executive Director of Frontline Dads, after serving 15 years of a 40-year sentence, has been on parole for more than 23 years. In the time he’s been out of prison, Jones went to college and grad school becoming a clinical therapist and working for social justice issues. And even though he was awarded a Presidential Service award in 2016 by President Obama – he still pays his $40 a month supervision fee and must ask permission to move freely throughout the commonwealth and the country.
Jones confided that it’s nerve-wracking – even after all these years – to live under state supervision. “I mean, it’s restrictive and is invasive, even though right now my checking-in is minimal. But the fact that we still live under this cloud of reincarceration. So, any violation, any infraction, anytime you piss somebody off the wrong way – which as a social justice advocate, I tend to do.”
Conceivably, if his work rubs someone the wrong way – Jones is vulnerable. He knows the system has the power at any time, to revoke his freedom. Jones has seen bad things happen to other people. “It’s knowing how unfair it is and how many atrocities have occurred in the different traps and pitfalls. So, I’m always, you know, speaking out publicly, agitating for change. So that’s not a good position to be in when you’re on parole. It’s uncomfortable, you know.”
The hardest part of all of it, Jones said, was pulling his life together once he’d gotten out. “It was tough in a lot of different ways. By the time I went to school, I was in my 40s. I had that stigma of being an ‘ex offender’ – I’d been away from school for a number of years. Financially it was tough. I was investing in myself. I had a job, so I had to work, go to school and to be a social justice advocate.”
Jones is glad he did it. “It was emotionally draining. It was socially challenging. It was a financial burden. But it was an investment that I felt was important.”
Being a parolee isn’t just socially challenging, it’s expensive. And not just for individuals in supervision. Jones has paid more than $10,000 into the system to be supervised. Parolees pay approximately $40 a month to be supervised. But it costs the Pennsylvania taxpayers an average of five times that amount to run the parole system – per parolee – for the same amount of time.
And often, that expense is unnecessary.
According to Danysh, after five years without re-offending, recidivism drops below 3 percent. “From a taxpayer’s perspective, we shouldn’t be wasting money supervising people that don’t require supervision anymore. People that we know statistically will not violate parole anymore. It doesn’t make dollars or cents.”
How many dollars and cents?
In Bucks County alone, the 2025 budget for adult supervision exceeded $11 million and supervised about 5,300 people. Rep. Carroll and other advocates know that both those numbers could be reduced if parolees could petition a judge for early release from parole and/or probation.
Saleem Holbrook, faculty member at U. Penn Law School and Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, still has to ask permission to go to Geneva for human rights conferences. And if Carroll and his dozens of co-sponsors don’t succeed in changing the state parole system – he’ll be asking permission for the rest of his life. Only a handful of states – Pennsylvania is one of them – sentence people to parole for the rest of their lives.
That’s a lifetime of paying his $40 each month and a lifetime of Pennsylvania taxpayers paying $200 a month to monitor him.
HB 605 would allow Holbrook, Jones and Danysh – people who have become assets to their communities – to petition a judge to put an end to state supervision. “This bill, this legislation, is definitely smart legislation. It is basically just a pathway off of long term, state parole after a set amount of years,” Holbrook elaborated. “It’s not like it’s something automatic. It’s earned.”
Danysh concurred, “There should be an encouragement for people to do well, not just a punishment when they don’t.”
For now, therapist Jones works diligently to help others – like himself – remain free. “I’m counseling people who were struggling with addiction. I’ve turned my attention to the work that I do with young people, around violence prevention and around recidivism. And working with men and women coming out of incarceration, trying to help rebuild their lives.”
Jones will keep doing that, while he supports Rep. Carroll’s efforts to rebuild the system. Until then, Carroll says, “We’re keeping people literally incarcerated while still being on the inside of our community. The aim for this bill is to be able to rectify some of those sentencing processes that have held people back for decades.”
Carroll’s plan? “What I really wanted to do in this process was to be able to fast track people’s progress. Rightfully so. To be able to give them their freedom, their total freedom back.”
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