They raised money and hired an organizer. With supporters on the outside, five members of the team went on to form a group called Parole Illinois. The debaters drafted a bill that would entitle everyone in prison in Illinois to a parole review. One explanation came from the head of the Illinois Department of Corrections at the time, who said the coach didn’t follow “safety and security practices.”īut the team had already captured the attention of several of the visiting legislators. The coach was barred from entering any state prison in Illinois. Weeks after the public debate, the prison disbanded the Stateville team. “Just as prisoners must change and reform, so must the system,” Mr. He was convicted of the double murder under the legal theory of “accountability,” which allows prosecutors to charge accomplices or associates as if they committed the actual offense. Parham was a teenager in a gang when a friend killed two people during a drug deal. “Was I a monster who threatened the very fabric of society like the natural-life sentence suggests?” he asked. Yet in prisons across the country, more than 200,000 people are serving life or virtual life sentences of 50 years or more. Oscar Parham, whose geniality had earned him the nickname Smiley, said that the most severe punishments should be restricted to the most egregious offenders, to the rare mass murderer or serial killer. Among the others, the shortest sentence was 40 years. Dorado said that without parole he and his teammates were likely to die in prison. Arrest rates for both violent and nonviolent crimes generally peak when people are in their late teens and early 20s, and from there criminal behavior drops steadily. The Bureau of Justice Statistics and countless studies show that Mr. Raul Dorado, who was 20 years into a life sentence, told the politicians that he and the other men on the debate team were imprisoned between the ages of 16 and 26.
Around twenty of the lawmakers showed up in the prison’s theater. Their coach, Katrina Burlet, who also led a team at an evangelical liberal arts college, invited the 177 members of the Illinois General Assembly to attend the debate. Under current law - Illinois abolished discretionary parole in 1978 for all future offenders - none of the 14 members of the Stateville Correctional Center debate team would ever get to appear before a parole board.
In 2018, at a maximum-security prison an hour outside of Chicago, a debate team gathered on a stage to argue the merits of reinstating parole in Illinois.
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