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Parole in the United States

Parole is the early supervised release of a prison inmate. In most states, mere good conduct while incarcerated in and of itself does not necessarily guarantee that an inmate will be paroled; other factors may enter into the decision to grant or deny parole, most commonly the establishment of a permanent residence and immediate, gainful employment or some other clearly visible means of self-support upon release (such as Social Security if the prisoner is old enough to qualify). Many states now permit sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (such as for murder), and any prisoner not sentenced to either this or the death penalty will eventually have the right to petition for release (one state - Alaska - maintains neither the death penalty nor life imprisonment without parole as sentencing options).

Parole is a controversial political topic in the United States; during elections, politicians whose administrations parole any large number of prisoners (or, perhaps, one notorious criminal) are typically attacked by their opponents as being "soft on crime". The US Department of Justice (DOJ) stated in 2004 that about 60% of parolees completed their sentences successfully, while 15% were returned to prison, and 4% absconded. These statistics, the DOJ says, are relatively unchanged since 1995; even so, some states (including New York) have abolished parole altogether for violent felons, and the federal government abolished it in 1984 for all offenders convicted of a federal crime, whether violent or not. Despite the decline in jurisdictions with a functioning parole system, the average annual growth of parolees was an increase of about 1.5% per year between 1995 and 2002.