Parole is supposed to ask a hard, practical question: has a person serving a life sentence reached the point where release can be responsibly considered?
New research by PhD student Karan Tripathi and Netanel Dagan, Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, shows that this decision can carry a much wider burden. Their article, published in Criminology & Criminal Justice, compared parole for life-sentenced prisoners in India and Israel. It found that parole can become a place which extend punitivity and manages public anxieties about crime and institutional legitimacy.
Most public debate about punishment ends at sentencing. Tripathi and Dagan highlighted a quieter point, further down the penal process: the moment when people serving life sentences ask whether they can return to society.
This is a significant moment of penal discretion because life imprisonment in India and Israel does not always mean immediate imprisonment until death. In India, life sentenced prisoners can be considered for release after 14 years. In Israel, parole consideration becomes available after a minimum of 20 years. In both countries, the formal possibility of release is filtered through highly consequential parole decisions.
The study draws on a large body of empirical material. In Israel, the researchers analysed 329 Special Parole Board hearing transcripts from 2018 to 2022, interviews with 20 former parole board chairpersons, and relevant case law. In India, they examined 1,183 applications considered by Delhi’s Sentence Review Board between 2018 and 2021, alongside interviews with eight board members.
The two systems look very different. Israel has a more formal, judicialised system. A judge heads the Special Parole Board, prisoners are usually represented, and the legal framework expressly authorises certain punitive considerations. In India, parole is more administrative. Delhi’s Sentence Review Board is chaired by the state home minister, most members come from the executive bureaucracy, and life sentenced prisoners are given no oral, written or legal representation during the proceedings.
Despite these structural differences, the study found that both systems produced punitive outcomes.
In Israel, punitive reasoning operates through law. The parole board can deny release in especially serious cases if it believes release would severely harm public trust in the justice system or weaken deterrence. A counter terrorism amendment also allows certain life sentenced prisoners to be removed from parole consideration altogether if their offence is classified as a terror act. The paper argues that this formal structure disproportionately affects Palestinian lifers, who are more likely to be channelled into security-based exclusion.
In Delhi, punitivity worked through discretionary practice. The Sentence Review Board rejected 77.52% of the applications studied. More than half of all rejections were based solely on the nature and seriousness of the offence, despite Indian courts repeatedly holding that parole decisions must consider rehabilitation, conduct, risk and reintegration. The effect was particularly stark for terrorism and sexual offence cases. These applicants were technically inside the review process, yet the research found they were rarely given meaningful consideration.
This contrast matters. Israel shows how punitivity can be built into formal rules. India shows how it can operate through administrative discretion, moral language and political calculation. The machinery differs, but the result is similar.
The paper also shows how victims become central to parole decisions in both countries, although in different ways. In Israel, victims can submit statements or appear before the parole board in serious cases. Their accounts of harm can become part of the board’s reasoning when it decides that release would be inappropriate. In India, victims are usually absent from the process. Their absence does not make them irrelevant. The board often imagines the victim as someone who would demand continued imprisonment, or invokes broader groups such as women, children and civilians as collective victims whose safety requires refusal.
This changes what parole is asked to do. It becomes a forum for symbolic justice and public reassurance, alongside the assessment of rehabilitation and risk.
Public trust played a similar role. In Israel, the parole board framed punitive denial as a way of protecting confidence in the judiciary and the authority of law. In India, the research found a different logic. Board members linked some decisions, especially in high profile sexual violence cases, to public outcry, media attention and pressure from political authorities. Punitive language helped convert political risk into criminal justice reasoning.
The core contribution of the paper is its account of parole punitivity as adaptable and productive. Punitivity does not take one fixed form. It can travel through statutes, bureaucratic discretion, victim narratives and ideas of public trust. It also produces new categories of penal subjects.
Both systems, the paper argues, create a divided parole field. Some prisoners remain within the category of citizens who may be assessed for release. Others are treated as enemy subjects whose return to society is made nearly unthinkable. In Israel, this is most visible in the treatment of Palestinian prisoners classified through security frameworks. In India, it appears in the treatment of people convicted of terrorism offences, particularly where Muslim identity is folded into assumptions about collective threat.
This finding matters for parole reform. More formal procedures may improve decision making. Yet the study warns that punitivity can survive inside those reforms, if the deeper reasoning of parole boards remains unscrutinised.
For life sentenced prisoners, parole can determine whether punishment has a meaningful endpoint. For criminology, the research expands the field of comparison beyond the heavily studied Anglo American jurisdictions and shows why the back end of punishment deserves far more attention.
Parole takes place after the courtroom and away from public view. This research shows why it needs close scrutiny. If release decisions can reproduce punishment through the language of public trust and victim protection, parole reform must ask how decision makers decide what kinds of people deserve a future outside prison.