Prison overcrowding is keeping Idaho women behind bars even after they’re granted parole

It was Friday the 13th when Andrea Johnson heard the news from a friend over a muffled telephone receiver from the county jail in Cascade, Idaho. After 16 months behind bars, Johnson had been granted parole. “I was anxious, but I was hopeful,” Johnson, 46, said.

Why wouldn’t they let me out?” But there was a catch, her friend said in March: Johnson would have to spend at least another year locked up. Idaho parole commissioners gave Johnson a “tentative parole date” of March 8, 2027. The commission decided that she wouldn’t be released on parole until she completed grief counseling for the death of her infant daughter — which Johnson said triggered her addiction and led to her conviction for drug possession — and a class on managing substance use disorder.

But Johnson, who was left in jail because state prisons didn’t have room for her, had no access to those programs. That’s why she couldn’t complete them before parole commissioners reviewed her case. They gave her no timeline for when she would be able to access them, despite state law designed to prevent inaccessible programming from standing in the way of parole.

The Idaho parole commission’s use of “tentative parole dates” like Johnson’s is part of a self-perpetuating cycle, in which parole delays are both the result of the highest women’s incarceration rate in the nation and contribute to it. Because of Idaho’s overcrowded prison population, some women can’t access the programming that commissioners expect them to complete before they’re released. And because they can’t access it, those women remain incarcerated longer, delaying access for other women who need the same programs.

Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson for the Prison Policy Initiative, which advocates for reducing mass incarceration nationwide, said people who are stuck behind bars waiting for access to programs but are otherwise deemed fit for parole are “some of the lowest hanging fruit” for reducing prison populations. State law requires the Department of Correction to ensure that lack of access to programs isn’t the main reason keeping inmates from parole. But neither the department nor the Commission of Pardons and Parole knew how many inmates face such delays.

InvestigateWest analyzed seven years of parole data, finding that women were marginally more likely than men to have their parole postponed, forcing women to spend add…