Never Too Old to Start Over

On a rainy Monday morning in April, a group of umbrella-wielding protesters took cover underneath some scaffolding in Midtown Manhattan, just blocks away from New York governor Kathy Hochul’s New York City office. The protesters carried signs displaying the faces of loved ones who have been incarcerated for decades. “Hochul bring them home,” read the words underneath.

Stanley Bellamy, a tall, slim community organizer wearing a black kufi and a thick gold ankh around his neck, addressed the huddle, thanking them for coming out in the cold and the rain. “We left our brothers and sisters inside. She has the executive power” to release them, he said, gesturing toward the governor’s office. Cheers erupted.

The rally, organized by Release Aging People in Prison, brought together activists, abolitionists, and allies who want their elderly relatives and friends in prison released. The crowd had gathered to urge Hochul to use her power to pardon and commute prison sentences.

Since Hochul assumed office in 2021, she has made 94 grants of clemency—but over 1,140 more clemency applications are still pending. Now, incarceration rights groups are pushing her to use her powers more widely, asking both for acts of clemency and for legislative changes that take meaningful steps toward dismantling mass incarceration in the state.

This push by community groups for sentencing relief for elderly incarcerated people dovetails with two pieces of legislation considered by the New York legislature in the 2025 session: the Elder Parole Bill and the Fair and Timely Parole Act. Both attempt to address the fact that the number of incarcerated seniors has been on the rise over the past twenty years. The Elder Parole Bill, sponsored by Democratic state senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, would grant a parole hearing to people aged fifty-five and above who have served at least fifteen years of their sentence. The bill, first introduced in 2018, garnered majority support within the New York senate in March. The Fair and Timely Parole Act, sponsored by Democratic senator Julia Salazar, would establish a more thorough parole process that would make it easier for eligible individuals to receive parole. The act would direct parole boards to focus more on the person’s rehabilitation while incarcerated than on the original crime. Unfortunately neither bill succeeded in the New York legislative session that just concluded, but their supporters have vowed to push for them again when the next session begins in January.

Bellamy, whom most people call “Jamel” and who now helps organize Release Aging People in Prison, was among those granted clemency by Hochul in December 2022. He had served thirty-seven-and-a-half years of a sixty-two-and-a-half-year sentence. Bellamy was fifty-nine when Hochul commuted his sentence, allowing him to appear before the parole board twenty-five years earlier than his first scheduled hearing. On April 24, 2023, he walked out of Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Dutchess County, and was welcomed at the gates of the facility by members of the organization for which he now works.

Bellamy was born in the Bronx and raised in Corona, Queens. His parents worked day and night, leaving Bellamy and his nine siblings to raise themselves. Bellamy said he nonetheless had a good childhood, earning straight As in school and sitting eagerly in the front of the classroom. He had dreams of becoming a police officer, but when he was nine, his friend and classmate Raphael was killed in an encounter with the police. A witness said police officers had pushed Bellamy’s friend down the stairs, while the police officers said that he had fallen. This, Bellamy said, soured his view of the world and the police, and changed his future.

“No matter who was telling the truth, as a nine-year-old, how do you look at death? I didn’t understand that, and I went into myself,” he said.

After this tragedy, Bellamy would get scared and start to sweat whenever he saw police officers in his neighborhood. “I didn’t even want to be in their presence no more because I didn’t trust them,” he said. “And so what was left? That other door opens.”

The other door opened that same year, when a group of older boys asked Bellamy to be a lookout for them as they attempted to rob a home. They couldn’t enter the house, so Bellamy—still small enough to fit through a window—slipped in for them. He said things spiraled out of control after that. He started sitting in the back of the classroom, later missing classes entirely. He dropped out of school in the tenth grade. “I went to the streets.”

In 1985, when Bellamy was twenty-three, he and his codefendant were convicted of murder, as was one of his younger brothers, who is still incarcerated. Bellamy took responsibility for shooting one of the victims, who thankfully recovered; he insists that he did not shoot the other victim, who died from his injuries. A witness said that Bellamy’s brother was the shooter, but Bellamy says he was simply with them that night and in fact had remained in the car. Bellamy is now trying to free his brother, who is now in his late fifties and still in prison.

When Bellamy was behind bars, he found out that the mother of his two young children had become addicted to crack cocaine. This finding changed the trajectory of his time in prison. He knew he had to do whatever he could to be a father to his two boys. “I had to stop all that foolishness,” he said. “I had to get my life together.”

He started by joining a youth leadership and mentoring group founded by the late Eddie Ellis, a criminal justice advocate and president of the Community Justice Sentence, an anti-crime research and advocacy organization. In 1990, a few years into the first steps of this path, Bellamy learned that his father had died. Shortly after, Bellamy was allowed to read a report about his case, which included a statement from the mother of the man who had been shot and killed in his case.

“Experiencing the pain that I felt from losing my father, I understood the pain she felt from losing her son,” he said. So Bellamy made a vow, “right then and there,” to do everything he could to make sure no more mothers would cry over losing their sons to death or long prison sentences.

In the following decades of his own prison sentence, Bellamy earned his GED, an associate’s degree in liberal arts and humanities, and a bachelor of science degree while also working as a teaching assistant in adult basic education and precollege programs for other incarcerated people. He also became involved with community organizing, mentoring fellow incarcerated individuals in conflict resolution, personal responsibility, and anger management, and leading an annual anti-violence seminar at Sullivan Correctional Facility, a now-shuttered maximum-security prison in Fallsburg, New York. While inside, he began his work with Release Aging People in Prison as a community leader for the incarcerated population.

Bellamy and his colleagues at Release Aging People in Prison are staunch advocates for both the Elder Parole Bill and the Fair and Timely Parole Act, believing that they would represent significant steps in decarceration.

The parole process is currently completely decoupled from actual information about safety. For example, parole boards don’t seem to care that the recidivism rate for older people is extremely low. Nationwide, released individuals between the ages of 50–64 have a 7 percent rate of returning to prison, according to the New York City Council. For those aged 65 and above, the rate is only 4 percent. Only 2 percent of people over the age of 55 who have served long sentences for violent crimes are reincarcerated if released.

Parole boards don’t even care about departments of corrections’ own risk assessments. In 2021 the Vera Institute of Justice analyzed 168 parole request transcripts in New York and found that 85 percent of the petitioners were considered low risk for violence and rearrest—but were denied parole. In 60 percent of these cases, the sole reason for denying parole was the original crime.

Racial discrimination also plays a role, not only in how parole is granted, but in who is imprisoned and for how long. In Manhattan over the last two decades, courts convicted Black people of felonies and misdemeanors at a rate 21 times higher than white people, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. Across the state, Black people account for around 40 percent of felony and misdemeanor convictions over the same period, while only accounting for 14 percent of the population. Latinx New Yorkers were convicted of 22 percent of felonies and 21 percent of misdemeanors, while representing about 16 percent of the state’s population. When it comes to parole, these disparities persist. Between 2022 and 2024, the New York State parole board was about 32 percent less likely to grant parole to a person of color than a white person, according to The Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at New York University.

“Mass incarceration has been shown to undermine community health and safety,” said Senator Salazar, sponsor of the Fair and Timely Parole Act and a cosponsor of the Elder Parole bill. “One of the key remedies is giving older adults serving long sentences an opportunity to demonstrate their personal transformation before the Parole Board.”

Speaking from his home in New York, Bryant Bell, a paralegal at New York’s Legal Aid Society, echoed the potential impact of these bills. “I believe that the people who are prepared to reenter society successfully and to make a contribution to their community should be given a fair shot,” he said. “They should be given a second chance.”

Some vocal opponents to the bills include conservative Republican senators George Borello and Dean Murray, who have both spoken out against criminal law reform. During National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, held annually in April, Borello insisted bills such as the Fair and Timely Act are “a slap in the face to every victim who is still coping with the trauma of what was done to them or their loved one.” That same week, Murray called these bills “garbage.” Ray Tierney, the district attorney of Suffolk County (which includes most of Long Island, one of the state’s most conservative areas), is also opposed, as he recently explained in an op-ed published in the New York Post: “We cannot allow these parole bills to be the next wave of reckless policy. What’s most infuriating is the disconnect between Albany’s legislative chambers and the real-world impact these bills will have: A mother’s fear of running into her attacker at the store.”

At the Release Aging People in Prison office in Chelsea, a brightly lit space covered in artwork, Bellamy brings out a thick folder of papers kept carefully within one of his desk drawers. Inside is the document that led to his release: a 346-page clemency petition outlining his case, a statement of remorse, the work he did while in prison, and his request for freedom. Another document described his plans for life on the outside, a five-point plan that included spending time with his aging mother and continuing to work as a community organizer. In the few years he has been a free man, he has accomplished each of these points, reclaiming lost time and missed opportunities. He said he knows people in prison whose petitions are double or triple the size—pages and pages summarizing their work toward rehabilitation and restoration. These are the people he thinks about every day.

“If they don’t get clemency, if the Elder Bill don’t pass, they going to die in prison,” he said. “And we know that. That’s why we come out here. We fight for them because we know what they capable of doing.” Bellamy seals the folder of his documents and walks into the front office, stopping to chat with colleagues over a box of pizza. He’ll gather his things soon. It’s time to go home.

_{Image: Annie Spratt / Unsplash}

Contributors

Meera Navlakha Meera Navlakha is a writer and journalist, covering politics, race, culture, and society. Her writing and reporting have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Times, W magazine, Vice, Mashable, and the Independent.

Topics

• Decarceral Pathways

Tags

• decarceral legislation
• parole
• probation and parole