In 1978 Steven Douglas Drown, a twenty-eight-year-old originally from Iowa, entered the California prison system to serve a sentence of seven years to life for murder. When Drown first entered prison, Jerry Brown was serving his first term as governor. Jimmy Carter was president of the United States, and the Bee Gees topped the pop music charts. Back then, Drown was fresh out of the Navy with an honorable discharge.
“I came out to California with an Iowa attitude,” said Drown. “I never prepared myself for life. Everything was always given to me.” He said his parents and the military did not teach him much responsibility, and he had no life experience. “I was arrogant. I cared only about myself.”
Drown is one of 191 people serving a seven-years-to-life sentence for murder under the state’s old Indeterminate Sentencing Law. We refer to them as “7-Ups.” A public records request filed with the California Department of Corrections in 2024 revealed a number of previously unknown details about this cohort. The longest-serving 7-Up entered prison as a fourteen-year-old in 1958, when Dwight Eisenhower was president. The oldest 7-Up is now ninety-three years of age. About half of them have spent fifty or more years in the custody of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), at an estimated cost to taxpayers of about $6 million each. On average, they have each appeared before a parole board fourteen times.
Academic research and the California parole board’s own risk assessments agree that people who have served life terms have low risk of recidivism. Some may not have killed anyone; prior to 2019, California’s felony-murder law allowed murder convictions for anyone who participated in a felony during which a death occurred, regardless of agency or intent. Others committed infamous assassinations or murder sprees as young adults. What they share in common are not their crimes, but the political decisions made by the state legislature, voters, parole boards, and governors that account for their lengthy incarceration.
More from our decarceral brainstorm
Inquest—finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Award for General Excellence & cited in The Best American Essays 2025—brings you insights from the people working to create a world without mass incarceration.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the latest in your inbox every Saturday.
Newsletter
In general, people given an indeterminate prison sentence must serve a base term, or a percentage of the total sentence, before their initial parole suitability hearing. From there on, they continue at routine intervals to appear before a parole board until such a time as the board deems to set them free.
In most cases, the board’s decision seems predetermined: according to CDCR data, between 2018 and 2023 only about one in three people who appeared before the parole board got to walk out of prison. This is despite the parole board’s own data, which shows that lifers who get out of prison almost always stay out. CDCR granted parole to 8,000 people with long sentences over a ten-year period; recidivism ranged from 2 to 4 percent, with fewer than 1 percent returning to prison for a felony crime against a person. Tracked over an equivalent nine-year period, the general recidivism rate in the United States is closer to 80 percent. Despite the fact that recidivism is therefore vanishingly small among those who have served long sentences, most parole boards, including California’s, remain reluctant to give lifers a chance at freedom. As Bobbi Cobaugh has argued in Inquest, there is little hope when the original crime is allowed to trump all other considerations. It is a perspective held even by former members of California’s parole board. In a July 2000 declaration, Albert M. Leddy, former chairman of the Board of Prison Terms (BPT, California’s parole board), wrote:
BPT panels find prisoners ‘unsuitable’ for parole based mainly or entirely on the facts and circumstances of their offense instead of their level of dangerousness, as reflected by performance, rehabilitation and expert evaluation in their prison records. Because the facts and circumstances of crimes do not change, the procedure effectively increases all such sentences from life with possibility of parole to life without any possibility of parole.
After spending more than half his life behind bars, Drown doesn’t look like anyone’s stereotype of a hardened criminal. He looks like the old man in line at the hardware store. When I first spoke with him last year, he had appeared before the parole board fifteen times. Despite having no record of violence in prison, he has never been found suitable for release.
“The last two I got were seven-year denials,” said Drown. “My last disciplinary report was thirty-one years ago.”
On June 27, 2024, Drown returned from his sixteenth parole hearing looking defeated. He had received another three-year denial. “I’m embarrassed to say they denied me again,” he said, adding he felt “dejected.” He said the board adds new requirements for release each time lifers attend a new parole hearing. “What else do I need to do?” he asked.
For people with high-profile convictions, going before the parole board can feel even more hopeless.
The only 7-Up woman, seventy-eight-year-old Patricia Krenwinkel, is a former member of the Manson Family. She was sent to prison in 1971 after her conviction for seven murders, according to CDCR records. (She was initially on California’s death row, but the California Supreme Court’s 1972 People v. Anderson case commuted all death sentences to life sentences.) In 2022, and again in 2025, the parole board finally decided in her favor, but both times Governor Gavin Newsom reversed their decision. The power to do so was granted by California voters to the governor in 1988, and governors have since used it freely.
Bruce Davis, who is now eighty-three, was also a member of the Manson Family and entered prison in 1972 on a double murder conviction. He has appeared before the parole board thirty-four times—more than any other 7-Up. He has been recommended for parole seven times, but the findings have been rejected by three consecutive governors. This follows a national pattern of state governors growing ever-increasingly miserly with their powers to approve parole and grant clemency, seemingly acting on the assumption that no one ever lost an election for keeping someone in prison.
“We’re in a system where the politics hinder us from getting out,” Davis agreed. Asked if he wants justice, the octogenarian said, “I don’t want justice. If I was given justice, they’d execute me. What I want is mercy.”
It’s not just high-profile cases like Krenwinkel’s and Davis’s that have had their parole process turned Sisyphean by law-and-order politics. Across the board, it has become nearly impossible for 7-Ups to receive a fair hearing before the parole board.
“Convicted murderers don’t deserve any more breaks,” California’s then-governor Pete Wilson declared in his 1992 State of the State. The parole board listened. According to Keramet Reiter’s book 23/7, the parole board held more than 18,000 hearings between 1992 and 2000. It only granted parole in 173 cases—a success rate of .96 percent. The next eight years weren’t much better; between 2000 and 2008, the parole board denied release in nearly 98 percent of cases. And even in the rare case that the board did grant parole, the state governor (first Gray Davis, then Arnold Schwarzenegger) rejected the decision more than 60 percent of the time, Reiter wrote.
Since 2014 California has enacted reforms that have expanded parole eligibility, including for youth offender and the elderly. For the elderly, parole boards are now instructed to consider a prisoner’s diminished physical capacity and underlying health issues to determine whether they would pose a risk to public safety. All 7-Ups are eligible for release under elderly parole legislation. These reforms have made parole a possibility for lifers once again. Last year, the board granted parole in 25 percent of the cases it heard.
Even with those changes, however, California has one of the lowest parole rates in the country, behind Alabama and South Carolina. Eligibility, in other words, is far from a guarantee, and for many lifers the reality is that their chance of receiving parole in California remains vanishingly small. And in the current political climate in California—perhaps most notably, saddled with a governor with presidential ambitions—routes to more sweeping changes are often foreclosed. For example, in 2023 California lawmakers introduced Senate Bill 81, which would have overturned a parole board denial if a court found evidence that a prisoner would not present a current, unreasonable risk of danger to others, thus modifying the judicial standard of review. But Governor Newsom vetoed it.
This chokehold on parole has contributed to a rapidly escalating crisis of aging in California’s prisons. In 1999 the portion of the state’s prison population over the age of fifty-five was 3 percent, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Today, it’s 22 percent. All of the people discussed in this article are elderly.
Gregory “White Eagle” Coates is another elderly 7-Up I spoke with. Now sixty-eight, he has been incarcerated for more than fifty years. “I came in as a juvenile,” he said. “I became eligible [for parole] in 1981.” Like many 7-Ups, he meets the requirements both for youth offender parole and elderly parole. CDCR records show he has appeared before the board ten times.
Coates said he was found suitable for release on parole in 2018. But a victims’ rights organization convinced Governor Brown to reject the parole board’s decision. “Instead of getting angry, I started doing more programs,” Coates said. He has participated in many of the self-help programs offered at San Quentin, and at all the other prisons at which he has been kept. “Everywhere I’ve been, I’ve done nothing but programs.”
Coates went before the parole board again in October 2024. Another denial. Unless something dramatic happens with the political winds or the will of California voters, he won’t be eligible for another hearing until he’s seventy.
This article is published in partnership with Solitary Watch. Solitary Watch’s work is supported by a grant from the Ridgeway Reporting Project, managed by Solitary Watch with funding from the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation and the Vital Projects Fund.
Image: Bryan White / Unsplash
