Calvin Alexander thought he had done everything the Louisiana parole board asked of him to earn an early release from prison.

He had taken anger management classes, learned a trade and enrolled in drug treatment. And as his September hearing before the board approached, his disciplinary record was clean.

Alexander, more than midway through a 20-year prison sentence on drug charges, was making preparations for what he hoped would be his new life. His daughter, with whom he had only recently become acquainted, had even made up a room for him in her New Orleans home.

Then, two months before the hearing date, prison officials sent Alexander a letter informing him he was no longer eligible for parole.

A computerized scoring system adopted by the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections had deemed the nearly blind 70-year-old, who uses a wheelchair, a moderate risk of reoffending, should he be released. And under a new law, that meant he and thousands of other prisoners with moderate or high risk ratings cannot plead their cases before the board. According to the department of corrections, about 13,000 people — nearly half the state’s prison population — have such risk ratings, although not all of them are eligible for parole.

Alexander said he felt “betrayed” upon learning his hearing had been canceled. “People in jail have … lost hope in being able to do anything to reduce their time,” he said.

The law that changed Alexander’s prospects is part of a series of legislation passed by Louisiana Republicans last year reflecting Gov. Jeff Landry’s tough-on-crime agenda to make it more difficult for prisoners to be released.

While campaigning for governor, Landry, a former police officer and sheriff’s deputy who served as Louisiana attorney general until 2024, championed a crackdown on rewarding well-behaved prisoners with parole. Landry said early release, which until now has been typically assumed when judges hand down sentences, is a slap in the face to crime victims.

“The revolving door is insulting,” Landry told state lawmakers last year as he kicked off a special legislative session on crime during which he blamed the state’s high violent crime rate on lenient sentences and “misguided post-conviction programs” that fail to rehabilitate prisoners. (In fact, Louisiana’s recidivism rate has declined over the past decade, according to a 2024 department of corrections report.)

The Legislature eliminated parole for nearly everyone imprisoned for crimes committed after Aug. 1, making Louisiana the 17th state in a half-century to abolish parole altogether and the first in 24 years to do so. For the vast majority of prisoners who were already behind bars, like Alexander, another law put an algorithm in charge of determining whether they have a shot at early release; only prisoners rated low risk qualify for parole.

That decision makes Louisiana the only state to use risk scores to automatically rule out large portions of a prison population from being considered for parole, according to seven national criminal justice experts.

That was not how the tool, known as TIGER, an acronym for Targeted Interventions to Greater Enhance Re-entry, was intended to be used. Developed as a rehabilitative measure about a decade ago, it was supposed to help prison officials determine what types of classes or counseling someone might need to prevent them from landing back behind bars — not be used as a punitive tool to keep them there, said one of its creators.

Criminal justice advocates and civil rights attorneys say the new law could disproportionately harm Black people like Alexander in part because the algorithm measures factors such as criminal history where racial disparities already exist. The law’s opponents also contend that the unique step Louisiana has taken to curtail parole is deeply problematic — and potentially unconstitutional — because it does not take into account the efforts of prisoners to better themselves while incarcerated.

“They deserve that opportunity to show they’ve changed,” said Pearl Wise, who was appointed to the parole board by Landry’s Democratic predecessor and served from 2016 until 2023. “You demonstrate over time the changes that you made and that you are not the person that was sentenced on that day.”

An Immutable Risk Score

Alexander is like thousands of prisoners who have previously appeared before the board — repeat offenders accused of nonviolent crimes, often mired in addiction with limited education or learning disabilities. Alexander can’t read or write, having dropped out of school as a fourth grader in the early 1960s. He needed to help support his family in deeply segregated Mississippi and turned to selling crack cocaine as a child. That period was also the start of his own lifelong struggle with narcotics that resulted in multiple arrests and extended stints in prison.

The department of corrections would not allow an in-person or phone interview with Alexander. Instead, Verite News and ProPublica mailed Alexander written questions, which a fellow inmate read to him and then wrote down his responses