Back at our table, we settled once again into plastic bucket chairs. His next interview was set for August, 2019, and he sounded pessimistic about his odds. “If you killed a cop, you ain’t got no hope,” he said. He was tired of the whole ritual: “You go to the board, they sit up there and smile at you. They crack jokes. You go back to your cell, and they hit you for two more years.” The last time, however, they had hit him with only fifteen months. “Everyone says it’s a good sign,” he said, “but it’s not a good sign to me.”

Yet he seemed buoyed by the commitment of his volunteers. In the eight years prior to their first visit, he had had only one other visit, from his brother Melvin and his wife. The first time he met the volunteers, he admitted, he had been uncertain of their intent. They looked “mad young,” he told me. “I said to myself, ‘What is this? Is this going to be a playground thing? Something for them to bide their time until they get something better?’ ” But they had earned his trust, coming to see him three times in four months, and, after the board denied him parole in May of 2018, they had agreed to continue working with him to prepare for his next hearing. He called them all regularly, catching one or the other on the phone every few days. “What surprised me about them was their sincerity,” he said. “I trust very few people if I trust anyone at all. They have a real naturalness.”

In the months since they had started working with him, he had tried to connect with each of them. He knew that Olivia Button liked to box, so he gave her advice on how to train and sent pages with exercises to do. When he learned that Gina Lee’s parents were from South Korea, he wanted to hear more; he’d always been interested in Korea. He discovered that John White liked yoga, too, and talked to him about yoga techniques. When the volunteers told him how they got to Auburn—leaving New York City at 4 a.m. in a rental car, driving ten or twelve hours round trip—he assumed that they must be getting paid for their work. They told him that they were volunteers. But every few months he would ask again, as if he could not quite believe that they were helping him without pay. He had little to give them in return, except for his advice on working out and healthy eating. When Lee was sick, he suggested that she try chewing on garlic. When Button’s birthday came, he mailed her two birthday cards. In his letters to them, he had expressed his gratitude. “Thanks again for all the help you are giving a person such as me,” he wrote, three months after they met. “I have not been a happy or hopeful person in a very long time.”

There is no official mechanism to require people confined in New York’s prisons to confront their guilt, to grapple with questions of remorse and responsibility, to think about how they might make amends to a victim’s family. At times, the legal system even seems to work against these goals; at trial, defense attorneys typically downplay the defendant’s culpability—or deny his guilt altogether—in an effort to minimize his punishment. Often, a defendant, long after he is convicted, will cling to the narrative of his crime that his lawyer told in court. The imprisoned individual may go years, even decades, without ever speaking honestly about his crime. The state prison system did start an “apology letter bank,” so that incarcerated people could write to their victims, but most people in prison do not know that it exists.

The most successful programs to help people reckon with their crimes have often been started by incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people. In the mid-two-thousands, José Saldaña and two of his peers at Shawangunk prison launched A Challenge to Change, an eighteen-week workshop, led by incarcerated men, which was later expanded to other prisons. “We wanted a program where a guy would come in and confront what he did,” Saldaña, who was released in 2018 and is now the director of the RAPP Campaign, told me. “We wanted total honesty.” Saldaña described the group sessions as “more difficult than we imagined” and “at times very, very emotional.” Among the program’s objectives is to counter the notion, common among people in prison, that there is a hierarchy of crimes; individuals who committed sex offenses were considered to be at the very bottom. “The murderer thinks he’s better than the rapist,” Saldaña said. “We dispelled all that stuff.”

Kathy Boudin, who was imprisoned at Bedford Hills, a maximum-security prison, for two decades, told me that most of the women with whom she was confined did not speak honestly and openly about their crimes, “because there is no safe place inside the prison system where people have a chance to do this.” In the visiting room, they often lied to their children out of a sense of shame about what they had done, but the truth inevitably became harder to conceal. “You’re in prison for eighteen years, and you’re, like, ‘I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it,’ and your children read on the Internet and they know you did it,” she said. When Boudin was released, in 2003, she had an idea to start a program that would “help people examine their lives and come to terms with what they did” and to “deal deeply with the harm” they had caused. She hoped that the program would “allow them to be able to talk to their children about it, to talk to their families about it, to not feel like they’re living in total shame all the time.”

The program that Boudin envisioned became the Longtermers Responsibility Project, which, for the past decade, has been run by the Osborne Association—a nonprofit group that works with incarcerated people and their families—at Sing Sing and Fishkill. In the program, twelve people convicted of murder-related crimes meet with a facilitator for weekly group sessions over four months. Laura Roan, a program manager at Osborne, facilitates some of the sessions. “ ‘Oh, I never meant to hurt anybody.’ That’s the story I hear over and over,” Roan said. “Well, why did you load the gun, then?” She continued, “It’s very hard to live with that idea that you are somebody who is really able to take the life of somebody else.” Perhaps this is why, as she found, many long-termers do not seem to have a coherent narrative of their own crimes. “You tell everybody something different,” she said. “You tell yourself one story, you tell your prison peers a different story.” But, Roan went on, “the parole board is asking them to tell a different story they’ve never told before. Your goal is to show them you’re safe to release.”

The stories that imprisoned men and women tell the board about their crimes often diverge from the facts in their court or parole files. Sometimes people are minimizing their guilt. Sometimes they are misremembering details of events that occurred decades earlier. Sometimes they are actually correct, and the details in the official documents are wrong. And sometimes they have no memory at all of the crime they have committed and have created a narrative about it that makes sense to them. Like many of the men with whom Dennis was imprisoned, he had repeatedly filed appeals in the courts in the first decade of his incarceration. The lawyers who wrote them argued that he had been wrongly convicted—his defense attorney at trial claimed that he was not guilty—and after he lost his initial appeals and started representing himself, writing his own legal papers and filing them pro se, Dennis continued to make this claim. His court battles continued for more than ten years. But, once he was eligible for parole, he took the advice of peers: “As long as you deny the crime, they’re going to keep hitting you.” He appeared before the parole board for the first time in the summer of 1996, when he was forty-five years old. In a room at Attica, seated across from two male commissioners, he admitted to having killed Patrolman Denton, and recounted a story about arguing with him, saying that “the argument initiated into a fight, and one thing led to another, and that’s when the officer got hit in the neck.” The parole board turned him down, writing in its decision that Dennis was “still in denial” and “does not voice any remorse.”

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During the next two decades, Dennis appeared before the parole board every other year. Transcripts from his hearings show that he attempted to express remorse. In 2002, he said, “I take responsibility for everything I did. I’ve hurt a lot of people through this.” In 2010, he said, “I regret it. Wasn’t my intention to murder anybody or kill anybody.” In 2011, the state parole board began using a new “risk assessment” tool, to measure the likelihood that an individual would commit another crime once he was released. An assessment of Dennis found that he was a low risk, but the board continued to turn him down. In the course of twelve parole appearances, he was interviewed by twenty-five board members, some of them more than once. In 2018, the parole board explained its decision with the same language it had used many times before: “Your release at this time is incompatible with the welfare of society.” There was no indication of what he could do to increase his odds of obtaining parole the next time.