The Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles cancelled parole hearings for the rest of this week after Gov. Kay Ivey placed a moratorium on early paroles and sharply criticized the board for considering early releases of violent offenders.

Board spokesman Darrell Morgan said today the board wanted to make sure none of the cases scheduled for hearings this week fell under the 75-day moratorium. Morgan said hearings are expected to resume next week.

Early parole hearings are those held before an inmate has served the minimum time to be eligible for initial parole consideration.

For the most violent offenses, such as murder, rape, and robbery, that’s a minimum of 85 percent of the sentence or 15 years, whichever is less.

For some other offenses, the minimum is one-third of the sentence or 10 years, whichever is less.

But the board can make exceptions to those minimums and grant early parole.

Prosecutors and victims’ advocates say the board has been giving violent offenders early parole consideration at an alarming rate. One inmate released early is accused of killing three people in Guntersville in July.

Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, sponsor of a criminal justice reform bill passed in 2015 to reduce prison overcrowding, said today nothing in that legislation called for early paroles for violent offenders. He said lawmakers might have to address the issue next year.

“I think we’re going to have to look at curbing some of the discretion of that board when it comes to violent offenders,” Ward said.

Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall met with the three-member parole board on Monday. After the meeting, Ivey issued an executive order imposing the moratorium on early paroles and requiring the board to come up with a corrective action plan within 30 days. That plan, after review by the governor and attorney general, must be implemented within 75 days, when the moratorium expires.

In the executive order, Ivey said the board “has docketed for early parole consideration hundreds of violent offenders, including offenders sentenced to multiple, consecutive life sentences for the most serious offenses, without any apparent reasonable justification under the law.”

Marshall said he expects to see changes at the parole board.

Ward called the situation “a true mess.”

“They’re making decisions that don’t even follow their own guidelines over there,” Ward said.

The board issued a statement earlier this month saying it had no data showing an increase in early parole consideration for violent offenders.

The three parole board members are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate.

In addition to issuing the moratorium Monday, Ivey named board member Lyn Head as chairman, replacing Cliff Walker, who remains on the board.

Ward said he supported Ivey’s actions.

“Prison reform has always been what can we do about nonviolent offenders so we can keep the most dangerous people locked up,” Ward said. “So by doing what they’re doing it goes totally contradictory to what we were trying to pass in those laws in 2015.”

Alabama House Speaker Mac McCutcheon, R-Monrovia, said today it’s too soon to talk about possible legislation concerning the parole board but said he has heard concerns from prosecutors and believes Ivey and Marshall are on the right track in seeking changes.

Janette Grantham, state director of the victims’ advocacy group VOCAL, said victims' families arrived this morning at the board’s offices expecting to attend scheduled hearings that did not fall under the governor’s moratorium. Instead, Grantham said they found a locked door and a sign that said hearings were cancelled until further notice.

Grantham said it was disappointing that families did not get word that all the hearings were cancelled.

“It takes a lot for a victim and even for a family of an inmate to get their mind right and to make a plan to take off from work and all that to go to a parole hearing," Grantham said.

Parole board spokesman Morgan said there was a significant effort to notify families of the cancellation by telephone. Morgan said he also tried to get the word out through media interviews today.

Grantham said she first noticed a docket with an unusual number of early paroles for violent offenders in May 2017. Then the case of Jimmy Lee Spencer this year raised concerns to a new level. Spencer had a long criminal record and was serving a life sentence but was released on parole in January. He is charged with capital murder in the deaths of three people in Guntersville in July, including a 7-year-old boy.

VOCAL took its concerns to Ivey. Before Grantham was able to meet with the governor, she said she saw hearing notifications indicating that close to 100 inmates, all women, were scheduled for early parole hearings this week.

“She promised us she would look into it and that resulted in the meeting (with the parole board) Monday," Grantham said. "I assume by what her statement is that she did not get good answers.”

Ivey said she was disappointed in the responses to her questions she heard from the parole board on Monday.

“I think the governor made a very strong statement," Grantham said. "I’m very thankful to her for having the courage to step forward and do something about this. I’m speaking for victims but this is making the whole state unsafe because we know that people that are paroled before their time, the things that they can do.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which represents inmates in a federal lawsuit over mental health care and medical care in Alabama prisons, said the moratorium was not a good decision.

“It’s disappointing but not surprising that Governor Ivey bowed to pressure and made a knee jerk political decision in this matter,” Lisa Graybill, deputy legal director of the SPLC said in a statement. “The governor’s colleagues in the Alabama Legislature studied the issue of parole extensively when they passed 2015’s criminal justice reforms that included updating the factors for parole eligibility. Alabama’s incarceration rate is the third highest in the country in part because we keep people in prison too long. Parole is not a second opportunity for district attorneys to retry and resentence Alabamians; it is set up to offer people a second chance to become productive members of the community.”