Hoyt called her after he got the bread, the night before his execution, and that 28-minute phone call changed her life. That instinct, to bear witness to the injustice in our criminal legal system and to find everyday ways to disrupt it, led her to decades of volunteering in Arkansas prisons, most recently supporting incarcerated people in their parole applications.

What is parole? When a judge hands down a sentence, it sometimes comes with parole eligibility baked in: after a certain number of years, you’re eligible for release under supervision. But eligible doesn’t mean released. More than 210,000 people in prison are already past their parole date. In theory, incarcerated people go before a parole board to make their case for release. In practice, the process is opaque and lonely. It’s a rarity to have a lawyer or other support to navigate the process. In some states you can only appear before the board by video. In others, the board sees only a paper casefile. Despite the gravity of these hearings, they often last no more than a few minutes. The result is a system where people are denied release after decades inside, after real change and growth, often with little explanation of what they’d need to do to get out next time. The U.S. is already an outlier in how long and how harshly we sentence people, which makes parole central to addressing mass incarceration.

In response, ordinary people like Renie Rule have volunteered their time to help incarcerated people strengthen their parole applications. She learned more about the process by researching, talking to people on the board, and sitting in on hearings to see what actually worked. She made sure the incarcerated people she worked with had information they were lacking about what the parole board would consider ahead of time, including what their own department records looked like, and what they could do to improve their chances. Renie is one person leveraging a model that has worked across the country. Groups like Parole Prep  have trained hundreds of community volunteers to partner with incarcerated people as they prepare for their appearances before the Parole Board. The volunteers visit and correspond with incarcerated applicants, compile advocacy materials to submit to the Parole Board, and work with them to prepare for their hearings. Incarcerated people who work with Parole Prep have a 65% release rate, which is more than double the statewide average.