‘THEY DON’T CARE’

Alabama Board Denied Parole to a Dead Man

The board declined to release 92 percent of inmates seeking release in 2023.

Alabama’s parole board is so stingy with get-out-of-jail cards it voted to send a dead man back to prison. That’s according to AL.com, which examined the board’s reluctance to grant parole even though the prisons are dangerously overcrowded and many inmates meet the board’s own criteria for release. The site found that last year, the board voted 2-1 against parole for Fredrick Bishop, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2008 for robbery. But 10 days earlier, Bishop had been found unconscious and died in the infirmary. “I can’t believe that,” his mother, Dorothy Jean Bishop said of the parole denial. “But I believe it, because they don’t care.” The parole board chalked it up to a clerical error: “Typically, inmates who are deceased are removed from the parole hearing docket; however, the Board was not aware at the time of the hearing that Bishop had recently passed away.”