On Feb. 9, Massachusetts Parole Board Chair Angelo Gomez, Jr. appeared before the Special Commission on Correctional Consolidation and Collaboration, which was designated by state lawmakers in 2024 to streamline all aspects of the prison system.
In an email, state Sen. William Brownsberger, the special body’s co-chair, explained that the purpose of the appearance was for Gomez to clarify his department’s relationship with reentry, defined by the National Institute of Justice as the “process by which a person in correctional confinement prepares for release and transitions back into the community.” In addition to the senator, the 20-member commission is co-chaired by state Rep. Daniel Hunt, and includes legislators, stakeholders, and public officials.
Sitting with Judith Lyons, the general counsel for the Mass Parole Board, and the agency’s Executive Director Lian Hogan, Gomez told the commission that “parole rates are rising.” It made for relatively major news, with the reaction in the State House hearing room—and subsequently in the press—interpreting the promising announcement as being current. But that’s not actually the case.
Gomez did not mention that all of the data he presented on Beacon Hill was gathered prior to his Oct. 29, 2025 appointment as chair. Stating that he had no data from 2025, the current chair of the Parole Board showed numbers from all the way back in 2024, when Tina Hurley was still in charge. He neglected to say the data didn’t cover the board’s record under his own leadership; since Gomez took the helm, parole rates for lifers have gone down, not up.
Following the hearing, several news outlets echoed the incomplete comments made by Gomez. An article syndicated by the State House News Service, titled “Parole rates in Massachusetts on the rise,” ran in CommonWealth Beacon and Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, among other publications.
With that misleading information widely circulated, and since the ad hoc commission hearing covered more than just overall paroling rates, we scrutinized all of the questionable data presented by Gomez, and also considered some facts that the chair failed to mention.
A tale of two chairs: Hurley and Gomez
BINJ has reported on parole in Mass for six years, most recently covering a lack of understanding of its purpose by the media and public.
Parole is not “early release,” but rather the earned and conditional release of prisoners to the free world where they live under strict supervision for the remainder of their sentence. Parole requires a prisoner to prove to a parole board that they are no longer a risk to society.
Stanford Criminal Justice Center was the first to report in 2011 that those with life sentences eligible for parole had only a 1 to 3% re-offense rate—and those crimes were largely non-violent. A separate report in 2024 by the Sentencing Project, a DC-based nonprofit, followed 200 Marylanders to show “recidivism rates for the older population is extremely low, even among those convicted of the most serious offenses.”
Gomez himself told the commission that those with life sentences were the population with the “most success” on release because they have a significant amount of time behind bars and age out of crime. But he also said, inaccurately, “A lot more lifers are being released.”
Before Chair Hurley’s departure in April 2025, the Mass paroling rate was steadily rising. Per the board’s own published 2023 report, the rate of release for non-lifers in houses of correction or state prisons was 67% under Hurley. That was not significantly higher than under board chairs in the years before her tenure.
The increased paroling rate of those with life sentences under Tina Hurley, however, is significant.
There has not been an official published report by the Parole Board since 2023, but BINJ has been tracking those with life sentences. Our research found that in 366 decisions during her three-year tenure, Hurley’s board released 65.8% (or 241 people) to parole. That’s more than her predecessors—Chair Glorianne Moroney (456 decisions/45.6% grants), and Chair Paul Treseler (392 decisions/26% grants).
After Hurley left, Tonomey Coleman served as the temporary Mass Parole Board chair for six months. His paroling rate for 54 prisoners with life sentences was 51.9%, with 28 people released.
Gomez has been chair since Oct. 29, 2025. As of this writing, for the 33 decisions on lifers during that time which are published online, his rate of release is 54.5%, with 18 out of 33 earning parole.
Per those up-to-date numbers, lifer parole rates in the commonwealth are not rising. They are in decline.
Additional information and omissions
Gomez did not mention to the commission that since he became chair, parole decisions are now taking five-and-a-half months. According to a BINJ analysis, under Chair Coleman, it had been four-and-a-half months. Under Chair Hurley, parole decisions, by and large, were taking only three months.
Gomez did say that the six-person board, which has been down one member, is swamped. As we reported, Gov. Maura Healey has yet to tap a seventh member.
The current chair noted that in 2024, one or two Parole Board members travelled at least twice a week to institutions across the state, and heard petitions for 2,818 parole-eligible incarcerated men and women. That same year, members attended hearings for 141 life-sentenced individuals before the full board, and heard 41 petitions to terminate parole.
Gomez did not say how many of those petitions were approved, or that Hurley was in the chair seat during that time.
Extra work impacting clemency
Before he was nominated to join the Parole Board, Gomez held the position of chief parole supervisor for the department’s field services division for two years. Leaning on that experience, the current chair clarified many details pertaining to field service for the commission, explaining, for example, that an average parole officer handles 35 to 50 cases at a time. But when asked by members of the Special Commission on Correctional Consolidation and Collaboration to present clemency numbers, he was less prepared.
Parole Board Counsel Judith Lyons directed Gomez to statistics for the two arms of clemency—pardons, and commutations. A pardon removes the underlying conviction, while a commutation is a reduction in a court-ordered sentence. The Parole Board, which technically functions as the Advisory Board of Pardons for these hearings, processed 53 pardon and 70 commutation requests in 2024, Gomez said.
In 2024, Gov. Healey issued blanket pardons for those with misdemeanor marijuana possession convictions, and 21 other pardons by April 2025, as well as new clemency guidelines that seemed to promise a progressive administration. However, since she took office in 2023, there have been no commutations approved.
Gomez stated that commutation hearings had been stalled because of the extra work of hearing 100 cases (so far) from the landmark court decision, Commonwealth v. Mattis. That ruling says that in Mass, those who are convicted of crimes before they turn 21 can no longer receive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Gomez failed to mention that in 2024, under Hurley, the Parole Board approved four commutations—for William Florentino, Edward Fielding, Randy Arias, and Scott Kirwan. As the Boston Globe reported in April 2025, at the end of Hurley’s tenure, the board sent those approvals to the governor. The governor has not acted on any of these recommendations, which have now been pending for more than a year.
Mac Hudson, a member of the commission who was formerly incarcerated and now works as a paralegal for the organization Prisoners’ Legal Services, asked Gomez about a timeline for these approvals. Gov. Healey’s clemency guidelines state that after a year, “the petitioner shall presume that the Governor disagrees with that positive recommendation and will not grant the petitioner executive clemency. After the one-year period has elapsed, the Board shall advise the petitioner and close the case.”
Lyons reiterated that the Parole Board is only advisory, and told Hudson, “You would have to speak to the Governor’s office.”
Confusion for the commission
Commenting about the presentation by Parole Board leaders, at one point in the hearing, Rep. Hunt asked Chair Gomez about a data point regarding 68% of petitioners who had faced the board. Specifically, the representative asked if the slide showed the actual number of people “released from custody.”
There was not an immediate answer. After searching through notes, Executive Director Lian Hogan said that those were indeed people who were actually released.
However, while 68% may eventually be released from state custody, their paroles can still be rescinded for some issue, such as a disciplinary infraction before release. The chart above only shows the rate based on the number of positive and negative votes by Parole Board members.
The Parole Board publishes information on these delays. In 2023, “89 incarcerated individuals (25% of those with parole decisions) experienced a delayed release from parole, with an average delay of 67 days.”
Toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Hunt asked Gomez if there was “a decline in the overall amount of clients that you’re touching, or it just hasn’t hit you yet?”
Gomez told the commission: “There are a couple of different factors. … Our parole rates are up. A lot more lifers being released … So it looks like we are up about 3.5%.” It is unclear what Gomez meant by the comment, we asked and did not receive a response from the Parole Board, and no one from the commission asked him to clarify. [Counsel Judith Lyons responded on 2/23/26: “For clarification, 3.5% is the increase in the number of incarcerated persons released to supervision in 2024 as compared to 2023.”]
The commission now has to sift through this testimony and file a report by Sept. 30 on ways the Department of Correction, the Parole Board, the Office of Community Corrections, and Massachusetts county sheriffs can consolidate and collaborate.
