A Right That Exists on Paper
Compassionate release, and the distance between a law and its use
Almost every state has a law for releasing people from prison when they are dying, seriously ill, or old enough that the risk they once posed has passed. The names and tests vary, but the premise is shared: a sentence can outlive its purpose, and the law should have a way to say so.
Almost none of these laws see much use. This page measures the distance between the right on paper and the right in practice, and it does so entirely from public records.
It is also a working demonstration of a method. Statutes and case decisions are qualitative data, and the usual way to present them is a memo. But most questions people bring to a law are comparative: how many states require a diagnosis, how far apart are the age cutoffs, what reasons do courts give, what changed and when. Those are chart questions, so each section asks one, answers it with a chart form suited to categorical and legal evidence, and notes why that form got the job.
Data Sources
Everything here comes from public documents. Each data file names its source on every row, and the build refuses to render a row that does not.
Federal docket
U.S. Sentencing Commission
Motions decided and reasons given, by month, fiscal 2022 through 2026 Q2 (preliminary).
State statutes
Wylie, Knutson, and Greene 2018, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law
The fifty-state review behind this project: the laws as written as of 2016, where the policy coding reads what departments keep on file.
State policies
Holland et al. 2020, OMEGA
Fifty-state coding of corrections department policies, collected 2016.
State utilization
Holland et al. 2021, Mortality
Eligibility, applications, and releases from public records requests, 2013 to 2015.
Wisconsin law
The instruments themselves
Statute, rule, forms, and policy behind the timeline.
Statute 302.113(9g)↗ DOC 302.41↗ Form CR-254↗ DAI 302.00.13↗
Nearly Everywhere on Paper
Exhibit 01 · Lollipop
Start with what exists on paper. When researchers last read all fifty states’ policies in one pass, in 2016, what kinds of release policy did they find, and how many states had none on file?
Forty-six states had a compassionate release policy on their corrections department’s books; four did not. The unit is the department policy, not the state’s every door: release can also run through a parole board or a governor’s clemency power without the department holding a policy of its own. Counts sum to more than fifty because a state can hold more than one kind of policy, so read these as counts of policy types, not as the fifty states sorted into piles. Source: Holland, Prost, Hoffmann, and Dickinson (2020), OMEGA 81(4), figure 1 at p. 613.
The picture has since shifted. Illinois passed the Joe Coleman Medical Release Act in 2021, effective at the start of 2022. Nebraska, where medical parole for terminal illness or permanent incapacity has existed since 2005, added geriatric parole in 2023. That is the trouble with a decade-old map: it is the best one that exists, and it is already wrong.
Why this chart: a lollipop rather than a bar, because the quantity is a count of states and the bar area would add ink without adding information. The one category that is an absence rather than a policy is the only one in coral, so the exception is visible before the labels are read.
What You Have to Prove
Exhibit 02 · Icon Array
Having a policy is one thing; qualifying under it is another. Across the forty-six states with a policy, what did the policies require?
Source: Holland, Prost, Hoffmann, and Dickinson (2020), OMEGA 81(4), table 1 at p. 612. One caution carried from the source: the table reports age restrictions in nine states and the article text reports ten. The chart follows the table and flags the difference rather than quietly picking a side.
Why this chart: an icon array, the form risk communication research keeps reaching for when a share has to stay countable. Each dot is a state, so 45 of 46 reads as one state shy of everyone rather than as a long bar, and the denominator never leaves the picture. Sorting by prevalence rather than alphabetically turns a list of requirements into a finding.
How Old Is Old Enough
Exhibit 03 · Span
A policy on file and a statute on the books are different units. The two exhibits above describe the policies; this exhibit and the next describe the statutes, from my fifty-state review, also coded as of 2016. Twelve statutes name a qualifying age, and they do not name the same one.
Eighteen statutes make age a basis for release and twelve set a number. Louisiana’s 45 is the youngest and comes with twenty years served; South Carolina and the federal statute top the range at 70. Six more statutes require age without ever naming one (CT, MO, OR, TX, WA, WY). Source: Wylie, Knutson, and Greene (2018), Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 24(2), table 1, pp. 220-224.
Both reviews counted forty-six, and the match is coincidence. Holland and colleagues counted departments with a policy on file, out of fifty states; my review counted jurisdictions with a compassionate release statute, out of fifty-two, the District of Columbia and the federal system included. Six jurisdictions had no compassionate release statute in 2016: Arizona and South Dakota allowed temporary medical release only, and Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, and Utah had none. The four states without a policy on file are not identified in the published figure, so the two lists cannot be matched state to state.
The same boundary problem shows up whenever a law puts a number on a fuzzy category, which is the subject of a short exercise on this site: How Old Is Old?
Why this chart: a span, because the finding is the distance between the endpoints, and one row per statute because four statutes carry two ages and the pair is the point: the age depends on the sentence, which a single dot per state would hide.
How Long Is Terminal
Exhibit 04 · Dot Plot
Thirty-five statutes make a terminal illness a basis for release. Fifteen say how short the prognosis must be, and they do not say the same thing.
Where a number exists, it runs from 30 days in Kansas to two years in Arkansas and South Carolina, and the wording matters: New Jersey’s six months is a ceiling (“or less”), North Carolina’s is a line. Source: Wylie, Knutson, and Greene (2018), Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 24(2), table 1, pp. 220-224.
The other twenty statutes require a terminal illness without saying how terminal.
Why this chart: a dot plot on one shared axis, because the question is a single magnitude compared across states, and the stacks at six and twelve months are the finding: legislatures reach for round clinical numbers. The printed wording rides in the tooltip, because “6 months” and “6 months or less” are different laws and a bucket label would erase the difference.
Eligible, Applied, Released
Exhibit 05 · Nested Bars
From the law to its use: of everyone the states themselves counted as eligible over three years, how many applied, and how many were released?
Source: Holland, Prost, Hoffmann, and Dickinson (2021), Mortality 26(1), pp. 55 to 56. Denominators are reporting states only, so this is the funnel among systems that could produce the number at all. Note also what the last bar is not: the share who were refused. People leave this process by dying before a decision and by withdrawing, so the gap between applying and release is wider than any denial rate.
Why this chart: a funnel drawn as plain nested bars on a shared axis, because each stage is a subset of the one above it and the reader should be able to measure the drop, not just sense it. Tapered funnel graphics encode the same numbers as areas that no one can compare. The shading deepens as the pool narrows, the same part-in-whole grammar the federal chart below uses.
Does Anyone Have to Count?
Exhibit 06 · Stat Tiles
Every number in the section above depends on a state having written something down. Most of the work of finding out whether a law functions is finding out whether anyone kept the record.
39 of 49
tracked how many people they released
32 of 49
tracked how many people applied
17 of 49
tracked how many people were eligible
2 of 50
required that incarcerated people be told the policy exists
Tracking counts are from Holland et al. (2021), Mortality 26(1), p. 55, across the forty-nine state systems that responded to a public records request. The notification figure is from Holland et al. (2020), OMEGA 81(4), p. 616: only Alabama and New Mexico required that people in their custody be informed that the policy existed.
Those two findings travel together: a policy nobody is told about, tracked by nobody, will look underused whether or not anyone would have used it.
Why this chart: tiles, because four numbers with different denominators cannot share an axis, and forcing them onto one would invent a comparison the data does not support. The last tile is the one that changes how the first three read, so it goes last.
The Federal Docket
Exhibit 07 · Part-in-Whole Bars
Federal law runs on a different track: since 2018 people can file their own motions, and a judge rather than a prison official decides. Here are four and a half years of that docket, month by month.
Across the full period, courts decided 15,265 motions and granted 2,088 of them, or 13.7 percent. Monthly volume fell from 586 in October 2021 to 140 in March 2026, while the share granted rose from 9.2 percent to 16.4 percent. Source: U.S. Sentencing Commission, Compassionate Release Data Reports: fiscal years 2022 through 2025 from the Fiscal Year 2025 report, fiscal year 2026 from the 2nd Quarter FY2026 report, table 1 in each. Fiscal year 2026 figures are preliminary and cumulative through the second quarter.
Why this chart: one bar nested inside another, rather than two lines on two axes. Grants are a part of motions decided, not a separate series, and drawing a part inside its whole keeps the reader from reading a rising rate as a rising count. They moved in opposite directions here, which is exactly the confusion a second axis would have manufactured.
Why Courts Say Yes, and Why They Say No
Exhibit 08 · Small Multiples
Courts record their reasons, and the reasons are the most direct evidence there is of what this law has come to mean in practice. Grouped into themes, what does the federal docket say?
Among granted motions, reasons about sentence length and changes in law accounted for 35.0 percent of citations and medical reasons for 23.0 percent. Among denials, the single most cited reason by far was the general sentencing factors at section 3553(a), a discretionary weighing rather than a finding about health. Courts may cite several reasons per case: 631 reasons across 394 granted cases, and 5,067 across 2,401 denied. Source: U.S. Sentencing Commission, Compassionate Release Data Report, Fiscal Year 2025, tables 10 and 11.
One procedural line is worth reading on its own. Failure to exhaust administrative remedies was cited 447 times, which is a paperwork step rather than a judgment about whether release was warranted.
Why this chart: small multiples sharing one x scale, so grants and denials are read side by side without either being subtracted from the other. They are not complements: a case can be denied for four reasons and granted for two, so a single diverging bar would have implied an arithmetic that does not exist.
From Statute to Data
Exhibit 09 · Codebook Table
The chart above depends on a step that is easy to skip past. The Sentencing Commission publishes reason codes; the themes are mine, and the code labels are lightly shortened from the Commission’s wording. Here is the whole assignment, so the grouping can be argued with.
Open the codebook: every code, its theme, and its count
| Outcome | Theme (my coding) | Reason code (the Commission’s) | Cited |
|---|---|---|---|
| Denied | Discretionary weighing | Section 3553(a) sentencing factors | 1,260 |
| Denied | Discretionary weighing | Rehabilitation insufficient | 524 |
| Denied | Discretionary weighing | Protection of the public | 143 |
| Denied | Discretionary weighing | Post-sentencing conduct | 55 |
| Denied | Family | Other care available for minor child | 142 |
| Denied | Family | Other care available for spouse or partner | 23 |
| Denied | Medical proof | Insufficient proof of serious medical condition | 352 |
| Denied | Medical proof | Able to provide self-care in prison | 260 |
| Denied | Medical proof | Not at risk from COVID-19 or pandemic | 191 |
| Denied | Medical proof | Insufficient proof of deteriorating health | 66 |
| Denied | Medical proof | Insufficient proof of serious functional or cognitive impairment | 15 |
| Denied | Other | Other | 882 |
| Denied | Procedural | Failure to exhaust administrative remedies | 447 |
| Denied | Threshold not met | No extraordinary and compelling reason provided | 512 |
| Denied | Threshold not met | Does not meet age or time-served requirement | 120 |
| Denied | Threshold not met | Mandatory minimum penalty | 40 |
| Denied | Threshold not met | Binding plea agreement | 4 |
| Denied | Unspecified | No reason recorded | 31 |
| Granted | Conduct and rehabilitation | Rehabilitation | 95 |
| Granted | Family | Family circumstances: care for parent | 23 |
| Granted | Family | Family circumstances: care for minor or disabled child | 18 |
| Granted | Family | Family circumstances: care for other immediate family | 14 |
| Granted | Family | Family circumstances: care for spouse or partner | 2 |
| Granted | Medical | Serious physical or medical condition | 71 |
| Granted | Medical | Terminal illness | 28 |
| Granted | Medical | Age 65 with deteriorating health and time served | 16 |
| Granted | Medical | Prison failure to provide treatment | 12 |
| Granted | Medical | Deteriorating health due to aging | 11 |
| Granted | Medical | Serious functional or cognitive impairment | 4 |
| Granted | Medical | COVID-19 or pandemic | 3 |
| Granted | Other | Other | 41 |
| Granted | Other | Abuse by a corrections officer or contractor | 5 |
| Granted | Sentence and law change | Unusually long sentence and change in law | 80 |
| Granted | Sentence and law change | Multiple section 924(c) penalties | 45 |
| Granted | Sentence and law change | Other mandatory minimum or long sentence | 31 |
| Granted | Sentence and law change | Young age at time of offense | 19 |
| Granted | Sentence and law change | Section 851 enhanced drug penalties | 18 |
| Granted | Sentence and law change | Career offender issues | 16 |
| Granted | Sentence and law change | Mandatory nature of guideline at sentencing | 4 |
| Granted | Sentence and law change | Guideline amendment (not yet in effect) | 4 |
| Granted | Sentence and law change | Armed Career Criminal Act issues | 2 |
| Granted | Sentence and law change | Conviction or sentencing errors | 2 |
| Granted | Unspecified | Not recorded | 53 |
| Granted | Unspecified | Extraordinary and compelling (unspecified) | 9 |
| Granted | Unspecified | Nearly meets the policy statement | 5 |
Two judgment calls in there are worth naming. “Young age at time of offense” sits under sentence and law change rather than under anything medical, because it is an argument about whether the original sentence still fits. “Rehabilitation” is kept apart from both health and sentence length, because the Commission notes it never appears alone in a granted case: it always arrives alongside another reason. Three codes are new in the full-year report: mandatory nature of the guideline at sentencing, guideline amendment not yet in effect, and conviction or sentencing errors. All three sit under sentence and law change, because each is an argument about the sentence rather than the person’s condition.
Why this chart: a table, which is the right chart when the reader’s question is “what exactly did you do.” A chart of a coding scheme shows its shape; the scheme itself has to be legible line by line, or nobody can tell you that you put a code in the wrong pile.
One State, Thirty Years
Exhibit 10 · Vertical Timeline
National counts flatten a law into a yes or a no. Any single state’s version arrived in pieces, and Wisconsin’s is a clear case: a statute, a rollback, a rule, a set of forms, a policy.
Sources are the instruments themselves: 1997 Wis. Act 283, 2001 Wis. Act 109 creating Wis. Stat. sec. 302.113(9g), 2009 Wis. Act 28, 2011 Wis. Act 38, Wis. Admin. Code DOC sec. 302.41, Wisconsin Court System forms CR-254 through CR-256, DAI Policy 302.00.13 (reissued effective June 22, 2026), and 2023 Wis. Act 230 on victim statements. Today all four layers operate together and the sentencing court makes the final call.
Notice the 2011 entry. A release mechanism does not only get built; it gets narrowed, and a chart that recorded only expansions would have shown a straight line up.
Why this chart: a timeline set vertically, events alternating sides of the spine, because these labels are phrases and phrases need horizontal room; along a horizontal axis each label gets only the width of its own gap, and eight of them collide. Color marks the kind of instrument, which is the point most easily missed: what looks like one law is a statute, a rule, a form, and an internal policy, each changeable by a different body on a different schedule.
What This Cannot Tell You
Everything above is the law as written and the decisions as recorded. Both are real, and both stop short of the question people actually care about, which is why a law that exists so widely operates so rarely.
The records cannot answer it because the deciding happens before anything gets written down. A prison official weighs whether to forward a petition. A physician decides how confidently to put a prognosis in writing. A board or a judge weighs a small, quiet benefit against a rare, loud risk. Those are judgments made under uncertainty, and the file records the outcome, not the reasoning that produced it.
That is where I think the useful work is. A few questions I would want answered before claiming to know why these laws sit unused:
- Does what the policy is called change who applies and who is approved? The federal statute says “extraordinary and compelling.” Most states name their laws for the condition instead: medical or geriatric parole, medical release, conditional medical release. New Jersey went the other way and made compassionate release the statutory title in 2020, and Utah’s parole board uses the same name. The words carry different promises: mercy in one, clinical necessity in the other.
- Does telling people the policy exists change the number who apply? Two states required it as of 2016, which is close enough to a natural experiment to be worth running.
- Do clearer medical criteria move decisions, or only move where the argument happens?
- When a deadline is written into the statute, does the decision arrive sooner, and does the effect survive the first few years?
None of those are answered here, and none of them can be answered from statutes alone. They need the decisions, the timing, and the people who made them.
Two boundaries are deliberate. The page does not mix the federal and state figures into one national rate, because they count different things over different periods under different law. And it does not report a denial rate, because the published sources cannot support one: people leave these processes by dying and by withdrawing, not only by being refused.
The state layer is the weak link, and it is weak in a specific way: the policy coding and the statute coding are the best fifty-state reviews anyone has published, and both describe a world that has kept moving since 2016. Re-coding from current statutes is the next piece of work.
Related on this site: How Old Is Old?, a short exercise on putting numbers to a fuzzy category, and Maturity Gap, which asks the same kind of question at the other end of a life.