The California Board of Parole Hearings denied an aggregate of 9,886 years to incarcerated persons in 2025, according to a San Quentin News analysis and interpretation of Board of Parole Hearings data extracted from the five most recent issues of the quarterly California Lifer Newsletter.

This new quantitative perspective of the carceral landscape came from the San Quentin News metric “Aggregate Years Denied,” which multiplied the number of denials by their duration. As an example, five 10-year denials would produce a number of 50 Aggregate Years Denied, or 50 AYD. The CLN showed data for 4,589 hearings, but did not include one-year denials given to parole violators, which amounted to 139 for the year. Added together, the BPH denied a total of 10,025 years.

“Ten thousand years is a staggering number, it’s outrageous, it’s a crazy number. I’ve never looked at board denials in the aggregate before, but I am not surprised because I know that board grants were really low in ’25,” said Michael Beaudette, 66, a San Quentin resident with a board hearing in 2032.

Beaudette said, “We focus a lot on grant rates, but we should also take a much closer look at denials, especially since the board gives us so many of them.” For Beaudette, the AYD metric stood as a bellwether. He said the AYD number looked perfectly round, easy to understand, and easy to remember and so should stand as the number the board should make an effort to beat in the future.

Why did the numbers turn out so poorly? The CLN said BPH leadership agreed that the well-known issue of incarcerated persons gaming the system to avoid paying restitution must take the blame for the cloud. That cloud, though, had a silver lining: “The biggest impact of this issue is behind us now and we will begin seeing fewer denials based on this issue going forward … Or, as we told the board at a recent executive meeting, ‘Commissioners, this issue (restitution) is a dead horse. Stop beating it.’”

The CLN added a message for incarcerated persons engaged in restitution avoidance: “[I]f you are still playing that game, STOP it now.”

The San Quentin News analysis separated the 4,589 total hearings into 3,541 “suitability hearings” that involved only grants and denials, and 1,048 “other hearings” that involved stipulations, waivers, postponements, and continuances. The CLN data occasionally showed some minor differences from the data printed from the BPH website, but these differences did not significantly affect the outcome of the analysis.The number for one-year denials came from a San Quentin News analysis of printouts from data available at the BPH website.

Data published on the BPH website only listed a bare minimum of information. More data would  have added transparency to board decisions and could have explained, for example, whether commissioners with low grant rates conducted hearings more at Level IV facilities or at rural facilities without much programming.

Beaudette said he looked forward to better numbers in the future. “I would like to reunite with my family, and I can be an asset to fight recidivism. By the time I go to board, I hope the 10,000 number is a lot lower,” he said.