Chris Gelardi / New York Focus
Does anyone care how long people stay in prison?” That’s what Carol Shapiro wants to know.
In 2017, the longtime criminal justice reform advocate was appointed to New York state’s Board of Parole, which decides whether people who’ve served their minimum prison sentences should be released. She was eager to join the board because she wanted to reconfigure the gears of its “conveyor belt justice” — her term for the rapid, impersonal churn of cases in which a person’s freedom can be decided in mere minutes….