If you’re a prisoner serving an indeterminate sentence in New York, your god isn’t Jesus, Allah or Pasta. It’s the Parole Board. A purely political gang, accountable to no one, which holds literal life or death power over you. It’s not that the power can be used arbitrarily, but that there is no other entity that can grant you parole after you’ve served your minimum sentence. And all it takes for them to hold you in prison until the day you die is a shrug and nah.

This applies to prisoners sentenced as adults. This applies to prisoners sentenced as youths. All must pray to the Parole gods, or they will rot until their 15 to life has maxed out. Judges have tried to force the Parole Board to do their job, to no avail. Even if the Parole Board’s denials are pro forma malarkey, the most they can do is order the board to do is reconsider, getting another denial plus more empty words. Some victory.

Cravath has taken on the cause on behalf of plaintiffs, as a class action, who were sentenced as juveniles, making an end run around the Parole Board by suing for a violation of their constitutional rights in the Southern District of New York.

What permits Cravath to take this path is the series of Supreme Court rulings that the state cannot impose life without parole sentences on children without a “meaningful and realistic opportunity for release.” The contention is that New York’s Parole Board has denied parole to juveniles despite “unmistakable rehabilitation and reform, and low risk to public safety.”

Instead, the Parole Board issues curt denials, noting only the underlying crime and prior criminal history. Doesn’t this matter too? Of course, but that was what the sentencing judge had before him when he imposed sentence. With that same information, a judge imposed a sentence of, say, 15 to life, knowing that the defendant would be eligible for parole in 15 years, provided he behaved well in prison. The minimum sentence was the carrot. The back end of the sentence, life, was the stick.

Instead of honoring the sentence imposed by the judge, the Parole Board has deigned itself to be a Super Judge, both because it views its power to be superior to that of the sentencing judge and because its decisions cannot be reversed by a higher court. If the Parole Board says 15 years wasn’t harsh enough, then they just ignore the minimum sentence and whisper “denied,” and back to max goes the 17-year-old defendant who is now a 54-year-old prisoner.

And to add insult to injury, the Parole Board can’t find the time to even pretend to take its job seriously. A Parole Board panel will interview, usually by video, 20-35 prisoners per day. That’s a lot of lives to deal with, so surely they have some clue about these people beforehand.

In other words, the Parole Board panel knows next to squat about the prisoners over whose lives they rule. They don’t have to.

The New York Times has an editorial about this travesty.

This persists despite the fact that people are far less likely to commit crimes as they get older. At a deeper level, though, parole becomes a meaningless concept if it is routinely denied in the situations where it’s most called for. That’s particularly true in the case of juvenile lifers. Parole boards in New York and elsewhere must not only make passing note of an offender’s youth. They must, as the Supreme Court has said repeatedly, give them a real chance to show they’ve grown up.

They “must”? Well then. While the end-run is predicated on the law as applied to juveniles, the rationale for which is both clear and a matter of Supreme Court mandate, the Parole Board just chuckles and says, “yeah, who’s gonna make us?” Not the Times, who has some endorsement clout over the only person who has any authority over Parole Board members, Governor Andrew Cuomo. Did they refuse to endorse Cuomo for his failure to fix this mess? Nope.

And while the editorial grabs at the low-hanging fruit of juveniles, the exact same problem exists for every prisoner under an indeterminate sentence. The reason Cravath takes the “do it for the children” path is that there is law that enables the possibility of this circumvention, not because the problem isn’t endemic.

So will this change the treatment of youth subject to max sentences of life? The relief requested suggests it will at most produce a lot of sweet words that accomplish nothing. The suit seeks to enjoin the Parole Board from doing the same old bad stuff, require the Parole Board to do good stuff (like provide counsel for prisoners at their parole hearing) and grant attorneys fees.

Cravath may well win, and get everything they ask for (especially the attorneys fees), but no matter how strongly worded a federal judge rules against the Parole Board, the one thing that can’t be done is to order the release of a class of prisoners who have been denied a meaningful opportunity to receive parole.

Even if there was a demand for habeas corpus relief for the individual plaintiffs in the suit, who were chosen very carefully and reflect the most outrageous and ridiculous parole denials imaginable, the best that could come of it is the release of the named plaintiffs. Beyond that, it’s merely “do better, much better.”

And then the Parole Board can decide whether it feels like actually doing its job and take its responsibility seriously, or continue to do the same as it’s always done, or pretend to do better by crafting better decisions, ultimately ending in denial of parole anyway. Can they actually do that?

You bet they can, and nobody, except the governor of the State of New York, can stop them.