Convicted of Murder as Teenager and Paroled at 41

She wanted to explain how she had blossomed behind bars, earning a high school equivalency diploma and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in prison; how she barely recognized the wispy, naïve 18-year-old who had fallen for a man twice her age, become addicted to drugs and posed as a prostitute to set up a robbery that turned deadly.

Convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 17 years to life in prison, Ms. Ortiz had been in the same situation, prepping for a parole hearing — four times before. She knew she would have about 10 minutes to make her case to three strangers who knew little of where she had been but controlled everything about where she would go. Each previous time she had been nervous and flushed with remorse and regret. Each time, parole had been denied.

“I felt it doesn’t matter what I say, it doesn’t matter who I am or what I’ve done,” she recalled thinking. “It’s never going to change; the crime will never change.”

“The hard part about it,” she added, “was that I changed.”

On the other side of a heavy metal door, Robert Dennison sat with two other Parole Board members behind a long table stacked with files detailing the lives and crimes of Ms. Ortiz and some 30 other prisoners whose cases they would consider that day. As was their practice, they had begun reviewing the cases only that morning.

Mr. Dennison was appointed by Gov. George E. Pataki to the state’s 19-member Parole Board in 2000 and became its chairman in 2004; it was up to him to schedule which members sat for which of the 20,000 hearings each year at prisons across the state, and to set up meetings or phone calls with crime victims and their families, who are entitled to express opinions about parole decisions.

Parole Board members, who must have a college degree and five years of experience in criminal justice, sociology, law, social work or medicine, can serve an unlimited number of six-year terms, earning $101,600 a year. By law, they must interview inmates in person and are required to consider their criminal histories, prison achievements and sense of remorse. Ultimately, though, parole decisions are subjective.

“It’s a real hard issue: how much time should you do for taking a life?” Mr. Dennison said. “Many times, the parole commissioners feel differently than the judge and probably say to themselves or say to one another, ‘I don’t really care what the judge gave the person, I don’t feel comfortable letting this person out. And I am going to hold him for two more years.’ And that can go on and on and on forever.”

More than 800,000 people are on parole, according to the Department of Justice; New York State has more than 50,000.

In 2005, 9 of the 263 so-called A-1 violent offenders — those who, like Ms. Ortiz, had been convicted of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping or arson — who went before the board were paroled, according to the State Division of Parole. That was 3 percent of the A-1 offenders who had hearings (over all, 38 percent of inmates who had hearings that year were paroled).

In contrast, over the last four years, 14 percent of the A-1 offenders who were eligible for parole were granted it. Governor Pataki, a Republican, at one point tried to change state law so that A-1 offenders could not be paroled, and in 2006, a group of A-1 offenders filed a class-action suit claiming his administration had an unwritten policy that violated their rights by denying parole based solely on the severity of the crime.