When a 2016 California law made it possible for Lance Gonzalez to shorten his lengthy prison sentence by completing more rehabilitation programs and education, he hit the ground running.

Gonzalez “poured hundreds of hours into self-help groups, including courses on victim impact and cognitive behavior,” KQED reported this week. He taught classes, worked as a mentor and earned seven associate degrees.

His efforts towards shortening his long prison sentence seemed to pay off. Under the law, the state corrections department awarded Gonzalez enough time credits to move up his first parole hearing from 2028 to 2023. He was granted parole on his first try — a rare feat.

As Gonzalez was planning for his first hours as a free man last spring, a lawsuit pulled the rug out from under him. In May, a judge agreed with the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation — a conservative nonprofit organization — that the corrections department didn’t have the authority to advance parole for people serving life sentences. The state has appealed the ruling.

Meanwhile, a bill that would have allowed some Californians sentenced to life before 1990 to be eligible for parole died in the statehouse on Thursday.

The two stalled efforts in the Golden State are indicative of a tension visible across the country, as reform efforts aimed at paring back long sentences bump up against resistance from victims' rights groups and a resurgence of “tough-on-crime” politics.

The time people spend in prison generally got longer during the 1990s with the rapid adoption of “truth-in-sentencing” laws that severely restricted or even eliminated opportunities for incarcerated people to earn parole part-way through a sentence.

Wisconsin is characteristic of the changes in sentencing in many states. Before 1997, people convicted in Wisconsin were eligible for parole after serving 25% of their sentence and were automatically released after serving two-thirds. After 1997, people were required to serve 100% of their sentence, plus an additional 25% on supervised release.

Even as the state reduced arrests and prosecutions during the 2000s, there was no “release valve,” experts told Wisconsin Watch, causing the number of people incarcerated to continue to grow, even as fewer people were sentenced. At present, the state’s prison population is 5,000 people over capacity.

Read the full article about cutting long prison sentences by Jamiles Lartey at The Marshall Project.