The recent Star-Advertiser article on the Hawaii Paroling Authority could have shined much-needed light on one of this state’s most powerful and least accountable criminal justice institutions ("Reduced prison time angers victims’ families," Feb. 9).

But in stressing the anger that victims’ families feel over the HPA’s reduction of minimum sentences for 14 convicted killers, this 1,600-word article misdiagnosed the main problem at HPA and encouraged misunderstandings about what a criminal justice system is for.

Of course, victims’ families have many reasons to be angry. In all of these cases they have lost a loved one, and in some they have been revictimized by a process that treated them as little more than props in a play starring the defendant.

But a criminal justice system is not a victim-service program.

Moreover, notwithstanding the "Opening Doors" title of this newspaper’s special report, none of the 14 murderers will be leaving prison anytime soon.

Indeed, after resentencing by the HPA, their average minimum sentence is 36 years — and many will serve a lot longer than that.

In other developed democracies, 36 years behind bars is considered an extremely severe sentence. But in America, where more people are incarcerated than in any other country, decades-long sentences are deemed to be "soft on crime."

The real problem with the HPA is not excessive leniency; it is the arbitrary and capricious ways in which the three persons who comprise it exercise their enormous authority.

And make no mistake: The HPA’s authority is huge.

After a court imposes a criminal sentence, the HPA decides not only how long the inmate must serve before becoming eligible to apply for parole, but also makes decisions about which inmates to release on parole and which parolees to reincarcerate when the terms of their paroles have been violated.

In these respects, the members of the HPA exercise more power over who gets what in Hawaii’s criminal process than prosecutors and judges do.

Laws provide the HPA with little meaningful guidance about how to exercise these awesome powers.

A few years ago, as part of a research project on imprisonment and parole in Hawaii, I attended some HPA hearings. I cannot disclose specific case details, but I can say that the decision-making seemed to follow the principle that there are no principles governing crucial decisions about justice and public safety.

What I observed in Hawaii is consistent with the findings from research on parole decision-making in other contexts.

A recent study of parole in Israel, for example, found a pattern in the parole board’s decisions that was unrelated to the offenders’ backgrounds, crimes, and sentences — it was almost all about the timing of the decisions.

Prisoners who appeared at hearings early in the morning receiving parole 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time. The members of this parole board experienced decision fatigue later in the day, and when tired, they took the ultimate energy-saving shortcut of doing nothing, thereby leaving inmates in prison.

The most practical questions in our criminal process concern how to improve the quality of justice for individuals — and how to reduce injustice.

Parole decisions premised on the time of day or the moods of the decision-makers or the intensity of a victim’s anger are arbitrary, unreasonable and unjust.

The HPA is hardly soft on crime, but it does possess immense discretion, which it exercises without meaningful standards and almost entirely in secret.

This is a recipe for failures of justice that never make the media.