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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.

“I never got any direct pressure from Pataki not to let certain people out,” Mr. Dennison said, “but he did make it clear in the newspapers that he didn’t want violent felons released.”

NEW York passed the nation’s first “good-time” law, which shaved sentences for well-behaved prisoners, in 1817. In 1876, the state began imposing sentences defined as a range, with convicts becoming eligible for parole after serving the minimum; those who were released reported monthly to citizen volunteers known as guardians, forerunners of today’s parole officers.

Criminals sentenced to a range — like Ms. Ortiz’s 17 years to life — still earn their first hearing after serving the minimum, while those given a fixed term — say 10 years — can be paroled after serving six-sevenths of their sentence. Those who are held (“hit” is the slang term) are entitled to another hearing after two years, but most appeal the decisions to the Division of Parole’s Office of Counsel, and sometimes beyond that, in court; those who win appeals get another appearance, known as a hearing de novo.

Ms. Ortiz became eligible for parole in 2000. She was denied twice by the Parole Board, whose decisions were upheld both times by the Division of Parole’s Office of Counsel. She won court appeals both times on the grounds that the board had not reasonably weighed how much she had changed versus the severity of the crime she had committed, but she was rejected in both of the de novo hearings.

“It’s hard, because you always hope people will just see the true you and judge you that way,” she said. “Like they’ll say ‘O.K., she did this, but that’s not who she is.’ And it’s never like that.”

For Mr. Dennison — who was born in the Bronx and has lived in Eastchester, a Westchester County suburb, for most of his life — serving on the board was the capstone to a 37-year career in corrections.

After determining that teaching sixth grade was “too hard a job for me,” he used a master’s degree in counseling to become a parole officer, and eventually rose to deputy regional director overseeing operations in Brooklyn and Queens. He said he became active in the Conservative Party in 1998 to pave the way to a seat on the Parole Board. “It’s a political appointment,” he explained. “It’s the only way to get on.”

Of the 16 current members (there are three vacancies), 10 were appointed by Mr. Pataki, three by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer and three by Gov. David A. Paterson (who has suggested cutting the board to 13 members, to save money). Mr. Dennison said he witnessed spirited debate and angry outbursts among the commissioners, and developed a keen understanding of the subtle — or not — messages sent from the offices of elected officials about certain kinds of cases.

“The way it works is that you are free to make whatever decision you feel is the right decision,” he explained. “However, if you were sponsored by a particular state senator and you made a decision he didn’t like, it is conceivable that the next time you are up to be reappointed, he may not push your name to the governor.”

Mr. Dennison said he loved the job, taking pride in having an impact on people’s lives — freeing those he deemed deserving, leaving caged those he determined were dangerous. Over the years, he said, there were simple cases and tough cases, and cases with dire consequences, like the model prisoner of 18 years who, shortly after his release, raped a teenage neighbor and set her home on fire.

“It is an easy job if you don’t have courage and you don’t have compassion,” he said. “Because then you really don’t care. And then it is easy to make whatever decision you want without feeling guilty, without feeling, ‘Gee, maybe I made the wrong decision.’ ”

IN the early-morning hours of a summer day in 1983, Ms. Ortiz, then 18, stood alone on a Coney Island street corner. A man pulled up in a car, looking for oral sex. That was the plan cooked up by her boyfriend: to get a man, any man, to pick up the pretty young thing. She made the deal for $25, and then made the biggest mistake of her life: getting into the car.

Ms. Ortiz grew up in Chicago and had come to New York as a teenager after fleeing an abusive relationship in Puerto Rico. That morning, she was following instructions that had been drilled into her head by her 36-year-old boyfriend. He had introduced her to cocaine, heroin and LSD, and had convinced her that robbery was a good way to support their habits: take the customer to a dark parking lot, wait for the boyfriend and his two buddies to creep up, get out and run.

But as she was running down 24th Street, the plan and her life crumbled. The robbers and the victim fought; the would-be customer was shot. Worse, as she would discover in the next day’s tabloids, he was an off-duty police officer, and he died after a few days. A frightened Ms. Ortiz, who had no criminal record, turned herself in.

Convicted of felony murder at trial, she spent 18 years at Bedford Hills — the state’s only maximum-security prison for women. Eventually, her fears of rape and abusive guards faded, and she began taking classes, earning college degrees. She worked as a bookkeeper and with a church ministry, helping other inmates to reconnect with their children and learn to read.

After 15 years, Ms. Ortiz began counting down to her first chance at freedom. “You start going through it in your mind,” she said. Other inmates told her what to expect at the parole hearing: “This is what the room looks like; this is where you’re going to sit.”

She was cautiously optimistic. “I was 18 years old, first-time offense, drug use — now I have a master’s degree,” Ms. Ortiz recalled thinking. “And my role, my role in the crime: I wasn’t the actual shooter. I wasn’t actually there when it happened. So this is what I kept telling myself: ‘This is going to happen.’ ”

Parole denied.

In a letter outlining its decision, the board said that “your serious record of violent crime” and other factors “demonstrate that you pose a serious threat to community safety and welfare.”

After three more denials, Ms. Ortiz grew weary of the emotional roller coaster, unsure what more she could do. “I want to say all of these great things that I’m doing, this great person that I am, but how do you balance that with a life was taken?” she said. “Someone did die because of my act, because of what I did. And so I think that was the hardest part. You really want them to see who you are, who you’ve become, who you’re going to be. That these are my hopes, these are my aspirations, this is what I want to do with my life.”

HAVING left the board in 2007, Mr. Dennison, now 63, spoke plainly about Ms. Ortiz’s case in a recent interview. “He was an off-duty police officer,” he said of the victim, “and, basically, people didn’t want to let her out because of that.”

Since retiring from the board, Mr. Dennison has worked with parolees to adjust to post-prison life and lobbied in Albany for changes in lifetime-parole rules. “I have been back to several prisons to explain to people how they can better prepare for the Parole Board,” he said, “how they can enhance their chance of being released.”

Ms. Ortiz, prisoner No. 85G0315, had no such counseling, though she had assembled hundreds of letters of support, including ones from several public officials, before her fifth parole hearing. (The victim’s widow said she had also written letters opposing Ms. Ortiz’s parole.)

Ms. Ortiz’s was the first name called that cold morning at Fishkill, and she took her place in an armless chair, dressed in prison greens, her long brown hair in a ponytail; she was 40. A stenographer, a parole adviser who helped her get her paperwork together before the hearing, a parole supervisor and a secretary sat along the periphery of the room. But like in a movie, she said, everything but the long table and the three strangers behind it melted into a smear of white light.

“So you’ve been in jail longer than you were alive when you committed the crime?” Mr. Dennison asked.

“Yes,” Ms. Ortiz responded.

“Do you tell your story to the women at Beacon?” he continued. “Do you tell them what a terrible thing getting involved with drugs can do, not just to your life but to the victims?”

“Exactly,” Ms. Ortiz said.

“I use my life as an example,” she added, “so that they know this can happen, it can easily happen to anyone if they continue living their lives, using drugs, not thinking about how their choices are going to affect other people.”

It was the longest of all her hearings, about 12 minutes. She was excused from the room, then called back in and questioned for five more minutes, then sent out a second time, then called in a third.

Then she opened the big metal door, closed it behind her, and wept.

“I was so exhausted, emotionally,” Ms. Ortiz recalled.

She returned to Beacon Correctional Facility, where she had spent the past couple of years, and was summoned by the parole adviser that afternoon. The inmates gathered on either side of the hallway and in stairwells, rooting for her. She was their friend and mentor, and in that moment, she carried all of their hopes for freedom.

“You’re going home,” Ms. Ortiz remembered the adviser saying. “I waited so long for that.”

When she emerged from the office with a smile, the prison halls erupted in cheers and hugs, smiles and tears.

In a little coffee shop in Harlem not long ago, Ms. Ortiz’s eyes were wet again after she spilled her soul. Now she, like Mr. Dennison, is helping other recently released inmates adapt, working with Exodus Transitional Community, a nonprofit group where 85 percent of the staff has served time. She completed her parole last year.

“I still have those dreams of not being able to leave prison, like I’m still in there trying to get out,” Ms. Ortiz said. “I’m no longer part of the system, but I keep having them. Why am I still struggling to get out?”