truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Junior Allen, 63, feels 2004 will be his year. The North Carolina Parole Commission will decide soon whether to grant his application for release, after 25 straight rejections. Allen's only conviction, in 1970, was for stealing a TV set, which today would carry a probable sentence of probation-only. Meanwhile, the same Commission released Howard Washington on parole in January after 10 years in prison for murder; he committed his crime one week before the state eliminated parole as a possibility for murders such as the one Washington committed. (Update: Allen was released a short time later.)

Super-Criminal-Friendly Judges: In November, D.C. Superior Court judge Susan Winfield ordered no jail time (just drug treatment and probation) to a 25-year-old man who has 33 burglary arrests and 7 convictions, including a gun count, plus previous failed probations and failed drug rehabs. And in Melfort, Saskatchewan, Dean Edmondson, 26, a white man, was sentenced to only house arrest in September after a conviction for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old aboriginal girl, who Justice Fred Kovach found was perhaps "the aggressor."

The Entrepreneurial Spriit: Michael Nelson opened a law firm in an Orlando, Fla., suburb recently (plush leased office space, a Mercedes company car, a letterhead listing law partners) and began soliciting business from drug-convicts' families, offering to negotiate reduced sentences for their kin. However, an investigation by WKMG-TV revealed in November not only that Nelson and his "partners" are not lawyers but that Nelson "practices" only during the day because he returns to a halfway house every night to finish a five-year bank- fraud sentence. (The station also found that business was good, with "hundreds of thousands of dollars" "received or solicited.") Amazed at the station's findings, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons revoked Nelson's halfway-house privilege and began its own investigation.

Alternate Universe: In October, former Massachusetts day-care center proprietor Gerald Amirault, who is believed to be the last person still imprisoned on the basis of now-widely-discredited, fantastical, heavily- coached child-sex-abuse testimony from the 1980s, finally won parole and will be freed in April. Officials have long refused to cut him slack because of his defiant, 18-year insistence that he never molested a single child. He noted that his sociology textbook for an in-prison college course mentioned his own case as an example of that era's hysteria-driven prosecutions of accused child molesters.

In October, imprisoned child molester Kevin Kinder, 31, scheduled for a routine court hearing, was temporarily placed in a holding cell in Tampa, Fla., with 60 other prisoners, among them a 22-year-old man who immediately recognized Kinder as the man who had molested him when he was 11. The man started punching Kinder and knocked out a tooth before he was restrained.

Marion, Ohio, inmate Willie Chapman got permission to delay his scheduled parole by one day until August 12 so he could attend a prison meeting of the religious/personal-responsibility organization Promise Keepers. Chapman's inspirational decision made the newspapers, inadvertently alerting his manslaughter victim's family, who complained to the Ohio Parole Board that Chapman should not be free at all. Consequently, the Board reconsidered Chapman's parole and delayed it 991 days, until May 1, 2006.