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Upside-Down Parole Policy Puts Us All at Risk
By Pat Nolan|Published Date: October 09, 2009
 We were all delighted to hear that Jaycee Dugard, the young woman who had been kidnapped 18 years earlier in northern California, had been found alive. Once the elation subsided, however, and more information about her alleged kidnappers became public, we had less reason to rejoice.
In 1976 her captor, Phillip Garrido, was sentenced to 50 years in a federal prison for kidnapping and raping a woman. After his release 11 years later, he was under continuous supervision by parole authorities, but despite his extensive record of sexual assault, Garrido managed to fool his parole supervisors and to keep Jaycee—and the two children she had given birth to—in tents in his backyard.
An article in The Reno Gazette Journal asked the question on many of our minds: “As reports continue to surface about other possible victims of Phillip Garrido, questions continue about why he was released from prison, who was responsible for his supervision, and how state and federal agencies failed to see two children and a woman living in his backyard.”
Garrido’s case is a textbook example of how our current parole system has its priorities upside down.
What Went Wrong
When dangerous offenders don’t get the attention they deserve from their parole officers, the public is terribly at risk.
Unfortunately, California parole case loads are so large that many parole officers merely check to see if offenders are using drugs or alcohol and if they have a job. By this standard Garrido was a model parolee since he didn’t use drugs or alcohol, lived where he was supposed to, and had a job. That was enough to earn him a “check off” on his parole report.
Furthermore, the state places every released felon on supervised release. From shoplifters and petty thieves to mass murderers, each felon is assigned a parole officer, with all the bureaucracy and paperwork involved in that process. Parole officers have an average of 70 cases each—an overwhelming responsibility. Because of Garrido’s violent background, he was one of 40 cases supervised by his parole officer—a larger load than most states assign for dangerous felons.
If any one of the officials who visited the Garrido property had looked in the backyard, he or she would have noticed clothes, diapers, or other indications that several females were living there, and that would have set off alarms. Between last December and his arrest in August, Garrido’s home was visited by 25 parole and law enforcement officers. Yet not one of them did much more than peek over the fence, leaving Jaycee and her daughters imprisoned just a few feet away.
This is the tragedy of the Jaycee Dugard case: While parole officers and local law enforcement were spending time tracking parolees who pose little threat, they overlooked a truly dangerous offender living in their community.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, some legislators came to a completely wrong conclusion. California’s Senator Tom Harmon told the Sacramento Bee, “This demonstrates the problems that we’re going to have if we release thousands of prisoners into our local communities.”
No! This demonstrates the problems you get when you don’t differentiate dangerous criminals from small-time offenders. This is what you get when the state stretches parole officers too thin by tracking low-risk offenders rather than dangerous ones.
We Can Fix the Problem
The Pew Center on the States recently published an excellent report—1 in 31—analyzing the current state of probation and parole in the United States. It points out that while two-thirds of offenders under corrections supervision are living in the community, only 10 percent of corrections spending goes to monitor them. The problem is made worse when those scarce dollars are spent tracking released offenders who pose little danger. Jaycee Dugard paid for this shortsightedness with 18 years of her life.
The Pew Report summarizes our imperative well: Parole should separate “those who are more likely to cause great harm from those who may cause relatively little harm.”
It is important that advocates of reform use the Jaycee Dugard case as an opportunity to explain that our current policies put us all at risk. Turning our parole programs right side up will make us all safer. |
