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| Calif. prisons wrongly released inmates |
| By sfgate.com - Bob Egelko |
| Published: 05/26/2011 |
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California prison officials wrongly left more than 1,500 parolees on the streets without supervision last year, including more than 450 with a "high risk for violence," the prisons' inspector general said Wednesday. The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation mishandled a new state law under which inmates who have served their sentences, and are considered low risk, are released without having to report to parole officers, the office of Inspector General Bruce Monfross said in a report. Such parolees are subject to searches without a warrant for a year but can be returned to prison only for committing a crime, and not for violating the terms of their parole. The program, called non-revocable parole, was put in place in January 2010 to save money and ease prison overcrowding. Those goals took on a new urgency this week when the U.S. Supreme Court, citing the breakdown of California's prison health care system, ordered the state to reduce its inmate population by 33,000 over two years. The inspector general said the corrections department, in selecting inmates for non-revocable parole through June 2010, used an automated screening system that often failed to list past felony convictions, parole violations and serious crimes that prisoners committed as juveniles. Records scrutinized A closer look at the records of a sample of 200 unsupervised parolees found that 31 should have been disqualified from the program, including nine who posed a high risk of violence based on their histories, the report said. Those figures indicate that the more than 10,000 inmates granted non-revocable parole during the first half of last year included more than 1,500 who should have been supervised, including 456 with a high risk of violence, the inspector general said. "We appreciate (the department's) desire to save money by automating" the screening procedure, the report said. But it said the department "should not compromise public safety in doing so, as it does by understating offenders' risk of re-offending and releasing high-risk offenders to unsupervised parole." The report did not say whether any of the inmates who should not have been granted non-revocable parole had committed crimes since being released. Overall, state officials say, inmates freed under the program have a lower recidivism rate than those on supervised parole. The inspector general also said the department has improved screening for the program since mid-2010. Awkward timing The criticism comes just as Gov. Jerry Brown's administration is assuring lawmakers and the public, in response to Monday's Supreme Court ruling, that it can safely winnow the inmate population by sending low-risk offenders to county jails instead of state prison. State Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance (Los Angeles County), who had requested the inspector general's report, said Wednesday that if prison officials "can't do (non-revocable parole) safely, how can the public have confidence they can release 33,000 felons safely?" The Corrections and Rehabilitation Department said the report was unfair. Lee Seale, the deputy chief of staff, said the inspector general used the agency's own work in upgrading its review procedures last year to conclude, misleadingly, that the previous system was riddled with errors. Read More. |
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