Victims’ Rights Group Blasts Prison Rehab Plan

Already under attack by Democrats, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is now taking fire from a traditional ally of his Republican Party, a victims’ rights group that says the governor is endangering the public with his parole and prison reforms.

In a television advertisement unveiled last week, the leader of Crime Victims United of California said the governor “let us down” after promising to “stand with victims.”

“We didn’t want it to come to this,” Harriet Salarno, the organization’s founder, said in an interview, “but the governor said victims would be his first priority, and now we’re being ignored.... We’ve got parolees running around all over committing crimes.”

Salarno believes that Schwarzenegger is moving too hastily in refocusing the prison system on rehabilitation.

Despite the criticism, the governor’s reorganization of the state’s corrections bureaucracy -- which he calls a first step toward cleaning up the deeply troubled prison system -- is winning support in the Legislature.

Under a deal expected to be concluded next week, lawmakers would allow Schwarzenegger’s plan for a new Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to take effect in May, with one exception. The governor had proposed merging the youth prison system with the adult offenders system, but critics -- including a state watchdog agency -- said juveniles’ needs might be overlooked. The compromise would keep the California Youth Authority as a distinct division. Separate adult and youth parole boards would be maintained.

Democrats in the Senate and Assembly said Thursday they were ready to sign off on the deal.

“It’s far from perfect, and a reorganization of the boxes won’t stop the scandals,” said state Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), who helped negotiate it. “But I give this governor credit for having the internal fortitude to deal with prison reform.”

Senate Republican leader Dick Ackerman (R-Irvine) said GOP members like the overall course Schwarzenegger is steering for corrections but need time to examine details of the compromise.

As that element of the governor’s prison overhaul moved forward, another piece -- how the state handles ex-convicts who violate their parole -- continued to draw complaints.

Following the lead of other states, administration officials last spring began imposing different sanctions on parolees who violated terms of their release. In the past, almost any violation would have caused them to be sent back to prison for several months -- an expensive move that did little to prevent future criminal behavior.

Under the new approach, parolees who commit certain violations -- such as missing an appointment with a parole agent, testing positive for drugs or committing a petty theft or misdemeanor battery -- are directed into community programs that allow them to maintain family and job connections and get help with addictions.

Depending on their criminal background, parolees are diverted into 30-day treatment centers inside county jails and halfway houses or placed in home detention with electronic monitoring. The change followed a report by the nonpartisan Little Hoover Commission that called the state’s parole system a “billion-dollar failure” because of sky-high recidivism rates.

“What the state was doing with parolees in the past wasn’t working,” said J.P. Tremblay, assistant secretary for youth and adult corrections. “Now our agents have new tools in the community, which they are able to use at their discretion if it makes good sense.”

Salarno says the new approach is risky, permitting violent offenders to remain on the street. Salarno, who launched the group after her teenage daughter was murdered in 1979, said she hoped the TV ad would serve as a “wake-up call,” persuading Schwarzenegger to reverse course “so we don’t have more victims on his watch.”

The ad is airing throughout the Central Valley and may be extended into Southern California, Salarno said. It opens with a shot of another Salarno daughter, Nina, recounting the murder of her sister, and says that because of Schwarzenegger’s actions, “Catina’s killer could be back on the streets.”

Most of the spot, however, focuses on parole violators already on the streets. The ad claims that more than 2,500 such violators remained free last year under the governor’s program and that more than 2,000 went on to commit “new, serious crimes.”

The ad’s creator, political consultant Ray McNally, said he took the numbers from an article in the Sacramento Bee. But Jim L’Etoile, the acting deputy director of parole services for the Department of Corrections, disputed the figures. He added, however, that the department does not track the criminal behavior of parole violators who had been allowed to remain in the community.

“They’re trying to make this connection, but we don’t have the figures that would show it,” L’Etoile said. “We haven’t gone soft on crime. We’re trying to interrupt the criminal cycle with these new sanctions when appropriate. But we’re still returning a lot of parole violators to prison.”

A parole agent in Los Angeles County, Scott Johnson, said the reforms, though well-intentioned, had gotten off to a rocky start. He also said that trying to “rehabilitate these guys when they’re already on parole is too late. It needs to start in prison.”

Crime Victims United has been among the more influential victims groups in the capital in recent years, and its endorsement is coveted by lawmakers. Initially, it was financed almost exclusively by the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., the prison guards’ union. In the past, Salarno has said that if not for former union president Don Novey, the group would not exist.

Over the last year, the union has been fiercely critical of the governor’s prison initiative, especially its new approach to parolees. But now, Salarno said, the union is one of many contributors to Crime Victims United.

On April 11, the group will hold its annual fundraising dinner; at last year’s dinner, Schwarzenegger was the keynote speaker. Salarno does not expect him this year and says the governor “is a nice man but has pushed us aside.”

“I could always talk with previous governors, one on one, but not this governor,” Salarno said.