Singleton: He’s a Symbol of the Public’s Fear

Grim-faced, petition in hand, Danny Baronian, father of two young children, did his part to get parolee Larry Singleton, the man who raped and mutilated a 15-year-old girl, out of town.

“I don’t know where he should go. I just don’t want him here,” Baronian said last week as he urged each customer of the Lucky market on this town’s main street to add his or her signature to the petition demanding that Singleton be placed anywhere but in this Contra Costa County city.

All but a handful signed without hesitation. One of the few who didn’t was even more adamant. “Shoot ‘im,” the man said.

For five weeks, public outrage eddied about the 59-year-old Singleton; his parole inspired invective, threats, even his evacuation under guard from a threatening mob, 500 strong.

Amid the swirl, psychologists, sociologists and others familiar with the case said, Singleton emerged as a symbol for what many people fear most--random, unexplainable, violent crime, particularly threats to family and children.

‘Modern-Day Leper’

“People don’t want this polluted individual, this modern-day leper, in their community,” said Neil J. Smelser, a sociology professor at UC Berkeley. “It’s a kind of vigilante reaction: ‘Keep this leper out.’ ”

“In historical times, cases like this would have been exiled, or just sent to a monastery,” said Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in San Francisco. “But in modern industrial societies, we can’t do that.

“Maybe,” he paused and added, “the solution is for some religious group to step forward and offer sanctuary.”

On Saturday, Gov. George Deukmejian announced just such a novel solution: exiling Singleton at San Quentin prison for the remaining 10 months and three weeks of his parole. It will be a sort of island, not inside a prison cell, but on prison grounds in the same complex where prison guards live. On the grounds, he can be closely watched and will be kept separate from the public that is so repulsed by him--until his parole is over and he can roam free.

With the reaction so severe, experts in criminology said, the state had no choice but to try to assuage community concerns by implementing an intensive supervision of Singleton for his remaining time on parole, a sort of cooling-off period. Whether the authorities manage to keep him away from the community long enough so that people begin to forget remains to be seen.

Several experts said the case again illustrated a basic problem of what to do with criminals once they are released.

Parole Conditions

Singleton will continue to be subject to random searches and drug and alcohol testing, and must attend counseling and abide by a curfew between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. Singleton attacked his victim while he was heavily intoxicated.

Not only are the parole conditions novel, but social psychologists, legal scholars and criminologists throughout the country were at a loss to cite another case where the reaction to a parolee was so severe--and grew rather than diminished over time.

One historic case cited by criminologists as somewhat similar involved the 1924 Leopold and Loeb “thrill kill” murder in Chicago. Richard (Dickie) Loeb was killed in prison, but in 1958 Nathan (Babe) Leopold was paroled to Puerto Rico, where he spent the rest of his life in relative anonymity researching tropical diseases. He died there in 1971.

In Singleton’s case, experts said, the outrage is rooted both in his nightmarish crime and his refusal to acknowledge his guilt or show remorse for the girl he raped, maimed and left to die in a culvert outside Modesto on Sept. 29, 1978. The girl, Mary Bell Vincent, whose forearms were chopped off with an ax, survived and testified against Singleton at his trial.

Only last week, he seemed to try to minimize the crime when he spoke with Contra Costa County Supervisor Nancy Fahden and, Fahden related in an interview, said the girl had her “hand cut off,” not her forearms, as was the case. He also reportedly called her a “PCB queen,” evidently referring to the illicit drug, PCP.

Experts noted that people intensely resented Singleton’s relatively light sentence--14 years, reduced by nearly half by good-conduct credits gained by working in prison. The outrage was fueled by elected officials stridently denouncing him, and close media attention, several experts said.

“In cases like this, people tend to see it as a moral issue,” said Malcolm MacDonald, president of the American Probation and Parole Assn., based in Austin, Tex. “It becomes like a religious crusade to correct what many people see as a major injustice.”

Shared Concerns

These elements, bundled into the form of an aging, alcoholic merchant seaman who talks defiantly of his victim and women in general, heightened basic concerns shared by many Americans. Those concerns may be especially prevalent in suburban Contra Costa County, where encroaching urbanization has been the issue of the decade, and where the Corrections Department sought to place him.

The most liberal thinkers interviewed stressed that they sympathize more with the protesters than with Singleton, even though they said they would not join such protests. One man noted for his liberal views privately referred to Singleton as “the most repulsive parolee we have seen in a long time.”

The reaction appeared to go beyond any specific threat posed by Singleton to a general concern over a “threat to family life, a threat to children, a threat to a lot of sacred things,” Smelser said.

He said the phenomenon is similar to historical reactions against diseases such as leprosy, which posed “a real problem and . . . a symbolic problem. . . . It reflects this broad social concern about dangers over which we have no control.”

In several ways, Singleton fell through the cracks of the justice system. He was sentenced shortly after the Legislature approved a sweeping change in the penal code by adopting a determinate sentencing system. That system provides for set periods of incarceration for various crimes, and allows parole authorities no leeway to hold prisoners indefinitely, as was the case under the old indeterminate sentencing system.

Stiffest Sentence

Singleton’s prosecutor, Stanislaus County Dist. Atty. Donald Stahl, said the trial judge gave Singleton the stiffest possible sentence at the time for his crimes--attempted murder, rape and kidnap. Sentences for such crimes since have been increased. A mutilation-rapist today could be sentence to life in prison, legislators contend.

A spate of legislation has been proposed that would fill other loopholes brought to the fore by Singleton’s case. He managed, for example, to get six years knocked off his sentence because he worked while behind bars. A bill pending would remove that privilege for violent criminals.

But beyond that, Singleton’s case, extraordinary as it now seems, probably will not have lasting legal significance. California already has a variety of victims’ rights laws mandating, for example, that victims of crimes be allowed to appear at sentencing and parole hearings.

Of greater worry to many criminologists is that the case has failed to focus much attention on better ways to prepare parolees for life outside prison.

“We’re all worried about Singleton,” said Krisberg, “but no one seems to be worried about the fact that we (in California) have 50,000 prisoners jammed into bulging, unconstitutional prisons without any . . . program to prepare them to eventually rejoin society in some useful way. That is a bigger threat to my family and yours than Singleton.”

Most Will Be Freed

“Ninety-nine percent of the people in prison will hit the streets again one day,” said Deborah Hansen, a top New Jersey corrections official. “You’re talking about murderers, rapists, child abusers, armed robbers. . . . A Singleton gets out of jail every day of the year in this country. Given that brutal reality, we’ve got to do something with them.”

Authorities initially selected Contra Costa County for Singleton’s parole because he had lived there before the crime was commited. Parolees are thought to have a better chance of success outside prison if they are in familiar settings. Contra Costa County officials contended, however, that Singleton had no true roots there because he had no family or hope of getting a job there.

Contra Costa County officials and others who were critical of the Department of Corrections say the agency should have realized with the first public outcry--before Singleton was released--that Contra Costa County simply would not accept him.

“They screwed up, and they screwed up badly,” said Daniel Manville of the American Civil Liberty Union’s National Prison Project in Washington. “After that initial reaction, they should have quietly taken him to the other end of California, and they could have avoided this.”

Others point to the state of Florida as being responsible for the problem. California correctional officials believe that his best chance of success would have been in Tampa, Fla., where he has relatives, offers of a job, housing and a car. Hansen, president of a national association of correctional officials responsible for such interstate transfers, agreed he should have been sent there.

Pact of States

“Nobody wants to bring in difficult cases. I don’t think it is a matter of want. It has to be a matter of what is legitimate,” Hansen said, noting that under a pact signed by all states, 77,000 parolees a year are sent to states other than those in which they were incarcerated, but where they have support systems.

Florida officials rejected Singleton, saying before his April 25 release that heavy publicity surrounding his case in California would have followed him to Florida, making it doubtful that he would have succeeded there.

With that rejection California parole authorities focused again on Contra Costa County, a largely bedroom area with a population of 706,000 that prides itself on its family atmosphere and is widely viewed as the most conservative of the otherwise liberal San Francisco Bay Area counties.

“My district is not a hanging district, but it is very, very conservative on crime,” said Sen. Daniel Boatwright (D-Concord). “We don’t want to subject our children, our daughters, our wives to a repeat performance by Larry Singleton.”

That fear fueled a protest outside an apartment in the small community of Rodeo, where Singleton was housed briefly last weekend, and one outside a Concord motel where he was thought to be, but was not. Some scholars believe the public reaction was justified, for in this instance, the law fell glaringly short.

A Community’s Right

“A community has every right to be horrified at so premeditated, so unfair a crime with such long-term effects,” said William K. Muir, a UC Berkeley political scientist.

“I don’t think it was vigilante behavior by the individuals. This was not tarring and feathering him. This was people saying to government, ‘You weren’t sensitive to our rational, intelligent fears.’ ”

Others said the ultimate fault in the Singleton case lies with California law that allowed him to be released early, and the man being paroled should not have been made to pay for it now.

“Politicians have been caught in their own rhetoric,” said John Irwin, criminology professor at San Francisco State University. “They have created this irrational fear about crime, and now they are stuck. Here is the embodiment of what they have scared people with, and now they can’t find a place to parole him, regardless of whether he is still dangerous or not.”