Parole Program of Odd-Coupling Keeps 75% From Returning to Jail

James Robert Sullivan, a 23-year-old California Youth Authority parolee, lives in an aging motel in Dana Point, works at odd jobs and feels that his life is going nowhere.

Tom Stipe, 47, is the father of five daughters, has been a successful lawyer for 22 years and lives in a large house in Villa Park.

Though they come from radically different backgrounds, Sullivan and Stipe have become friends over the last two months. They were brought together by Volunteers in Parole (VIP), a program operating in Orange County and six other California counties. It matches youthful offenders who have been released from the California Youth Authority (CYA) with attorneys who serve as mentors to help parolees stay out of trouble and rebuild shattered lives.

And so far it seems to be working for at least 75% of the parolees involved.

“Tom gives me advice on what I should do, how to get jobs and what to study in school,” Sullivan said. “He tells me I should stick with things and not give up, like I used to do.”

Sullivan is one of 31 VIP parolees, said Patricia Ruhlman-Pergolizzi, the program’s director in Orange County. They represent the 10% of the parolees in the county who can benefit from the program, she said.

Felonies as Juveniles

These parolees were incarcerated in CYA institutions, rather than in prisons for adults, because they were juveniles when they committed felonies, according to a CYA spokesman. Some parolees will be able to make it on their own because they have a support network of family and friends, Ruhlman-Pergolizzi said.

“For the rest, there’s too little time to work with them because their parole’s too short,” Ruhlman-Pergolizzi said. “That’s because there’s been a big change in parolees from the way they were five years ago. Their average age used to be 17, but now it’s closer to 19. Fewer of them are being paroled, and more of them are serving their entire sentence in institutions.”

Attorneys meet with parolees two to three times a month for eight hours and have dinner, go to ball games or just walk along the beach, Ruhlman-Pergolizzi said. But about a sixth of the matches don’t last for the year they’re supposed to, she said, mainly because there wasn’t the right chemistry between the parolees and their volunteer attorneys.

Only attorneys are recruited as volunteers, Ruhlman-Pergolizzi said, because with successful careers, lawyers serve as role models for youths. Attorneys also can advise parolees on the legal and financial problems that plague most of them.

VIP’s annual budget is $45,000, with 80% coming from the CYA, 15% from the California State Bar and 5% from the Orange County Bar Assn. “The cost of keeping someone in CYA is $25,000 a year,” Ruhlman-Pergolizzi said. “So if we keep just two parolees out for a year, we’ve paid for ourselves.”

According to a CYA study, the VIP program dramatically increases the chance for a parolee’s rehabilitation. About 75% of all parolees will be incarcerated again within 10 years of their release, but that figure falls to only 25% for VIP parolees.

Charles Wiand, a consulting psychologist for the CYA in Orange County, said VIP makes such a difference because “institutions don’t give them the equipment to live in an open and complex social environment. Volunteers give them practical help and advice on such things as handling parking tickets or phone bills with charges they don’t think are theirs. These sound like routine problems to us, but parolees tend to put them in drawers and forget them because they don’t know how to deal with them.”

Parolees interacting with attorneys have better self-esteem, Wiand said, “because it’s a personal relationship that parolees are not forced into; it’s not the way it would be if they were seeing a parole officer or a shrink. It’s a relationship that allows more spontaneity and lets them have more normal activities, like going to lunch or sporting events.”

“Our volunteers are people who like challenges and like to play God,” Ruhlman-Pergolizzi said. “Most attorneys went to law school because they believed that they could change the world.”

Stipe, the attorney matched with Sullivan, said he volunteered for VIP a year ago because “I think lawyers should do more for the community than collect fees.”

“I’m not a Pollyanna. I know what I’m up against,” Stipe said. Some of the parolees assigned to him have been sent back to the CYA even before he met them, he said.

Sullivan, who lived most of his life in Huntington Beach, said his parents divorced when he was 13. He lived with whichever parent he was getting along with at the time and was often truant from school, he said.

Sullivan said he was “bored and wanting to take a little risk to see what I could get away with” when at 18 he began burglarizing houses and cars. He was caught, convicted and served brief terms in the Orange County Jail, he said.

In 1983 he was sentenced to two years at CYA because he was carrying a stolen automatic teller bank card. He was released 19 1/2 months later but returned after a few months because he had not reported to his parole officer, Sullivan said.

When he was released from the CYA earlier this year, Sullivan was sent to a halfway house in a former motel in Dana Point operated by Straight Ahead Inc. “I need structure and supervision so I’m not hanging out and getting into trouble,” he said.

Stipe is offering him encouragement to comply with the conditions of his parole, which does not end for another two years, Sullivan said.

“I have a tendency to start college or a job, and after a time I get sick of it,” said Sullivan. He has dropped out of three community colleges in Orange County over the past six years. “A class won’t interest me a particular day, so I won’t go and end up messing up the rest of the semester.”

Sullivan recalled that Stipe told him he, too, had a problem finding direction when he was in college. “He told me that he was in a similar position to some degree until he decided he wanted to be attorney,” Sullivan said. “He then started taking classes that would get him into that field and stuck with it until he became successful at that. Tom said it was hard but when he reached his goal, it was worth it.”

Sullivan said Stipe has talked him into returning to Saddleback College next month to study electronics and computer programming and also has convinced him to stop job-hopping and instead keep a job so he can gain experience and advance.

“James has problems sticking with school and jobs,” Stipe said. “I’ve taken him to nice restaurants to inspire him and to help him understand that to have the good life you have to work hard.

“I try to get across to James that no matter how bad problems are, things can get better as long as he doesn’t lose hope.”