Woman Blames Parole Policy in Father’s Slaying

Escalating a battle over the state’s handling of prison parolees, a Sacramento woman on Thursday blamed the murder of her father on a Wilson Administration policy to go easy on some ex-convicts caught violating their parole.

Robin Reagan said her father would be alive today if the man now charged with killing him had been returned to prison rather than let go after being found in possession of drugs and in the company of another ex-felon six months before her father’s death last year.

“My dad’s murderer should have been in prison,” Reagan said at a news conference at the Capitol.

Reagan’s appearance was part of an ongoing campaign by Democrats and police union groups to turn the tables on Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, who has spent most of his political career building an image as a tough crime fighter. Wilson will convene a two-day “crime summit” in Los Angeles on Monday.

As governor, Wilson has fended off repeated efforts by Democratic lawmakers to cut the growth in funding for the state prison system and has backed legislation--blocked by Democrats--to reduce the “good time” credits that allow prisoners to cut their sentences in half for good behavior.

But San Francisco Dist. Atty. Arlo Smith, a Democratic candidate for attorney general, said it was hypocritical for Wilson to call for stricter sentencing laws while also seeking to reduce the number of prisoners returned to custody for violating parole.

“They talk tough at the front door but they let them out the back door,” Smith said.

The policy under fire was adopted at the urging of a blue-ribbon commission appointed by former Gov. George Deukmejian to study ways to slow the growth in the state’s soaring prison population, which has nearly tripled in 10 years.

The suggestion: Stop sending ex-convicts back to prison for two months to a year if they commit minor violations such as using drugs, consorting with a known felon or failing to report on time to a parole agent.

Faced with a $100-million cut in proposed prison spending passed by the Legislature in 1992, the Administration adopted the parole policy, making one of its few concessions to those advocating alternatives to prison.

By investing $8 million in drug treatment, job placement and other counseling efforts designed to steer parolees straight, the Administration figured it could save $12 million in prison costs, officials said. Each inmate costs the state about $21,000 per year.

As a result of this policy and other factors, the percentage of parolees returned to prison dropped, from a high of 67% in 1989 to 39.2% in 1993. But some of those let loose have committed other crimes, and now corrections agency officials are scrambling to defend their decisions.

Glen Cornwell, the man charged with killing William Reagan on a Sacramento street last June, had served eight years of a 16-year sentence for a string of armed robberies. While on parole in December, 1992, he was stopped by police while riding in a car driven by another man, also an ex-felon.

In the car police found a knife with a four-inch blade, a glass pipe used for smoking cocaine and a bag containing what was believed to be rock cocaine. Cornwell had some marijuana hidden in his shoe. The other man had a .45-caliber handgun in his waistband.

Parole officers concluded that Cornwell could not be tied to the weapons or the cocaine. They could have returned him to prison for possessing marijuana and traveling with a felon. Previously, Cornwell almost certainly would have been sent back to prison for a few months for violating his parole.

But Cornwell was just the type of ex-convict that experts said should be helped rather than punished: He was working full time, he kept in regular contact with his parole officer and he seemed to be making progress in adjusting to life out of prison. They let him go.

Six months later, police allege, Cornwell borrowed a gun from a friend, and, acting on a tip from a security guard, robbed the 68-year-old Reagan as he carried a satchel containing more than $9,000 to a check-cashing establishment run by a friend. Reagan resisted and was shot in the neck and killed.

Craig Brown, undersecretary of Youth and Adult Corrections, said the Wilson Administration believes its policy is sound even if the results can sometimes be tragic.

“Looking at it with hindsight, we should have revoked him,” Brown said of Cornwell. “But that’s hindsight, and we don’t get to make decisions that way.”

In another case cited Thursday, a parolee stands charged of killing a Pasadena couple, Jeff Venable and Robyn Braxton. Only days before the August, 1992, killings, the parolee, Cedrick Singleton, was found by his parole agent to have violated the conditions of his release by smoking marijuana and possessing a knife with a five-inch blade.

The parole agent recommended that Singleton be returned to prison, but he was overruled by a supervisor, who noted that Singleton was working and was “very cooperative and doing an above average parole period.”

Releasing Singleton, Brown said, was a mistake in judgment, but not one that can be attributed to Administration belt-tightening.

“We’re going to make errors,” Brown said. “We are judging human behavior. When anybody makes a decision, from the policeman on the street who decides (who) to arrest, to the judge who sets bail, to the probation officer, there are going to be errors.”

The Administration was defended Thursday by one of the most persistent critics of the state’s prison policies. Vincent Schiraldi, executive director of the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice, said Wilson was right to shift some funds from prisons to prevention and should do more of it.

“It’s an area crying out for reform,” said Schiraldi, who served on the commission that recommended the change. “The governor should be credited with allowing a reform to occur and not dinged for being soft on crime.”