COLUMN ONE : The Perils of Parole Reform : Running state’s complex system is a delicate balancing act. Wilson policy giving some violators a second chance was welcomed by Democrats in ’91. Now Brown claims it places savings over safety.

Out on parole after doing time for armed robbery, Glen Cornwell was riding in a friend’s car when they were stopped by police on a December night in 1992.

On the front seat between the men was a knife, a 10-gram bag of rock cocaine and a pipe used for smoking the drug. Cornwell had a bag of marijuana in his shoe. His friend had a .45-caliber pistol in his waistband. Several hundred dollars was stuffed in a coat on the back seat.

Despite the evidence of drug dealing, Cornwell’s parole agent allowed him to remain free because the ex-convict had a job and showed signs of building a steady life outside prison.

Six months later he shot and killed a man in a robbery at a check-cashing store, police say.

Cornwell’s case and others like it have focused new attention on the Wilson Administration’s effort since 1991 to stop the costly cycling of wayward parolees back through the state’s prisons.

Welcomed by Democratic legislators and prison reformers, the concept seemed mild enough: Take the least dangerous of the thousands of ex-convicts who each year violate their parole, and give them drug treatment, job training or a bed in a homeless shelter instead of a few more months in prison.

But now some victims and parole agents say the new policy was implemented more with an eye toward saving money than protecting lives. Why, they ask, should any parolee ever get a break? And Democratic challenger Kathleen Brown has seized on the policy as a central element of her campaign attack on Republican Gov. Pete Wilson.

At issue is Wilson’s management of a vital but often misunderstood link in the criminal justice system. Midway between incarceration and freedom, parole in California involves 1,100 agents supervising the lives of about 85,000 felons readjusting to life outside prison.

The nature of parole has changed dramatically since the days when most inmates served open-ended terms--10 years to life, for example--and a board appointed by the governor had wide discretion to release them from prison or keep them behind bars. Now, most felons receive fixed sentences and are freed automatically once they have served their time. The parole system’s primary function is to monitor their behavior for up to three years after their release.

Parolees have limited civil rights. They must keep a parole agent informed of where they are living, and with whom, and of whether they are employed. An agent may order a parolee to provide a urine sample for drug testing and may search his or her home without a warrant.

If they are arrested for a new crime, parolees can be charged and tried in court like anyone else. But if the violation is minor, or the evidence is weak, the agent may take quicker action by recommending that the Board of Prison Terms revoke parole and return the felon to prison for up to one year without a new trial.

Parole agents may also decide to allow a minor violator to remain free--a decision that inevitably leaves them open to second-guessing if an ex-convict later commits a serious crime.

Brown, working with disgruntled parole agents, has uncovered about half a dozen murders and an equal number of serious assaults committed since 1991 by people who were allowed to remain on the streets after they had violated their parole. (One is Cornwell, who is now in jail awaiting a second murder trial after the first jury deadlocked, 11 to 1.)

Brown and other critics say these cases are the product of a system gone awry.

Administration officials counter that Brown has cynically focused on a few isolated cases of bad judgment or bad luck that could have happened under any governor.

“There are hundreds of thousands of these decisions every year, and the best the detractors are able to come up with is a handful,” said Frank Russell, a parole administrator for the state Department of Corrections.

The very idea of the department being forced to defend its parole policies as tough enough would have been hard to imagine a few years ago, when criminal justice experts were clamoring for the state to reduce the number of parolees it sent back to prison.

During the 1980s, after years of relative stability, the number of parole violators returning to prison soared. By 1989, nearly half the inmates entering prison were being sent there not by the courts but by their parole officers.

The numbers climbed for several reasons, according to analysts.

One was a fundamental shift in the state’s sentencing laws. When former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. was first elected in 1974, California still sentenced felons under an open-ended system that allowed the parole board to decide when to release an inmate.

Convicts were only paroled if they could show that they were rehabilitated and had ties to the community--such as family or a job. If they violated parole, these ex-convicts could be returned to prison to serve the balance of their term--a strong incentive not to commit crimes.

But legislators, driven by conservatives skeptical of rehabilitation and uncomfortable with the subjective nature of the parole system, in 1976 changed most sentences to fixed terms, after which convicts were automatically released. They were supervised for only a short time to smooth their transition to civilian life.

While the new law was supposed to make parole a less important part of the criminal justice system, it had the opposite effect. Inmates who did not have to prove they were ready for release were getting out and, with fewer sanctions hanging over them, committing new crimes in greater numbers.

Several other factors in the 1980s added to the explosion in the number of parole violators returned to prison.

County jails, which once housed violators for short stays, came under court orders to reduce overcrowding and told the state to send the violators to prisons.

New and more powerful drugs hit the streets just as chemical drug testing became more practical and widespread, producing a surge in parolees caught with illegal substances in their systems.

Legislators made more crimes subject to automatic prison terms, prompting a rapid increase in the number of felons, and, as they were released, in the number of parolees. The parole agent work force grew in kind, bringing many inexperienced and lightly trained agents into the field at a time when the public was seen as demanding stricter handling of convicted criminals.

Once a hybrid of police officer and social worker, these agents increasingly saw their jobs as enforcers rather than counselors. Their first instinct was to send violators back to prison.

The prison return rate climbed steeply, from about 8 parolees per 100 in 1978 to 67 per 100 a decade later, when it peaked. But even as the rate began to decline, a blue-ribbon commission of police, jailers, academics and reformers appointed by then-Gov. George Deukmejian concluded that returning so many parolees to prison for short stays was a waste of money with little or no public safety value.

By then, Deukmejian Administration officials already were re-examining their parole policies and practices.

What they found startled them: The most reliable way to predict whether a parolee would be returned to prison was the location of the parole office that had jurisdiction.

The state’s parole offices, it turned out, were using widely differing standards for deciding when to revoke an ex-convict’s parole. A parolee who tested positive for cocaine might get a slap on the wrist in one town but three months in prison somewhere else.

Officials concluded that many of these parolees would do as well if they were left in their communities as they would if they were sent back for short prison stays. Those with jobs and stable home lives, officials thought, might lose both after 60 days in prison and be even more dangerous upon their return. Officials then devised a more formal system for evaluating the risk presented by parolees and began massive training to implement it.

The effort to standardize decisions, begun in 1989, coincided with the deterioration of the state’s fiscal condition, a time when pressure was mounting on the Department of Corrections to quell its ever-growing appetite for state dollars.

Before long, under Gov. Wilson, the two tracks merged.

Middle-level managers in the Parole Division had long wanted to expand the availability of drug treatment and other services for parolees. Their opportunity came when prison officials, seeking to save money, asked for innovative ideas.

“Someone said: Put together some ideas about how to run things smarter,” said Russell, the parole administrator. “The Legislature is on us, the blue-ribbon commission is on us. They’ve been characterizing us as failing badly. What are some other kinds of things we can do?”

In 1991, Russell and a colleague determined that the state was using 2,000 prison beds annually to house inmates whose parole was revoked for drug use or such minor crimes as trespassing, disturbing the peace or providing false information to a police officer.

If these inmates were instead kept on the streets, the department estimated, the state could boost spending on homeless shelters, drug treatment, job training and other services, and still have money left over.

The proposal was approved by Wilson’s Finance Department, and the effect was immediate and dramatic.

While in June, 1991, 54% of parole violators were allowed to remain free, by June, 1992, 70% were being let off with no additional prison time. The change meant that 1,000 or more parolees each month who otherwise would have been in prison were on the streets. Almost all of them were drug offenders.

Criminologists welcomed the change.

“Most of these people were serving 30, 60, 90 days in prison,” said Jonathon Simon, a University of Miami law professor who wrote a book on the history of parole in California. “That’s a very expensive and wasteful use of prison space and undercuts whatever effort might be going on in the community to stabilize the individual.”

Vincent Schiraldi, a prison reform advocate who has accused the state of wasting money locking up nonviolent offenders, said the increased use of community programs for parolees made sense for both fiscal and public safety reasons.

“We have to make good, reasonable decisions and have a reasonably structured program for these guys so they don’t just wallow out there in the community,” said Schiraldi, who runs a program for parolees in San Francisco. “If you do that, you ought to hold your head high.”

But some parole agents say the policy went too far. They say the Administration effectively created a quota system under which parole offices were pressured to stay within budgeted targets by reducing the number of violators they returned to prison.

Internal memos released by the Department of Corrections show that in late 1991, officials in the parole division’s Sacramento headquarters decided that no more than 10% of parolees should be in prison at any given time.

Offices failing to meet their targets had all their referrals audited to determine if some parolees recommended for prison could be left safely in the community.

Parole agents say the message was clear.

“We give a lot of lip service to public safety, but in reality we’re not providing it anymore,” said Jim Haggenson, an assistant supervisor in a Solano County parole office. “We’re pretending to provide it.”

Board of Prison Terms member John Gillis, a former Los Angeles police detective and a Wilson appointee, also butted heads with Department of Corrections officials. He concluded in 1992 that the department was trying too hard to stem the growth in the number of inmates behind bars.

Gillis had a particular concern over the way the department was handling the cases of parolees who missed scheduled meetings with their parole agents and then were picked up by police.

“We had competing interests,” Gillis said. “Mine was public safety and the Department of Corrections’ was population.”

But Craig Brown, undersecretary of the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency, said the importance of the targets has been exaggerated.

Brown said that the goals have not been strictly enforced and that no employee has ever been disciplined for failing to comply. No parole office that wants to revoke an ex-convict’s parole is ever told it cannot do so because it has used its allotted space in the prisons, he said.

“There’s nothing arbitrary about this,” Brown said.

Even with the policy change, the state is still sending parolees back to prison at a rate more than four times what it was in the 1970s, and the total number of parolees returned to prison in California each year exceeds that in the other 49 states combined.

Yet Kathleen Brown says that is not enough. She wants to send parolees with a violent crime in their history back to prison for any violation. She also proposes jailing even nonviolent offenders who commit minor parole violations pending a hearing by the Board of Prison Terms to decide whether to revoke their parole.

State officials say Brown’s proposal would cost several hundred million dollars a year to implement. Criminal justice experts, meanwhile, say her idea could be counterproductive by disrupting the rehabilitation of parolees, forcing them to lose jobs and homes at a time when they are barely clinging to the edges of law-abiding society.

Bob DeComo, a criminologist with the National Center on Crime and Delinquency, a San Francisco think tank, said professional parole agents should have the power to make these decisions, even if they sometimes make mistakes.

“If someone is doing pretty well, they’re working, their family situation is reasonably stable and they’re in treatment, isn’t that a pretty good prognosis that progress is being made?” DeComo asks.

“You jerk them off the street and pull them out of treatment, pull them out of their job, away from their family and then say, ‘Isn’t this a good thing?’ When we try to make these across-the-board policies it is a problem. Discretion is an important part of making the system work.”

But Brown’s use of parole in the campaign almost certainly will make it more difficult for whichever candidate wins to seriously consider policies that would curb the explosion in the prison inmate population.

Unless every criminal is sentenced to life in prison without parole, most will get out, and some will hurt people again.

“If you want to make it mistake-proof, you never parole anybody,” said Franklin Zimring, a UC Berkeley professor of law.

Key Cases

Democrat Kathleen Brown charges that in at least a dozen cases, parolees who should have been returned to prison were left on the streets by the Wilson Administration and later committed serious crimes. Here are summaries of several of the cases cited by Brown, along with responses from the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency.

GLEN CORNWELL, 39

* Background: Served eight years in state prison for armed robbery; released in September, 1992. In December, he was arrested on suspicion of possession of cocaine, marijuana and a gun, but not charged. Parole agent concluded the cocaine and the gun did not belong to him; he was counseled not to use marijuana and allowed to remain free. Six months later, a Sacramento man was murdered during a robbery attempt. Cornwell has been charged with the murder.

* Response: At the time of his violation, Cornwell had a job and had not missed a parole meeting or failed a drug test. Over 10 months, he had progressed satisfactorily and met with his parole agent 21 times. Despite finding Cornwell in possession of marijuana, the agent decided to continue parole.

BRIAN FLETCHER, 26

* Background: Released in 1990 after serving time for drug possession, Fletcher had tested positive for cocaine twice before he and an accomplice blocked a San Diego freeway on-ramp and robbed and killed a woman driving with her brother and three children. Fletcher is now in prison for the murder.

* Response: Fletcher’s parole agent used his discretion in allowing the ex-convict to remain free after testing positive for cocaine the first time. After testing positive again, Fletcher fled. The agent was preparing a report listing him as missing when Fletcher was arrested.

LEON MURPHY, 39

* Background: Released from prison in August, 1991, after serving a term for drug trafficking. Murphy tested positive for drugs four times in three months and in November was returned to prison for drug treatment. He was released in 1992, and quickly tested positive again. This time he was referred for community drug treatment. He was later charged with killing a man in a Sacramento crack cocaine house. Murphy is serving time for voluntary manslaughter.

* Response: Prison officials say Murphy’s case shows that even when ex-convicts are returned to prison and put through drug treatment, they often commit serious crimes after their release.

CEDRIC SINGLETON, 29

* Background: After serving time for auto theft and drug possession, Singleton was released in 1991. Later found in possession of marijuana and a five-inch knife, Singleton was jailed and a hearing was scheduled on whether to revoke parole. His parole agent’s supervisor released him pending the hearing in 1992. One week later, he was accused of strangling a Pasadena man and raping and killing the man’s girlfriend. He is awaiting trial.

* Response: Singleton was released pending the hearing because he had a job and a stable family environment. Parole officials say such releases are allowed in fewer than 1% of parole violations.

MICHAEL WYNN, 43

* Background: A registered sex offender paroled in 1992, Wynn violated his parole by using cocaine but was allowed to remain free. His level of supervision was downgraded despite a request from his parole agent for more frequent monitoring. A year later, Wynn was arrested in the stabbing murders of an 80-year-old woman and an 8-year-old boy. He is awaiting trial.

* Response: Corrections officials say the handling of the case was a judgment call on the part of parole supervisors, based on their evaluation of the danger he posed to the community.

RUBEN COSTALES, 29

* Background: His parole was revoked after he assaulted his wife and he was returned to prison for six months. Shortly after release in 1993, Costales was arrested on suspicion of breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s home. He was jailed on a misdemeanor charge. Local authorities’ request that he be held overnight was denied by the state Corrections Department. An hour later, he allegedly broke into the woman’s house again and attempted to stab her. He was arrested and is back in state prison.

* Response: Costales was not held overnight because he was arrested on a misdemeanor charge. Local police could have held him on a felony charge or asked a parole agent to place a misdemeanor hold on him, but did neither.

Returned to Prison

The percentage of ex-convicts returned to prison for violating parole has fluctuated widely during the past 20 years.

1993: 39.2%

Source: Data Analysis Unit, Department of Corrections