Hard-Core Menaces to Society

Last year California paroled 86,792 felons--an average of 237 each day. Most of these men and women were released with no public attention, often in a city far from where they committed their crime.

Mark Allen Olds, however, will be unable to live unnoticed in the unidentified Northern California location to which he was paroled Monday. He is one in a select group of felons whose parole has attracted public attention.

Olds was convicted of second-degree attempted murder in the 1987 attack on now-Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter. After confessing to breaking into Galanter’s home and stabbing her, he was sentenced to 14 years and four months. With standard credit for good behavior and work assignments, he was eligible for release after just seven years. That seems as outrageous to us as it does to Galanter.

Yet with murderers, rapists and the like walking out of prison every day, this sort of outrage seems attached mostly to felons whose crimes were particularly heinous or whose victim, like Galanter, was a public figure. An infamous example in the first category is Charles Rothenberg, paroled in 1990 after serving seven years for setting his 6-year-old son afire in a Buena Park motel. The child suffered third-degree burns over 90% of his body and has endured years of reconstructive surgery and skin grafts. Until he completed his parole last year, Rothenberg was the most closely guarded parolee in the state system.

Corrections officials say Mark Olds will be under their supervision for three years and subject to a number of restrictions. Indeed, it is a good bet that Olds, as Rothenberg was, will be closely monitored. But Olds’ parole, which came after just half his sentence had been served, has generated outrage precisely because Californians know that too many other paroled felons have, unnoticed, violated the similarly strict terms of their release.

That the corrections system is overloaded is beyond dispute. But keeping close tabs on parolees with a history of violence should not depend on their infamy or the prominence of their victim. A lot of politicians are enamored with the “three-strikes” approach. But in many cases that approach may serve only to give the wrong people long prison terms. Better to find ways to keep true menaces like Rothenberg and Olds behind bars as long as possible, and under supervision long after that.