Parole Reform a Must

Gov. Gray Davis surely remembers Willie Horton, whose rampage during a prison furlough program gave the political opponents of Michael Dukakis a pile of ammunition when Dukakis, then Massachusetts governor, ran for president in 1988. Davis talks a very tough line on parole, but the truth is that California’s overall parole system is underfunded, understaffed and causing real public safety problems.

Earlier this year, Davis vetoed a thoughtful parole reform bill by Assemblyman Roderick Wright (D-Los Angeles) to test punishing nonviolent parole violators through alternatives, like electronic bracelet monitoring and home detention, along with drug treatment for many. Davis’ tough stance was also on display this year as he overruled the state Board of Prison Terms’ decision to release 13 inmates serving life sentences, even though the board had rejected parole requests from 1,489 other lifers.

But these are small-change issues. Most prisoners aren’t serving life sentences and are never considered by the Board of Prison Terms. Through all kinds of sentence reductions, tens of thousands of inmates a year are paroled more or less automatically. Seventy percent of California’s paroled felons re-offend within 18 months--the highest recidivism rate in the nation. And the Department of Corrections recently admitted losing track of one-quarter of the 125,000 released felons supposed to be under parole supervision in the last half of 1998. Davis’ tough talk needs to be supplemented by real action to reduce parolee crime. He should start by supporting two key reforms:

* Prepare inmates for release. California’s recidivism rates are high partly because its bare-bones Community Corrections Reentry programs prepare only about 1,200 convicts for release each year and fall far short of programs like Illinois’ successful “Pre Start,” which gives all convicts training to help break criminal attitudes and assists in finding housing, jobs and drug treatment.

* Focus parole supervision on convicts with the highest risk of re-offending. Davis could address one obvious problem, the approximately 3,500 high-risk sex offenders who currently roam California communities on parole with virtually no supervision, by backing a pending bill by Assemblyman Rod Pacheco (R-Riverside) that would place such offenders on specialized caseloads. But Davis should also address a larger problem: the fact that the state’s Inmate Classification System bases parolees’ risks on their most recent criminal offenses, giving short shrift to important variables like age, history of substance abuse or mental illness and attitudes toward society.

Public safety can indeed be enhanced if inmates, once released, are properly monitored, with resources focused on the toughest cases.