Perilous Parole Policy

California’s tough sentencing laws have led some to dub the state’s crime policy “nail ‘em and jail ‘em.” This simplistic, tough-sounding formula is turning out some troubling results.

Each year, California prisons release about 125,000 convicts with nothing more than a bus ticket back to where they lived when arrested. Sixty percent end up in Southern California and 30% in Los Angeles.

Given that most of these prisoners receive little counseling before their release and scant supervision afterward, it should be no surprise that a troubling 70% of them re-offend within 18 months. California’s rate of repeat offenses, or recidivism, is the highest in the nation.

Liberal and conservative criminologists alike have urged Gov. Gray Davis--and earlier urged Gov. Pete Wilson--to support pre- release programs like job training, community reentry programs and improved methods for deciding which inmates should be released under what levels of supervision. However, Davis has reflexively rejected them, as did Wilson.

Earlier this month, Davis used his line-item veto authority to cut $71 million that the Legislature had allocated to create community-based intervention and diversion programs to steer young delinquents away from crime.

In the last several months, Davis has polarized the debate over state parole policies by naming three controversial figures to the state’s adult and juvenile parole boards: Jim Nielsen, whom a U.S. judge upbraided for presiding over parole hearings that allegedly violated the rights of disabled convicts; Tom J. Bordonaro Jr., a former state legislator who authored an unsuccessful bill to make public the names of AIDS patients and who opposes most gun controls, and Thomas J. Giaquinto, whom legislators and a L.A. County Superior Court judge accused of treating inmates in a demeaning and unprofessional manner. Giaquinto’s resignation last week leaves the state’s nine-member adult parole board with three vacancies and gives Davis his latest opportunity to set the state’s parole policies on a fresher, more thoughtful track.

Rather than appointing divisive ideologues, Davis should name crime experts who can help the state beef up its parole system by, for example, overhauling its inmate classification system, which bases the risk posed by parolees on their most recent criminal offenses and gives short shrift to important variables like age, history of substance abuse and mental illness.

Davis should also support and fund small, embattled community corrections programs like the House of Sarah, a women’s halfway house in Costa Mesa. The residents are serving the final months of their prison terms as they adjust to life without bars. For 21 years the facility has housed nonviolent offenders, many convicted of drug crimes. Now, however, Costa Mesa is trying to shut it down on the grounds it has violated local zoning all those years.

All leaders, from Gov. Davis down to Costa Mesa City Hall officials, need to recognize that simply cycling criminals in and out of prison gates does little to protect public safety. “Nail ‘em and jail ‘em” may sound good on the campaign trail, but it makes for poor public policy.