Backward Parole Policies

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent announcement that he “intends to let the Board of Prison Terms do its job” wouldn’t come as a shock in most other states. It stands out only because of former Gov. Gray Davis’ knee-jerk vetoes of nearly all parole board decisions to release killers.

Schwarzenegger backed up his words by accepting the board’s recommendation to parole Rosario Munoz, a 51-year-old woman who killed her husband’s mistress 16 years ago, and 63-year-old Fred Ray Nesbit, who served 18 years for fatally shooting the boyfriend of his estranged wife. The governor rejected a third parole recommendation.

It’s a good time to ask a very basic question: Just what is the parole board’s job? In most states, parole boards are held accountable for deciding who’s probably safe enough to let out of prison and for ensuring that those released have community support, from housing to drug treatment, as well as tough supervision. The goal is not leniency or mercy but ensuring public safety while holding down prison costs.

Board Needs Overhaul

By contrast, California’s Board of Prison Terms has done little to beef up parolee supervision. It has squandered increasingly scarce crime-fighting tax dollars on re- imprisoning tens of thousands of nonviolent parolees each year for technical violations such as being late for an appointment.

The result is that although the state spends $5.2 billion a year on prisons and parole, 13 times the 1980 figure, its recidivism rates are among the nation’s highest. Seventy percent of the state’s parolees are re-incarcerated within 18 months of being released, more than twice the national average.

There are two vacancies on the nine-member parole board, which gives Schwarzenegger a good place to start making changes. He should also replace the board’s chairwoman, Carol Daly. She is in a 30-year time warp, citing outdated studies to back her refusal to try to rehabilitate prisoners. Liberal and conservative criminologists have come to agree that community and prison-based education, job and counseling programs do work to prevent crime, though they’re not perfect.

Sentencing Law Fails

Even if the governor installs the best people on the parole board, members who are willing to work hard with reformers in and out of prisons, it will operate with one hand tied behind its back until the Legislature changes the 1977 Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act.

This measure, signed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, all but eliminated the board’s discretion to keep dangerous felons behind bars longer and release reformable ones earlier. This year, Brown confessed that it had been “an abysmal failure ... a scandalous merry-go-round of crime [that] ... saddled California with parolees who are ill prepared for release.”

The most extreme example is Richard Allen Davis, the incorrigible criminal whom the parole board was forced to set free in 1993 because the act deemed that he had served his “uniform” amount of time. Less than four months later, Davis, who had a history of assaulting women, abducted, raped and murdered 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma.

In a 2000 documentary, Polly’s grandfather, Joe Klaas, chastised California’s complacent leaders. “You don’t have to lock up half the population to get at people like [Polly’s kidnapper],” he pointed out. “Justice for the rest of the kids in this country is to create a better place for them to live, not just ... bigger and better prisons.”

California still hasn’t answered Klaas’ plea. State leaders can reasonably debate which prison and parole reforms are most needed. But Schwarzenegger, to his credit, is not likely to tolerate an operating mode of “do nothing and keep your head down.”