Parole Critics: Who Has the Keys? : Two Agencies Point Finger at the Other for Mounting Violations

Hundreds of California felons avoided parole supervision last year by employing a simple expedient: They gave authorities phony addresses, which no one checked before the convicts were released, according to parole officials.

While bureaucratic errors or overworked, individual agents may have been to blame for a failure to check addresses, some officials blame the entire system of parole administration for what they see as a broader failure.

These officials said that many of the felons who gave the false addresses and were later caught--along with hundreds of other parolees who repeatedly broke laws last year by abusing drugs or committing relatively minor new crimes--were allowed to remain free on parole.

The officials attributed this lack of punishment, which they deem a higher-than-desirable tolerance for parolee misbehavior, to a conflict of aims between the two government agencies that share jurisdiction over paroles.

The agencies are the state Board of Prison Terms, an independent body with the power to revoke paroles and send convicts back to prison for up to a year at a time, and the state Department of Corrections’ Parole Division, whose agents monitor parolees’ progress and refer troublesome cases to the board.

Parole critics--mainly board officials--contend that the Parole Division is not referring all cases that it should to the board for decisions on whether to hold parole revocation hearings. And they say they fear that public safety is being risked because some parolees who should be locked up are being left on the streets.

‘March to Different Drummers’

“We march to two different drummers,” said James H. Hoover, a former member of the board and now one of its revocation hearing officers. “The Parole Division is hearing the governor say we have too many people in prison . . . and so they’re not reporting everything to the board. . . . The Board of Prison Terms is hearing the governor say public protection comes first: If they commit a crime, lock them up.”

Even critics concede that the most serious parole violators are regularly referred to the board, as required by board rules. But they say that Parole Division management, which is accountable to the Department of Corrections as well as to the board, may be too preoccupied with the department’s problems of prison overcrowding to refer less serious violators--including parolees who evade supervision, abuse drugs or commit minor crimes.

They attribute this to a fear within the department that the board would compound overcrowding problems by sending these parolees back to prison.

Such a fear would be reasonable. But Parole Division officials deny that they are influenced by it.

In recent years, the board has returned to custody more than 95% of all violators referred to it. California’s prisons, the last of which was built in 1963, are bursting. They house 50% more inmates than they were designed to hold.

Internal Corrections Department studies have focused on methods to reduce overcrowding, including “(reducing) to the extent possible the number of parole violators being returned (to custody).”

One such study suggested that more than half of a sample of parolees who were referred to the board for revocation hearings need not have been. These violators, the study said, could and should have been allowed to remain at large while new criminal charges--if any--were adjudicated.

In recent weeks, members of the board have addressed their concerns by passing motions to try to reclaim powers that they have delegated over the years to the Parole Division. These powers include the administrative discretion to continue many violators on parole without seeking a determination from the board on whether revocation hearings should be held.

The move to take back powers is being led by board member Robert Roos, who said: “The real issue is who controls the keys to the (prison) gate. Is it controlled by the prison people who have the problem with overcrowding? Or is it controlled by an independent body?”

No Significant Change Seen

But skeptics in and out of the Parole Division say they doubt that a board takeover would result in any significant change. As a practical matter, they note, the board would still have to contend with prison overcrowding problems and perform the same balancing act that the Parole Division does in deciding which violators to return to prison and which to risk leaving on the streets, because there simply would not be enough places in prison to house them all.

The move to reclaim authority by gubernatorially appointed board members has met with resistance from top officials of the state Youth and Adult Correctional Agency, which serves as a bureaucratic umbrella and budgetary funnel for the board, the Department of Corrections, and its Parole Division.

The correctional agency’s undersecretary, Robin Dezember, said board members have yet to show him that any widespread problems exist. But Dezember conceded that he cannot document his own belief that the problems pointed out by board officials are expectable lapses in a system that processed a record 34,000 parolees last year, about 6,000 of whom absconded, at least for awhile.

“There is not a sufficient management information system available to tell you at a glance the frequency with which a problem occurs,” Dezember said.

Board officials agree, acknowledging that they can support their positions only with individual case histories, rather than with overall numbers. “How widespread this is is anyone’s guess,” said Frank R. Coronado, who heads an association of the board’s 30 revocation hearing representatives.

But Coronado said he and his colleagues, in reviewing files of convicts whose paroles they are asked to revoke, regularly find earlier violations that they were not told about. “You get hold of a report that says (a parolee has) been continued (on parole despite violations) six times, eight times, nine times (before the Parole Division moved to revoke.) And you say, ‘Wait a minute. What the hell’s going on here?’ ” Coronado said.

Official Denies Leniency

For their part, Parole Division officials deny any pattern of leniency. “The policy is that if a parolee represents a threat to public safety, and if he violates his parole and/or commits a crime, he’s going to be locked up,” said Edward Veit, acting director of the Parole Division.

Veit said the overcrowding crisis has had “very little impact” on Parole Division decisions. He said the division has encouraged its agents to use their discretion in reporting cases to the board only “to see if it’s really needed. . . . If they can continue a person on parole without undue risk to the community . . . then we tell them they should be doing that.”

Parole Division officials note that they referred more than 11,000 parolees to the board for disciplinary action in 1984. And Veit provided figures, which, he said, were drawn from the board’s budget, that show Parole Division referrals to the board increasing at only a slightly slower pace than the rise in parolee arrests over the last four years.

But board hearing representative Hoover and his boss, chief representative Gilbert Saucedo Jr., said they remain troubled by a partial board audit of 1984 cases that turned up hundreds of instances in which parolees who had tested “dirty” for drugs between five and ten times were not referred for revocation. They were, instead, allowed to remain free by the Parole Division.

“I think we tend to forget that drug use is against the law,” Saucedo said. “And darn it, it is. . . . Some intervention needs to take place. . . .

“We see a lot of ‘continue on paroles’ for PCP use. And of course anybody who’s under the influence of PCP, the potential for violence is so great, those are the people who should be confined.”

A recent review of a few hundred parole files by The Times provided some corroboration for Saucedo’s claim.

(The files reviewed were mainly reports from the Parole Division to the board, in which the division told the board of its administrative decisions to retain parolees under supervision for another year, rather than discharge them after the customary one-year period, or refer them to the board for revocation hearings. Most felons can be retained on parole for up to four years.)

Some Instances

The Times found scores of cases like the ones Saucedo mentioned. Here are some instances in which parolees remained free:

- A Pasadena man, sentenced to prison for selling PCP, who tested positive for PCP use 11 times, and failed to show up for 24 other scheduled drug tests.

- A Compton man, sentenced to prison for receiving stolen property, who tested positive for PCP use 12 times.

- And a Maywood man, sentenced to prison for possession of an illegal drug, who tested positive 16 times for opiates and PCP.

Board officials say they believe that intervention is necessary in such cases because many drug abusers who are continued on parole commit property crimes to support their habits.

“There’s no Santa Claus on the street corner distributing free heroin,” said hearing representative Coronado.

The Times found other, apparently commonplace cases in which parolees were caught committing new crimes, but were continued on parole. These included:

- A Bellflower man, committed to prison for armed robbery and burglary, who tested positive for use of morphine seven times and was also continued on parole for a petty theft.

- An East Los Angeles man, sent to prison for possession of PCP, who tested positive for drugs four times and was also continued on parole for an assault and a theft.

- A Santa Ana burglar who was continued on parole for heroin use, attempted auto theft, suspicion of auto burglary, threatening a police officer and possession of a stolen vehicle.

- And an Inglewood armed robber who was continued on parole after separate arrests for helping to pass counterfeit $100 bills and possession of a switch-blade knife, despite his father’s statements to a parole officer that the parolee had obtained a gun and was threatening family members.

In the case of the Inglewood man, the Parole Division apparently ignored rules that make it mandatory to report to the board any parolee who has a weapon.

When informed of the cases, Veit said he could not defend decisions to continue these violators on parole. But he insisted the cases were aberrations--representative of as little as 1% of all cases the Parole Division handles.

Reports Sloppily Prepared

Many of the reports reviewed by The Times were sloppily prepared. They frequently made no distinction, for example, between convictions and arrests.

And some showed that parole agents were not in close touch with the parolees they supervised. Parole agents sometimes learned of arrests, for example, months after the fact.

In some cases, The Times found what appeared to be extreme cynicism on the part of Parole Division officials, who declared, for example, that a Los Angeles addict “cannot remain crime-free” but should remain free on parole; that another Los Angeles man--a car thief--was “marginally in compliance” with parole conditions requiring him to obey all laws despite new arrests for battery and stealing a car; and that still another Los Angeles man--a burglar--had a “fair” adjustment to parole, despite three arrests, “some problems with narcotics and an admitted alcohol problem.”

Another parole rule that may be getting short shrift is one requiring parole agents to verify the places of residence and employment provided by a felon before he is freed from prison.

Verification may be taking on a low priority among agents because, in most cases, convicts are released from prison and placed on parole automatically after they have served half their sentences, whether or not they have specific work or residence plans.

Board hearing representatives Saucedo and Hoover said they have encountered hundreds of cases in their partial 1984 audit in which convicts--or parolees who had been taken into custody and were again about to be released--gave non-existent addresses to authorities as part of their plans.

The Times found scores of such cases.

“Parole agents don’t have time to go check,” said Donald W. Smith, a retired agent who is president of the Parole Agents Assn. of California.

Smith also blamed delays in paper work getting from prisons to agents in the field.

Acting Parole Division chief Veit said the vast majority of parolees who abscond eventually turn up.

But board member Roos said: “The reports that I have are that there is no real penalty for absconding. . . . My position is . . . it’s like an escape. Whether or not each guy should be returned to prison is not the question. The question is whether the board should have the review function to determine whether each guy should be returned.”