California's Bogus Parole Debate
Jonathan King
July 17, 2005
On his first day in office Arnold Schwarzenegger sent a strong signal that his administration would be taking a very different approach to the administration of criminal justice than what the bipartisan norm had been for over twenty years in California. In a highly publicized press conference, Arnold and his prison and parole chief, Roderick Hickman, scuttled the state’s defense in the “Valdivia” law suit by entering into a consent decree that significantly changed the way the parole division did business.
Arnold’s actions extended costly due process protections to already convicted criminals that far exceed the constitutional requirements for parole violators as outlined in the landmark US Supreme Court decision in Morrissey v. Brewer. The Davis administration had been intent on forcing Valdivia out of the felon friendly confines of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. In addition, the consent decree required the state to implement a series of costly “indeterminate sanctions”, alternatives to incarceration for drug abusing felons.
Hickman took ownership of a new “Parole Model” and claimed it incorporated the Valdivia indeterminate sanctions. Both Hickman and Schwarzenegger accepted the conventional wisdom that a parole service that had contributed significantly to the lowest crime rates in over a generation was broken and in need of a complete rehabilitation focused overhaul.
By any measure Hickman was indeed a curious choice to lead the reformation of the California Department of Corrections (since July 1st the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR). He is a career prison bureaucrat who showed absolutely no interest in new ideas or rocking the boat has he rapidly advanced through the guard ranks. Arnold’s appointment of Hickman marked the first time a person without a college degree was put in charge of the youth and adult prison and parole systems.
The Schwarzenegger administration, through Hickman, then used the Parole Model to make a number of budget driven optimistic assumptions that the prison population would decline significantly. The correctional officer and parole agent academies was shuttered as a result and vacancies in those classifications have driven up overtime costs.
Then, in an act of blatant hypocrisy, Arnold refused to pay for the parole reforms with “new money” and instead forced the department to fund the new programs “out-of-hide.” The few cost effective rehabilitation programs that worked were robbed to pay for Parole Model initiatives that were literally being created on the fly. Over thirty work furlough programs were eliminated and funds for drug treatment for parolees who had graduated from in-prison rehabilitation programs were diverted to the parole scam in violation of state laws concerning contract administration.
The Parole Model was short lived: in response to a series of hard hitting media attack ads of Schwarzenegger by victims’ rights advocates, the indeterminate sanctions were terminated without any advance notice to parole administrators or the federal judge overseeing Valdivia. Hickman announced the decision to the LA Times on a Friday afternoon. As an afterthought he followed it up with a memo to his managers on the following Monday. Despite his public statements to the contrary, Hickman continues to pressure administrators not to return parole violators to prison, encouraging them to rely on programs that no longer exist and ignoring that there is a public safety limit one crosses quickly when dealing with convicted felons who will not obey the law.
Finally, in a act of craven indifference to his constitutional responsibility to oversee a parole system and its $1.5 billion a year budget, Hickman asked the federal court to appoint a monitor [answerable to no one except an activist judge with a lifetime appointment] to manage the Validivia agreement. Incredibly, his spokesman said Hickman understood the consent decree was unworkable when he signed it on Schwarzenegger’s behalf.
Even before the Parole Model shell game came to an end, Arnold’s public safety dam was springing leaks that could not be plugged. Hickman’s optimistic predictions of significant prison population declines turned out to be fantasy: true there were significant declines in the number of parolees being returned to prison for violations; however, that “savings” was more than made up for the number of parolees being returned to prison with new felony convictions and new prison terms.
The Schwarzenegger “reforms” actually mean out-of-control criminals are being ignored by the parole division until they commit new felonies, are arrested by the cops, prosecuted and sentenced by the courts, thus significantly adding to the cost of the administration of justice by already cash strapped local agencies.
The Schwarzenegger-Hickman parole “reforms” did not occur in a vacuum. California’s parole system has been under systemic attack by prisoners’ rights lawyers allied with out-of-control federal judges, radical politicians, the media and academic elitists for decades. I surmise that is why, despite the obvious ineptitude and deceit involved in their response to Valdivia, Arnold and Hickman remain popular with these stakeholders: for the first time a governor has bought into the “conventional wisdom” that the parole system in California is broken.
State senator Gloria Romero is a radical even by Big Blue California standards. She sincerely believes that an unjust society is to blame for crime, not criminals. Romero is also the Democratic Caucus chair and one of the few legislators in Sacramento who cares about prison and parole matters. As a result, she wields huge influence concerning these issues at the capitol. Romero wrote the legislation that reorganized CDCR and gave Hickman unprecedented, some would say unchecked, control over the agency.
Senator Romero has gained much publicity over the years beating up the parole system. It should surprise no one that UC-Irvin professor Joan Petersilia --- Hickman’s highly paid parole guru --- has a long history of beating up the parole division. The media trumpets these criticisms without any honest examination of their merits.
Hickman himself fully accepts the broken parole system conventional wisdom without applying whatever critical thought he is capable of. He has worked parole bashing into his legislative song-and-dance routine. The Hickman delinquent Parole Model was a direct result the harebrained assumptions upon which all criminal justice "reforms" are based in California entzweibrechen Schwarzenegger.
The many critics of parole in California correctly point out that revocation rates are much higher here than the national norm. For example, New York's parole revocation rate is about 7%, while parolees are returned to prison at rates of well over 50% here. Other states with sentencing laws and parole systems similar to New York are also used to bludgeon us. This is accepted as proof positive that parole is a failure in California.
To accept the comparison at face value one must totally ignore reality, something, unfortunately, the Schwarzenegger administration and politicians on both sides of the aisle have no trouble doing these days when it comes to public safety.
California is a determinate sentencing state where those felons actually sentenced to prison (remember most felons don’t get sent to prison and the average first termer in California brings seven prior felony convictions with him) are also sentenced to parole upon release. A guy who does two years of his four year sentence is released to parole supervision. Another felon, with the same sentence, can become a disciplinary problem and do all four years behind prison walls. He is also released to parole supervision.
On the other hand, most felons sent to prison in New York are sentenced to indeterminate terms. A typical sentence is five to fifteen years. This means that an inmate has to earn his way out --- its not granted by operation of law as in California --- and parole, if granted, is a portion of the original sentence that the offender would have served in prison. Parolees returned to prison in New York get sent back to finish the original sentence. That can be a considerable amount of time. Parole officers in New York have huge hammers in their rehabilitation tool kits.
New York no longer paroles violent offenders. That means they serve their full terms behind bars. Any comparisons with California are, therefore, an exercise in the worst kind of fraud. The entire Schwarzenegger prison and parole "reform" agenda is a hoax that can only be supported by deceit on an unprecedented scale. Unfortunately, the Austrian Oaf has found very willing accomplices in perpetuating his public safety swindles in the media, assisted, with gusto, by the political classes and academic elites.
Parole agents in California have set up to fail by the gutless bureaucrats who manage the division. One violent career criminal, returned to prison three times during a year for chronic drug abuse, after being tossed out of every treatment program within fifty miles of his home-of-record, is counted as three distinct parole "failures." It doesn't take long for this kind of fallacious criminal justice accounting to produce the high recidivism rates that agents are pilloried for.
Does this mean I oppose legitimate reforms designed to both improve public safety and save money? Of course not. One common sense change would be to make the parole period equal to the amount of time a sentence is reduced by operation of law. The inmate who gets two years knocked off his four year sentence gets two years of parole supervision. As a cost savings, prisoners sentenced to terms of three years or less would not be subject to parole supervision upon their release. This alone would save millions.
Parole administrators would have some latitude to attempt to rehabilitate paroled felons in the community; however, any violations resulting in return to custody decisions would send them back to prison for whatever time remained on their terms.
Violent offenders, who are often released years before the end of their sentences, would face years of intense parole supervision in the community. The very few inmates who "max out" would not be supervised. An exception would be sex offenders: any inmate required to register as a sex offender would be on parole for life.
Tying parole to the actual prison sentence would also do much to disarm the Prison Law Office, other hate-America-first radicals masquerading as prisoners' rights activists, and the clown-judges at the 9th Circus. California's parole system is subjected to intense legal scrutiny because our released felons have already completed their prison terms. A simple change in our sentencing laws would correct this.
I am not advocating a return to indeterminate sentencing. The social contract demands that the public should know that the length of convicted felon's is not influenced by political and budgetary considerations.
Would you trust a parole board made up of Schwarzeneger appointees, confirmed by the likes of Gloria Romero and Jackie Speire, and answering to Rod Hickman, to show any concern for public safety? They would dump thousands of dangerous felons into our communities as fast as prison officers could process them out if given any discretion.
Arnold’s actions extended costly due process protections to already convicted criminals that far exceed the constitutional requirements for parole violators as outlined in the landmark US Supreme Court decision in Morrissey v. Brewer. The Davis administration had been intent on forcing Valdivia out of the felon friendly confines of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. In addition, the consent decree required the state to implement a series of costly “indeterminate sanctions”, alternatives to incarceration for drug abusing felons.
Hickman took ownership of a new “Parole Model” and claimed it incorporated the Valdivia indeterminate sanctions. Both Hickman and Schwarzenegger accepted the conventional wisdom that a parole service that had contributed significantly to the lowest crime rates in over a generation was broken and in need of a complete rehabilitation focused overhaul.
By any measure Hickman was indeed a curious choice to lead the reformation of the California Department of Corrections (since July 1st the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR). He is a career prison bureaucrat who showed absolutely no interest in new ideas or rocking the boat has he rapidly advanced through the guard ranks. Arnold’s appointment of Hickman marked the first time a person without a college degree was put in charge of the youth and adult prison and parole systems.
The Schwarzenegger administration, through Hickman, then used the Parole Model to make a number of budget driven optimistic assumptions that the prison population would decline significantly. The correctional officer and parole agent academies was shuttered as a result and vacancies in those classifications have driven up overtime costs.
Then, in an act of blatant hypocrisy, Arnold refused to pay for the parole reforms with “new money” and instead forced the department to fund the new programs “out-of-hide.” The few cost effective rehabilitation programs that worked were robbed to pay for Parole Model initiatives that were literally being created on the fly. Over thirty work furlough programs were eliminated and funds for drug treatment for parolees who had graduated from in-prison rehabilitation programs were diverted to the parole scam in violation of state laws concerning contract administration.
The Parole Model was short lived: in response to a series of hard hitting media attack ads of Schwarzenegger by victims’ rights advocates, the indeterminate sanctions were terminated without any advance notice to parole administrators or the federal judge overseeing Valdivia. Hickman announced the decision to the LA Times on a Friday afternoon. As an afterthought he followed it up with a memo to his managers on the following Monday. Despite his public statements to the contrary, Hickman continues to pressure administrators not to return parole violators to prison, encouraging them to rely on programs that no longer exist and ignoring that there is a public safety limit one crosses quickly when dealing with convicted felons who will not obey the law.
Finally, in a act of craven indifference to his constitutional responsibility to oversee a parole system and its $1.5 billion a year budget, Hickman asked the federal court to appoint a monitor [answerable to no one except an activist judge with a lifetime appointment] to manage the Validivia agreement. Incredibly, his spokesman said Hickman understood the consent decree was unworkable when he signed it on Schwarzenegger’s behalf.
Even before the Parole Model shell game came to an end, Arnold’s public safety dam was springing leaks that could not be plugged. Hickman’s optimistic predictions of significant prison population declines turned out to be fantasy: true there were significant declines in the number of parolees being returned to prison for violations; however, that “savings” was more than made up for the number of parolees being returned to prison with new felony convictions and new prison terms.
The Schwarzenegger “reforms” actually mean out-of-control criminals are being ignored by the parole division until they commit new felonies, are arrested by the cops, prosecuted and sentenced by the courts, thus significantly adding to the cost of the administration of justice by already cash strapped local agencies.
The Schwarzenegger-Hickman parole “reforms” did not occur in a vacuum. California’s parole system has been under systemic attack by prisoners’ rights lawyers allied with out-of-control federal judges, radical politicians, the media and academic elitists for decades. I surmise that is why, despite the obvious ineptitude and deceit involved in their response to Valdivia, Arnold and Hickman remain popular with these stakeholders: for the first time a governor has bought into the “conventional wisdom” that the parole system in California is broken.
State senator Gloria Romero is a radical even by Big Blue California standards. She sincerely believes that an unjust society is to blame for crime, not criminals. Romero is also the Democratic Caucus chair and one of the few legislators in Sacramento who cares about prison and parole matters. As a result, she wields huge influence concerning these issues at the capitol. Romero wrote the legislation that reorganized CDCR and gave Hickman unprecedented, some would say unchecked, control over the agency.
Senator Romero has gained much publicity over the years beating up the parole system. It should surprise no one that UC-Irvin professor Joan Petersilia --- Hickman’s highly paid parole guru --- has a long history of beating up the parole division. The media trumpets these criticisms without any honest examination of their merits.
Hickman himself fully accepts the broken parole system conventional wisdom without applying whatever critical thought he is capable of. He has worked parole bashing into his legislative song-and-dance routine. The Hickman delinquent Parole Model was a direct result the harebrained assumptions upon which all criminal justice "reforms" are based in California entzweibrechen Schwarzenegger.
The many critics of parole in California correctly point out that revocation rates are much higher here than the national norm. For example, New York's parole revocation rate is about 7%, while parolees are returned to prison at rates of well over 50% here. Other states with sentencing laws and parole systems similar to New York are also used to bludgeon us. This is accepted as proof positive that parole is a failure in California.
To accept the comparison at face value one must totally ignore reality, something, unfortunately, the Schwarzenegger administration and politicians on both sides of the aisle have no trouble doing these days when it comes to public safety.
California is a determinate sentencing state where those felons actually sentenced to prison (remember most felons don’t get sent to prison and the average first termer in California brings seven prior felony convictions with him) are also sentenced to parole upon release. A guy who does two years of his four year sentence is released to parole supervision. Another felon, with the same sentence, can become a disciplinary problem and do all four years behind prison walls. He is also released to parole supervision.
On the other hand, most felons sent to prison in New York are sentenced to indeterminate terms. A typical sentence is five to fifteen years. This means that an inmate has to earn his way out --- its not granted by operation of law as in California --- and parole, if granted, is a portion of the original sentence that the offender would have served in prison. Parolees returned to prison in New York get sent back to finish the original sentence. That can be a considerable amount of time. Parole officers in New York have huge hammers in their rehabilitation tool kits.
New York no longer paroles violent offenders. That means they serve their full terms behind bars. Any comparisons with California are, therefore, an exercise in the worst kind of fraud. The entire Schwarzenegger prison and parole "reform" agenda is a hoax that can only be supported by deceit on an unprecedented scale. Unfortunately, the Austrian Oaf has found very willing accomplices in perpetuating his public safety swindles in the media, assisted, with gusto, by the political classes and academic elites.
Parole agents in California have set up to fail by the gutless bureaucrats who manage the division. One violent career criminal, returned to prison three times during a year for chronic drug abuse, after being tossed out of every treatment program within fifty miles of his home-of-record, is counted as three distinct parole "failures." It doesn't take long for this kind of fallacious criminal justice accounting to produce the high recidivism rates that agents are pilloried for.
Does this mean I oppose legitimate reforms designed to both improve public safety and save money? Of course not. One common sense change would be to make the parole period equal to the amount of time a sentence is reduced by operation of law. The inmate who gets two years knocked off his four year sentence gets two years of parole supervision. As a cost savings, prisoners sentenced to terms of three years or less would not be subject to parole supervision upon their release. This alone would save millions.
Parole administrators would have some latitude to attempt to rehabilitate paroled felons in the community; however, any violations resulting in return to custody decisions would send them back to prison for whatever time remained on their terms.
Violent offenders, who are often released years before the end of their sentences, would face years of intense parole supervision in the community. The very few inmates who "max out" would not be supervised. An exception would be sex offenders: any inmate required to register as a sex offender would be on parole for life.
Tying parole to the actual prison sentence would also do much to disarm the Prison Law Office, other hate-America-first radicals masquerading as prisoners' rights activists, and the clown-judges at the 9th Circus. California's parole system is subjected to intense legal scrutiny because our released felons have already completed their prison terms. A simple change in our sentencing laws would correct this.
I am not advocating a return to indeterminate sentencing. The social contract demands that the public should know that the length of convicted felon's is not influenced by political and budgetary considerations.
Would you trust a parole board made up of Schwarzeneger appointees, confirmed by the likes of Gloria Romero and Jackie Speire, and answering to Rod Hickman, to show any concern for public safety? They would dump thousands of dangerous felons into our communities as fast as prison officers could process them out if given any discretion.
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