The Sac Bee reports:
“We’re going to look over the fences. We don’t want another Garrido,” Greg Shuman, who supervises a Sacramento-based California Parole Apprehension Team, told agents heading out for one sweep. “It’s no-tolerance. Anything, any violation, they’re going to jail.”
Five teams were created this year in different parts of California, while five more will start in January.
Money to fund them comes from savings created by a law that took effect this year. That law eliminated parole supervision for thousands of ex-convicts, some of whom served time for serious crimes.
It allows agents to focus on the parolees that state corrections officials consider the greatest risk to the public. Supervising fewer people lets agents concentrate their attention on sex offenders, gang members and violent criminals, said Robert Ambroselli, who heads the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s adult parole division.
The move to use budget savings from early release to target high-risk offenders is, of course, a sensible one. But are these folks high-risk offenders? The article mentions that 480 out of the 900 parole violators who have been arrested recently are sex offenders, which, according to CDCR’s own recidivism report, are the lowest risk group among released inmates. That is, if one does not count parole violations. Whether any risk has been prevented by a registered sex offender’s arrest would depend on whether the parole violation that led to the arrest is, indeed, a crime in its own right, or some technical violation.
This surge in law enforcement energy might explain the following curious story that appeared this week in the San Jose Mercury News:
Lawrence Joseph Brown, 52, was taken back into custody in Tustin just 30 miles from the California Institution for Men in Chino.
“We had investigators following him, and he was in a car with a woman,” a violation of a stipulation of his parole, Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas told The Associated Press in a phone interview.
The woman was Ruby Huggler, a woman Brown had stayed with during a brief parole earlier this year, and Rackauckas said he believed she picked him up from the prison.
This week I showed my students Fritz Lang’s 1931 masterpiece M. In one of the movie’s best scenes, Lorre, a child murderer and sex offender, is apprehended by the mafia, and “tried” by a kangaroo court trying to decide whether to execute him or hand him over to official law enforcement. His speech, and their reactions to it, is truly fascinating, and goes to the heart of the question here–do we believe that these offenses come from evil, or from disease, or both. Our persecution of released sex offenders seems to suggest the latter; we rearrest them because we are concerned about compulsion. A student of mine once called this unique perception of guilt “culpable sickness”. Feeding our fears of the unknown and unexplainable is important, but it is more important to deal with actual recidivism than with imagined and feared recidivism. I hope we are, indeed, preventing dangerous and risky reoffending by directing our energy toward these released offenders, rather than merely substituting one form of oppressive and wasteful enforcement with another.
3 Comments
"I hope we are, indeed, preventing dangerous and risky reoffending by directing our energy toward these released offenders, rather than merely substituting one form of oppressive and wasteful enforcement with another."
Ms. Aviram, while your hope is well intended, I can attest to its futility under the current political climate.
I was one of those targeted during this recent series of CDCR parole sweeps. Let me first state that I utterly reject the label 'sex offender.' Such a label, as continuously promoted by the media and CDCR, fosters a stigma which paves the way for public acceptance of policies and funding of law enforcement endeavors in this arena. No other group of people who have been incarcerated bear such a label. Granted, there are some horrible individuals who have earned it, but simply tagging a group in this manner is counterproductive at best.
I was returned to custody on a parole violation in which I possessed photographs of family members at holiday events. Some of these photos were of nephews and nieces who are minors. My original charges had no relationship to children, pornography, or violence. The special conditions of my parole make no mention of photographs or images other than a restriction on pornography (a routine PC290 registrant parole condition). The mere fact that I had in my residence photos of minors caused me to be placed on a parole hold at the local county jail. I remained at the jail for 3 days until I was transferred to Deuel Vocational Institute (DVI) in Tracy. This is the Northern California Reception Center for CDCR inmates. I remained at DVI for 5 more days, at which time my parole officer ordered my release under what is termed "COP" – Continue on Parole. There were no charges assessed, and I am back home where I resume living and rebuilding my life.
I was able to read the notices of probable cause issued by CDCR Parole to four other PC290 registrants who were arrested during the same sweep. One had in his possession a 4×6 framed photograph of his live-in girlfriend in bikini style underwear. The second man had six photographs on his cellular phone which were sent to him by his girlfriend, whom he also shared an apartment with. This girlfriend was actually at the residence when the sweep occurred, but her presence did not alter the parole agents decision to arrest the individual. A third person had in his possession a pencil sketch drawing of a marijuana plant, and was subsequently arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia. The fourth person was arrested for possessing two empty beer cans in a trash bag within his residence.
One of these individuals was released to COP at the same time as myself. I would speculate that the others, as many with similar technical violations, will attend their Valdivia hearings within 10 business days and be released to COP as well.
The general public only sees the official press releases touting the arrest numbers and the public safety mantras expressed by CDCR through the media outlets. I do not doubt that a small number of individuals were arrested on serious violations of their parole, but based upon personal experience I will attest that the vast majority of these cases in which there was no threat to public safety will be released from prison within days or weeks. The public is not made aware of this portion of the statistics.
The sheer number of inmates being processed at DVI on a daily basis is staggering. The public is to a large degree unaware of this machine that consumes lives and money at a frenetic pace.
After reading your blog post, I was inclined to write from a perspective of first hand experience in order to shed some light on what is really taking place.
I hope this has in some way been helpful.
Wow, Anonymous, thank you so much for writing. It is extremely important to hear the truths behind the policies touted on the CDCR website. I am grateful to you for sharing these experiences with us–they raise serious doubts as to how much "reform" was involved in parole reform.
"I hope we are, indeed, preventing dangerous and risky reoffending by directing our energy toward these released offenders, rather than merely substituting one form of oppressive and wasteful enforcement with another."
Ms. Aviram, while your hope is well intended, I can attest to its futility under the current political climate.
I was one of those targeted during this recent series of CDCR parole sweeps. Let me first state that I utterly reject the label 'sex offender.' Such a label, as continuously promoted by the media and CDCR, fosters a stigma which paves the way for public acceptance of policies and funding of law enforcement endeavors in this arena. No other group of people who have been incarcerated bear such a label. Granted, there are some horrible individuals who have earned it, but simply tagging a group in this manner is counterproductive at best.
I was returned to custody on a parole violation in which I possessed photographs of family members at holiday events. Some of these photos were of nephews and nieces who are minors. My original charges had no relationship to children, pornography, or violence. The special conditions of my parole make no mention of photographs or images other than a restriction on pornography (a routine PC290 registrant parole condition). The mere fact that I had in my residence photos of minors caused me to be placed on a parole hold at the local county jail. I remained at the jail for 3 days until I was transferred to Deuel Vocational Institute (DVI) in Tracy. This is the Northern California Reception Center for CDCR inmates. I remained at DVI for 5 more days, at which time my parole officer ordered my release under what is termed "COP" – Continue on Parole. There were no charges assessed, and I am back home where I resume living and rebuilding my life.
I was able to read the notices of probable cause issued by CDCR Parole to four other PC290 registrants who were arrested during the same sweep. One had in his possession a 4×6 framed photograph of his live-in girlfriend in bikini style underwear. The second man had six photographs on his cellular phone which were sent to him by his girlfriend, whom he also shared an apartment with. This girlfriend was actually at the residence when the sweep occurred, but her presence did not alter the parole agents decision to arrest the individual. A third person had in his possession a pencil sketch drawing of a marijuana plant, and was subsequently arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia. The fourth person was arrested for possessing two empty beer cans in a trash bag within his residence.
One of these individuals was released to COP at the same time as myself. I would speculate that the others, as many with similar technical violations, will attend their Valdivia hearings within 10 business days and be released to COP as well.
The general public only sees the official press releases touting the arrest numbers and the public safety mantras expressed by CDCR through the media outlets. I do not doubt that a small number of individuals were arrested on serious violations of their parole, but based upon personal experience I will attest that the vast majority of these cases in which there was no threat to public safety will be released from prison within days or weeks. The public is not made aware of this portion of the statistics.
The sheer number of inmates being processed at DVI on a daily basis is staggering. The public is to a large degree unaware of this machine that consumes lives and money at a frenetic pace.
After reading your blog post, I was inclined to write from a perspective of first hand experience in order to shed some light on what is really taking place.
I hope this has in some way been helpful.