Budget: Parole agents gearing up for battle

March 21, 2011 | 4:27 PM | By Rina Palta
    FILED UNDER: Corrections, Budget, Parole, Realignment

    CDCR
    Along with funneling some 38,000 prison inmates to county jails, Governor Jerry Brown’s budget, if passed, would slowly and steadily dismantle much of the state’s parole system. According to a document released by the Parole Agent Association of California, there are a number of major changes planned:
    • Only those convicted of serious and violent offenses, sex crimes, or those being released after their third strike offense would be supervised by parole agents after leaving prison. Currently, nearly every person leaving prison goes on parole supervision, meaning they have to check in with a parole agent, obey certain rules (like curfews, drug tests, sometimes wearing GPS bracelets), and give up certain rights (like not being searched without a warrant).

    • Parole agents would no longer have the ability to send a parolee back to prison for violating the terms of his or her parole. In the current process, if a parolee does anything from not showing up for an appointment, to failing a drug test, to committing a new crime, an agent has the ability to send that person back to prison for a limited amount of time. That parolee can either accept the violation (and new time in prison) or appeal to the Board of Parole Hearings, which more often than not, affirms the parole revocation. Now, parole revocations would have to go through the court system.
    • The vast majority of parole revocations would not mean a return to prison. Only lifers could be returned to prison for violating their parole–everyone else would serve whatever new sentence in the county jail.
    The reasoning behind the changes to parole is likely that a vast number of people entering prison on any given day in California are there on parole violations. Over a three-year period, 46 percent of inmates released in California return to prison on a parole violation (and many of those on a technical violation, meaning not a new crime, but violating of a condition of parole, like a not reporting for a meeting or carrying a weapon). Brown no doubt believes that cutting down on parole supervision and cutting into the ability of parole agents to send parolees back to prison will reduce the prison population and California’s high recidivism rate.
    Needless to say, the Parole Agent Association isn’t thrilled about these changes, which they say essentially take the teeth out of parole. In a memo to their membership, the PAAC argues that this realignment would result in a court system flooded with costly new cases (as opposed to the relatively streamlined way of dealing with crimes through parole violations). They also argue that strict parole has helped diminish crime rates in California and that counties will be unable to supervise these offenders effectively.