Parole Officers are Responsible for Too Many Parolees

In 2007, California had 126,906 people on parole. Each of these parolees must be monitored by a parole agent. The number of parolees assigned to a parole agent, however, is extremely high. According to Seth Unger, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), some case officers oversee as many as 100 parolees. Like so many other programs in California’s criminal justice system, parole agents are understaffed and overworked.

Because parole agents are responsible for a high number of parolees, they experience difficulty monitoring them. Reporting to parole officers is infrequent. Approximately one in four parolees visits their parole officer only twice a year. “High control” parolees must make two in-person contacts a month. These parolees are considered to pose a higher risk to public safety because they have either committed a violent felony, are a sex offender, or belong to a gang. “Control service” parolees—a middle tier of parole classification—must report once a month. Such reporting “varies from mailing in a form to a parole officer, to a periodic phone call to a clerical staff person, to a face-to-face visit with a parole agent.”

This poses a risk to public safety and contributes to the recidivism rate. Approximately 70 percent of parolees are sent back to prison. Parole agents just do not have the time or money to properly supervise people on their caseload. Parolees too often reoffend and re-harm the communities they are released back into.

Additionally, parolees are not receiving the types of reentry programs that parole was originally meant to provide. Parolees oftentimes need assistance finding employment, housing, health care services, and drug treatment. Parole agents, however, have few resources for providing these services. Because there are so many parolees assigned to an agent, they cannot “apply sustained personal attention and/or pressure in individual cases — short of deciding to return the parolee to prison, which continues to happen too often.”

Some efforts have been made to reduce the number of parolees per agent. For example, the Assembly Prison Reform Bill sought to reduce the average caseload of California parole officers from 70 parolees to 45 parolees. Additionally, the recent arrest of Phillip Garrido has many people thinking about this problem. Parole agents allegedly visited Garrido’s home several times, but never discovered that Jaycee Lee Dugard was living there with the two daughters Garrido purportedly fathered. The state inspector general is conducting an investigation into the manner in which CDC handled Garrido’s parole.

California’s parole system faces many challenges. The burdensome number of parolees assigned to each parole agent has many problems. Parole agents lack the ability to closely supervise parolees, which makes our communities less safe. They also lack the resources to assist in parolee reentry to reduce recidivism rates. Most importantly, it takes us further away from parole’s original purposes of rehabilitation and reintegration.