FAILING PAROLE: LACK OF SERVICES HURTS PUBLIC SAFETY AND TAXPAYERS

The legislative analyst recently documented the dangerous and expensive
failure of the state's parole system. The governor and legislators need to
pay attention. Both public safety and public dollars are at stake.

California taxpayers spend $245 million a year to monitor 100,000 newly
released inmates. An astounding 67 percent of them return to prison because
they fail on the streets, either by committing new crimes or by violating
the conditions of their parole.

That's a higher parolee failure rate than in any other state. When parolees
fail, taxpayers spend another $1.5 billion to return them to prison and
maintain them there.

It's money that would be better spent, as the analyst recommends, on
housing, drug and alcohol counseling and job help, programs to assist
ex-cons, many of whom are mentally and socially fragile, to live
productive, crime-free lives.

Sadly, California invests almost nothing to reduce parolee failure, as Bee
staff writer Andy Furillo found in his recent special series on the crisis
besetting the state's parole system. Some 80,000 parolees are unemployed,
but the parole system offers no job help for most of them; 85,000 are
alcoholics or drug addicts, but the system has only 750 treatment beds; an
estimated 10,000 are homeless, but there's shelter space for just 200.

Echoing recommendations made by the Little Hoover Commission a few months
ago, the legislative analyst calls for sensible and long-overdue reforms:
more extensive monitoring of the most dangerous parolees; more investment
in parolee housing, job help and drug and alcohol rehabilitation; and
return of control of the parole system from the politically appointed Board
of Prison Terms to parole agents and the Department of Corrections.

No doubt the legislative analyst's report will be dismissed by some as a
liberal, soft-on-crime document. It is not.

Money spent to help former criminals conquer their drug and alcohol
addictions, get jobs and lead stable lives is cost-effective crime
prevention.

Copyright ) 1998 The Sacramento Bee