Garrido, Long Prison Sentences, and Parole

The continuing media frenzy over the saga of kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard and repeat sex offender Philip Garrido is coming to focus heavily on the fact of Garrido's "early release" from his federal 50 year to life sentence for kidnapping and raping Katherine Calloway.  Garrido actually faced prosecution in both Nevada and California as well for kidnapping Calloway from a South Lake Tahoe, California, parking lot and raping her in a lair he had created in a store-it-yourself facility across the state line in Reno, Nevada.  According to Sam Stanton and Denny Walsh's reporting in the Sacbee, Garrido was prosecuted by Nevada, but his public defender convinced the judge to make the 5 year to Life state sentence concurrent with the 50 to Life federal sentence, arguing that Garrido was already serving 50 years and facing California felony charges.  The prosecutor incorrectly noted that Garrido would have to serve at least 2/3 of his 50 year minimum (some 32 years).  But the prosecutor was wrong, under Federal sentencing policy of the time, prisoners were eligible for parole after either 1/3 of their sentence (16 years in Garrido's case), or 10 years, whichever was less.  California never prosecuted Garrido and he was paroled from federal prison after 11 years and a few months later from Nevada custody.  Three years later, undeterred (despite being on parole) and unrepaired, Garrido teamed up with the woman who had married him in Leavenworth prison to kidnap 11 year old Jaycee Dugard, and retreated to a new more secure lair in Antioch, California.  To most of the public, this saga is another confirmation of why they have never trusted parole boards ( discretionary release) or parole supervision, but instead, only in long fixed prison sentences. 

To proponents of reform in our system of mass incarceration generally and in the role of long fixed prison sentences specifically, the Dugard/Garrido case seems another historical catastrophe.  But in fact, it is a conversation we need to have.  If the only conclusion from the facts of a case like this is that every such offender should be held for 50 years or for life, we will never escape mass incarceration.  There is much that was questionable about the old sentencing system.  Promising 50 years minimum (while the reality was 10) is indefensible in a democracy (even though it provided wonderful flexibility). But the old federal system had it about right in setting 10 years as the maximum length of confinement with no chance of parole.  Ten years, the norm for murder in much of the world, allows plenty of incapacitation in many cases, and the prospect of confinement for decades with no chance of parole is both cruel and presents a fundamental challenge to morale and prison management.  

That does not mean the federal parole authorities were right to parole Garrido in 1988.  He had a history of repeated, violent, and audacious rapes, including two other attacks for which he was never prosecuted (but which federal authorities were apprised of).  His prison records have not been disclosed to the media so we do not know what treatment he may have received, or how the authorities viewed his marriage to Linda while in prison (perhaps a sign his raping days were over). 

What about parole supervision?  We should be outraged that parole and other law enforcement authorities failed to come upon Jaycee Dugard and later her daughters in more than 30 years of being a supervised and registered sex offender under federal and later state parole authority.  Earlier I argued that parole authorities may have been lulled by Garrido's apparent normalcy and success (against the norm set by state prisoners who often return to unemployment and homelessness in California's poorest urban and rural neighborhoods).  No doubt the shear passage of time led to complacency.  But there is no excuse for simply failing to search fully the property of a man with a known practice of secreting victims away in hidden lairs.  Despite that I continue to believe that parole supervision is the right tool for threats like Garrido.  The key is to overcome the normalizing biases that parole agents (and all other human beings in routinized jobs) apply to the risks they are managing.  One approach would be to better profile sex offenders.  Another, quite opposite approach suggested by Bernard Harcourt in his book, Against Prediction, is to use randomizing methods to decouple the intensity of searches and investigations from assessments of relative danger.  Everyone on the high intensity caseload ought to be subjected to periodic random searches of their entire property and at all times of day and night.  It is hard to believe that in 18 years such random searches would not have uncovered evidence of unreported family members.