242 felonies committed by parolees who otherwise would have been in prison

SACRAMENTO - A state audit of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's since-disbanded "new parole model" found that 242 offenders were convicted on new felonies committed when they otherwise would have been in prison.

The Bureau of State Audits report did not provide a breakdown on what crimes were committed, nor did the corrections agency have any details available Thursday on the types of offenses.

According to the audit, the offenses were committed by parolees who had violated the terms of their releases but had been placed in halfway houses or in drug treatment programs that the prison department put in place last year as alternatives to reincarceration.

"It's unfortunate that 242 crimes had to be committed and tried at expense to taxpayers when parole revocation may not only have prevented the crimes, but caused the individuals to change their ways," said Lance Corcoran, a spokesman for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which had expressed harsh criticism of the new parole policies when they were implemented last year.

But Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesman J.P. Tremblay said that not all of the 242 offenders necessarily would have been reincarcerated under the old policy. Some of them might have been continued on parole without being placed in the programs, he said.

"You have to look at these cases in their totality to decide what would have happened," Tremblay said.

First designed during former Gov. Gray Davis' administration, corrections officials rolled out the alternative sanctions programs in early 2004 amid considerable fanfare by the new Schwarzenegger administration that it was seeking to overhaul an expensive, corrupt, overpopulated and brutal prison and parole system.

Two key components of the new parole program were the Halfway Back and the Substance Abuse Treatment Control Units, which were put in place in January 2004 and May 2004, respectively, as alternatives to prison for offenders who committed minor violations of their parole terms, such as testing positive for drugs or missing a meeting with a parole agent.

Statistics reported by the Sacramento Bee in February, however, showed that with the programs in place, fewer offenders were being returned to prison on parole revocations while more were coming back in after committing new crimes.

A crime victims' group financially supported by the peace officers group launched a limited TV advertising campaign that highlighted the reincarceration statistics and criticized the Schwarzenegger administration's parole policies. In April, the then-Department of Corrections dumped what it had called the "new parole model."

In its assessment of the parole changes, the state auditor found that the new policies didn't save nearly the amount of money the department had promised ($1.2 million a month instead of $8.4 million), failed to analyze its own data and was never able to "establish benchmarks ... to measure the programs' results."

"They basically did not know how the parolees that were participating in these programs were doing," Chief Deputy State Auditor Steve Hendrickson said.