Messamore believe mandatory parole will provide more opportunity to nail those who have no intention of changing their ways. Others may, with some help, make "better choices," she says.
"I understand why people say, 'Why should we help them?' But the bottom line is, if you don't give them resources, you're not doing public safety, either," Messamore says. "There's a view that you're either a social worker or law enforcement, that the two aren't the same. But they are. You give people resources to help themselves and change their behavior, and you're protecting the public."
But resources are getting squeezed in the ever-growing prison bureaucracy, and parole programs aren't high on the DOC's wish list. Asked by the legislature's Joint Budget Committee to rank its expenditures in terms of their importance to the department's overall mission, the DOC budget team last year ranked parole at No. 19 of 62 items, behind a host of security and training concerns. The parole board itself weighed in at No. 35, slightly ahead of drug, alcohol and sex-offender treatment programs. The "resources" handed out to a parolee when he leaves prison--the bus tokens, $100 check and the clothes on his back--came in dead last.
Bob Sylvester of Dismas House says the DOC still won't acknowledge the extent to which its overcrowding problem is really a parole problem. "The only way they're going to straighten this out is to have a summit meeting with the legislators, the judiciary and the parole people," he says, "and sit down and discuss the pieces that aren't working."
In recent years, several states have severely limited or abolished the use of parole, moving toward a "truth-in-sentencing" approach. Reformers such as Sylvester say it's time to get rid of the automatic time-off-for-good-behavior discounts that erode public confidence in the criminal-justice system, as well as the treacherous guesswork involved in discretionary parole decisions. Instead, he suggests, criminals would be expected to earn their way out, through voluntary rather than mandatory programs--programs that would bring them, under tight supervision, closer and closer to the street.
Chairman Trujillo, though, boasts that the parole board has "over 150 years of criminal justice experience" among its present members. "If all these people were going to be in prison until they're sixty, then you could consider doing away with parole," Trujillo says. "But the majority of the sentences we see are two, four, eight years. That tells me they're going to be out in the next six months to four years. So why not provide a transition? If public safety is our concern, we should do that."
Trujillo suggests that too many parole violators have come to regard prison as "better than the alternative they have on the street." If it were up to him, he'd send them all to the Colorado State Penitentiary, the state's supermax, for a little "bar therapy."
"I think prison ought to be a little tougher," he says. "CSP--every prisoner ought to have a taste of that. I honestly feel that a certain segment, if they were to have a taste of 23-hour lockdown for ninety days or six months, they'll never commit another crime."
But parolees says prison is tough enough, thanks; it's parole that needs fixing. John Robert Nelson wrote a letter to that effect that was published in the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph two months ago--the same day he was granted parole.
At age 38, Nelson has served seven years on a seventeen-year sentence for possession of LSD and amphetamines, including one year in a Colorado Springs halfway house. "I made it through the system quicker than most," he says, adding that the prison programs he found available to him upon entry in 1989 helped make a difference.
"I went into it with an open mind and got out of it what I could," he says. "When I came into DOC, I was fairly illiterate. I took a GED program and went on to college while I was in prison. And I took all the drug classes I could."
But federal funding for prison college programs has dried up, and much of what remains, Nelson believes, consists of merely token gestures of rehabilitation. "They aren't really comprehensive programs," he says. "They're short, six- to eight-week courses that most individuals are forced into, and they don't take it as seriously as they should."
Nelson contends that once a prisoner shows he can function in a halfway house or other less restrictive setting, parole and ISP should soon follow, freeing up more options for others. Instead, he says, one of his housemates spent four years in community corrections awaiting parole--despite his demonstrated ability to live outside a cell.
"They're using halfway houses as penal institutions rather than as a transitional program," Nelson says. "They should be implementing comprehensive, individual programs so people can get out and be successful. You can put the productive ones on the street, living at home, paying taxes--and save a lot on incarcerating them."
While in prison, Nelson says, "I looked at myself and decided there have to be changes in my life." Many others at the halfway house had gone through a similar process, he adds, but that didn't seem to cut any ice with the parole board. He was stunned to receive parole on only the second try.
