The Heated Question of Parole

By Michael S. Serrill

Who should decide when inmates ought to be set free?

Investigating a report of a stolen moped, New York City Police Officer Thomas Ruotolo approached a man to question him about the scooter he was riding. Suddenly the man pulled a gun and started firing. Ruotolo was killed, and two other officers were wounded. When he was arrested hours later, the accused assailant, George Accosta, 24, turned out to be on parole from a manslaughter conviction; that parole had not been revoked despite a subsequent conviction and a three-month jail term for criminal mischief. The raw brutality of the unprovoked killing, and shrieking headlines in the city's two tabloids stirred many New Yorkers last week to call for an end to a parole system that they think frees dangerous offenders haphazardly.

In California, meanwhile, authorities may be forced to release from custody a prisoner they regard as a danger to society. In 1978 Theodore Streleski, who had spent 19 years unsuccessfully seeking a mathematics Ph.D. at Stanford University, bludgeoned to death his academic adviser; Streleski reportedly told authorities that the killing was a "political" act to protest Stanford's handling of graduate students. A jury convicted him of second-degree murder and the use of a deadly weapon, which then carried a maximum sentence of eight years. In four weeks Streleski, 47, will have served his full term, with time off for good behavior, and will probably have to be released, though he has told reporters that he still believes his murderous act was "morally correct" and is "noncommittal" about whether he will kill again. The Streleski controversy follows by just a few weeks the mandatory release from a California prison of Dan White, who served only five years and one month for manslaughter after killing San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

The anguished outcries in New York and California concern the same problem: penal systems that too often free prisoners who seem obvious threats to society. But the two cases also illustrate how difficult solutions are. The parole system many New Yorkers are so eager to abandon could end up being replaced by one like the penal approach that governed the Streleski and White cases. In eleven states, including California, parole release has been abolished for most offenders in favor of a fixed, or "determinate," sentencing system. Under it, a judge must impose punishment from a narrow range of options set by the legislature or some administrative body, and an offender must serve all of the sentence, minus time off for good behavior. Gone are the old "one-to 20-year" sentences, which left parole boards to decide the real length of a term.

In the second half of the 19th century, judges in the U.S. sentenced most criminals to flat prison terms, and convicts were expected to serve them in full. But they seldom did; the penitentiaries, then as now, were always full, and Governors would sometimes pardon prisoners wholesale or delegate that authority to prison wardens, who often used their power randomly. Parole boards evolved in part to end this chaotic system, and to further the goals of progressive visionaries, who thought prisoners were victims of a "social sickness" and should be treated rather than punished. Individualized justice and rehabilitation were the watchwords.

In the 1970s a new generation of prison critics took a hard look at indeterminate sentencing and the parole system and concluded that the reforms needed reform. Both liberals and conservatives joined in a movement to do away with pa role boards and adopt fixed sentences.

Liberals wanted to eliminate the wild disparity in sentencing that resulted from the broad discretion given to both judges and parole officials, and to make sentences shorter. Conservatives wanted to guarantee that more offenders went to prison and stayed there. Both groups had abandoned rehabilitation as a purpose of incarceration. Says Kay Knapp, director of the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission: "When you move to a system whose premise is retribution, just deserts, that old kind of system starts looking less attractive."

Drawbacks to the experiments with fixed sentencing are already apparent. They have contributed to prison overcrowding. Average sentences are often much longer--draconian in the view of some critics--partly because of what has been called the "crime-of-the-week syndrome," which impels politicians to increase mandatory sentences after the occurrence of a headline-grabbing offense. Moreover, inmates no longer have much to gain by participating in work and education programs, which together with the hopelessness of long sentences has made prisoner control more difficult.

Fixed sentencing "is a simplex solution to a complex problem," says Paul Young, a spokesman for the New York parole board. "Everybody's jumping on the bandwagon, but nobody's looking down the road." The lesson, however, is not quite that nothing changes, nothing works. New York could learn from the experience of California and other states. Minnesota, for instance, has immunized itself against the crime-of-the-week syndrome with its much admired Sentencing Guidelines Commission, which is independent of the legislature.

"But there are going to be horror stories no matter what system you have," says Peter Hoffman of the U.S. Parole Commission. At the same time, those horror stories tend to obscure the reality that both the parole system and the fixed-time approach have some advantages. A few states now appear to be trying to graft some of parole's benefits onto fixed-sentencing plans. In 1982 California legislators, for example, passed a law permitting inmates to earn reductions of up to 50% in their sentences by participating in work or study programs. That kind of early release, of course, is just parole by another name. So are Connecticut's "supervised home time" and "reentry furlough" programs, which amend the state's fixed-time laws by allowing the release of inmates as much as six months early at the discretion of officials. Such emerging hybrids may lead to improvements. But criminal justice practitioners do not expect miracles. Neither should anyone else. --By Michael S. Serrill. Reported by Timothy Loughran/New York, with other bureaus

With reporting by Timothy Loughran