Sunday, August 29, 1999
Critics question parole formula
Can mathematical grid predict crime?
BY DAN HORN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The future of parole in Ohio is a simple mathematical grid, a few lines of numbers beneath the words “risk score” and “offense category.”
Just add it up, the theory goes, and find out who is a threat to society.
“It's not perfect,” says Reginald Wilkinson, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. “But it's as close as we can make it.”
For some, however, it may never be close enough.
Like its many predecessors, the new parole formula is now part of a decades-long debate over the way Ohio determines who goes free and who stays in prison.
The key question is whether anyone — or any formula — can reliably decide if a convicted felon is ready to return to the community.
Despite the certainty implied by the numbers, the process is far from scientific. More than 37 percent of the time, those freed early from prison go back within three years.
One recent parole failure was James E. King, who served 20 years for rape and robbery before his release in March.
Cincinnati police shot him to death last week after he robbed a bank.
“We felt after 20 years we would take a chance on him,” says Margarette Ghee, chairwoman of the Ohio Parole Board. “Evidently, it wasn't one of our better decisions.”
Prosecutors, defense attorneys and prisoners all have their own take on how to improve the odds, with ideas ranging from tougher sentences to better prison programs.
In the middle is the parole board, a 12-member panel of civil-service employees responsible for evaluating 46,000 inmates.
“No matter how they do it, they're always going to have controversy,” says Cathy Adams, a Cincinnati defense attorney. “The philosophies on how to deal with criminals are just too divergent.”
The parole board's latest attempt to bring those opposing forces together is the new grid system it began using last year.
The system is based on a formula that ranks each inmate by the seriousness of the offense and the “risk score” for offending again.
The grid works like a sliding-scale: Draw one line from the offense category and another from the risk score. A recommended sentence — anywhere from six months to life — appears where the two lines meet.
“What the guidelines have done is put more structure into our decision-making,” Ms. Ghee says. “They enable us to explain succinctly why we made any decision.”
Lately, she says, she's been trying to explain why the new guidelines have triggered a sharp increase in the number of felons released from prison.
So far this year, the board has granted parole in 37.6 percent of its cases — up from 14.8 percent in 1997.
Ms. Ghee describes the increase as temporary and says it is occurring now because the board is retroactively applying the new guidelines to all inmates.
According to the grid, she says, many of them are nonviolent offenders who should have been freed years ago.
Prosecutors, however, note that 73 percent of those paroled in 1998 had committed crimes in the two most serious felony levels, including robbery, drug trafficking and burglary.
“If these people are out, they're going to be committing more crimes,” says Hamilton County Prosecutor Mike Allen. “This isn't rocket science.”
To make his point, Mr. Allen recently reviewed the status of every felon paroled to Hamilton County in December 1998 — the month with the largest number of releases under the new guidelines.
The prosecutor found that 37 of the 71 felons already face new criminal charges.
While most are for minor offenses — drunken driving, trespassing, drug abuse — several are felonies that could land the parolee back in prison.
“These may be relatively minor,” Mr. Allen says, “but they were just let out and already it's, "Here we go again.'”
It's a familiar refrain to the parole board. No matter how much they refine their system, Ms. Ghee says, law enforcement will never be satisfied.
She says the statistics show that, despite high-profile failures like Mr. King, about 63 percent of parolees don't repeat their mistakes.
And most of those who do, she says, commit low-level crimes that don't involve violence.
“The guidelines are working,” Ms. Ghee says. “The people who should be released are being released and the people who need to be held longer are being held longer.”
But some critics will never trust any system devised by the parole board.
Former Prosecutor Joseph Deters, now state treasurer, sued the board four years ago after it paroled Ricardo Woods, who had served 20 years for killing a police officer.
“I think they're well-intentioned people,” Mr. Deters says. “But I was done with them when they freed Ricardo Woods. No grid will bring back their credibility with me.”
Mr. Deters says he doubts the board's new formula can accurately measure something as unpredictable as the criminal mind.
“It's very difficult to apply objective standards to crime,” he says. “Each case rises or falls on its own.”
Defense attorneys also have their doubts. Ms. Adams says many fear a rigid formula will keep some inmates in prison longer than necessary.
“The public defenders think they're too tough,” Ms. Ghee says. “We can't win.”
Mr. Wilkinson says the controversy over the new guidelines is a classic example of the age-old dispute over crime and punishment.
“As long as we have people on the left and the right of what we're doing, we're going to be in the middle,” Mr. Wilkinson says.
He says the new guidelines were born of a desire to be fair to everyone, including those inside the prison system.
The board adopted the guidelines in response to Ohio's 1996 “truth in sentencing” law, which eliminated sentences with minimum and maximum ranges.
The change means that felons who were sentenced to 10 to 25 years under the old law now might get exactly 14 years, with no chance for parole.
Ms. Ghee says the board adopted the new guidelines because it's unfair for inmates sentenced before 1996 to face potentially more time in prison than those sentenced after 1996.
She says the grid formula allows the board to give all inmates a specific release date.
“They know if they stay out of trouble, that's when they will get out,” Ms. Ghee says.
She says the grid is based on the theory that inmates are more likely to improve themselves and stay on their best behavior if they can look forward to a release date.
The board applied this theory to Mr. King when he came before them earlier this year. When his case was measured on the grid, it showed he could have been released three years ago.
He had participated in a violent-offender program, completed a sex-offender program and had showed good progress in his evaluations. “It looked like he'd made a change in his life,” Ms. Ghee said.
Although the board was wrong in that case, Ms. Ghee says it was the exception, not the rule.
Mr. Allen, however, says it only takes a few mistakes like Mr. King to take a heavy toll on society. He says it costs money and sometimes lives when a felon offends again.
To others, though, there's no way around some form of parole or strictly limited prison sentences. Their reasoning is based as much on practical issues as it is on law and order.
“There's a tremendous crunch for jail space,” says Michael Thompson, a policy analyst for the Council of State Governments. “Ohio is one of the most crowded systems in the country.”
The state's prisons are operating at 125 percent capacity with a budget of about $1.5 billion a year.
Despite those numbers, Mr. Wilkinson says, the parole board never releases inmates because of population concerns. The goal, he says, is to develop a system that's fair to the inmates as well as the rest of society.
He says it's crucial because, like it or not, most felons will one day walk out of prison and into the community.
“What the parole board does is evaluate risk,” Mr. Wilkinson says. “Obviously, human nature is going to say that we're not going to be perfect.”
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