Phillip Garrido kidnapped 11-year-od Jaycee Dugard in 1991 while he was on federal parole for kidnapping and rape. He raped Dugard repeatedly and held her captive for 18 years, the last 10 years while he was under California parole supervision. She was freed only because two University of California, Berkeley police officers became suspicious of Garrido when he passed out religious tracts on campus accompanied by the two young girls he fathered with Jaycee.
The Inspector General’s investigation of this sordid affair reveals that during the 10 years he was under the supervision of California parole authorities, Garrido received almost no supervision from his parole agents, and his parole agents received almost no supervision from their supervisors. The IG reported that "Garrido was only properly supervised 12 out of 123 months, a failure rate of 90 per cent" and concluded that California's parole operations have "systemic problems that transcend parolee Garrido's case and jeopardize public safety."
What little supervision Garrido got was conducted by inept parole agents who were clueless as to what was really going on with their parolee. In effect, Garrido’s parole was a “paper parole” consisting of periodic written reports containing information and progress evaluations based mostly on information he gave parole agents during telephone contacts and office visits rather than on information gathered through field visits, investigations and contacts with law enforcement agencies.
When it comes to public safety, paper parole is not worth the paper it’s printed on! And what is really alarming is the fact that the lack of adequate parole supervision is far from unique to the state of California.
Here are some excerpts from a report by Sam Stanton of the Sacramento Bee detailing the IG's investigative evaluation of Garrido’s fucked-up parole supervision:
Phillip Garrido reported to California parole authorities on June 8, 1999, fresh from being released by federal parole authorities.
He was a convicted rapist and kidnapper on lifetime parole out of Nevada, and had been charged but never tried in another case involving the sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl. He had been returned to prison for four weeks for a 1993 marijuana violation, and he had been a regular drug abuser.
All this information was contained in Garrido's federal parole file, and should have been used by California corrections officials to determine that he was a high-risk sex offender.
But no one read Garrido's federal file at the time, and that led to an astonishing series of failures to discover that he had been hiding Jaycee Lee Dugard in his Antioch-area home for years.
Parole agents never talked to Garrido's neighbors or checked in with local law enforcement. They ignored hundreds of instances when his GPS tracking device malfunctioned.
They never enforced a rule that he remain within a 25-mile radius of his house, and they allowed him regularly to skip drug testing.
Out of the 123 months California agents supervised Garrido, they did so properly for only 12 of those months.
When Garrido reported to California parole authorities that day in June 1999, he objected to remaining on parole and insisted he should not have to be supervised.
According to the report, he was not supervised at all until November 1999, when he was classified as a low-level offender.
His only contact with state parole agents between then and May 2000 were some phone calls, three office visits and five written reports that Garrido submitted.
From then on, his contacts with California parole agents were irregular and limited.
For the 10-year period California supervised him up until his arrest in August, agents visited his home only 60 times, with 40 of those visits coming in the past two years. Corrections officials have said a paroled sex offender typically might merit three to four visits a month.
No agents visited Garrido's home between June 2001 and July 2002. Only one visit was made between June 2004 and August 2005.
Four different times – November 1999, July 2004, December 2005 and April 2008 – California parole officials recommended to Nevada that Garrido be released from parole. Nevada refused.
During the 60 home visits, none of the six parole agents who supervised Garrido over the years noticed the electrical lines running from the Garrido house into the backyard and through the back fence to a shed hidden behind the fence.
California parole agents did not realize Garrido's property extended beyond the fence into a large hidden compound where he allegedly kept Dugard because they had not read his federal file, which included a diagram of the entire property, Shaw found.
Even when supervision of Garrido tightened over the last two years, agents missed critical clues. On June 17, 2008, his parole agent went to the home and found a 12-year-old girl there.
Garrido told the agent the girl was his brother's daughter. Authorities now believe she was Dugard's older daughter.
Parole supervisors skipped required reviews of Garrido's case 10 times, and an additional 15 times "completed case reviews but failed to identify and correct obvious deficiencies in the manner parole agents handled Garrido's case."
Even after Garrido was placed on GPS supervision in April 2008, parole agents barely monitored his whereabouts.
Because he had mistakenly been classified as a low-risk offender, he was on "passive" GPS, meaning agents did not follow his movements in real time but could tell where he had gone.
He was told to get permission to go more than 25 miles from his home, but he routinely did so without consequence.
From April 2008 until July 2009, Garrido's GPS device alerted parole agents 335 times that its signal was not working for long periods.
"This was almost a nightly occurrence. System records show that parole agents ignored 276 of these alerts altogether."
Once, when the device sent an alert that indicated the strap that connected it to Garrido's ankle may have come undone, his agent took no action.
Parole agents never talked to Garrido's neighbors, some of whom had expressed concerns about his odd behavior. One neighbor met Jaycee early on, something that could have been learned by vigilant parole agents "to further investigate Garrido and perhaps discover Jaycee."
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