When inadequate information is provided to the parole board

In a dreary room in the old Connecticut State Prison in Wethersfield, I watched as “a kindly looking man in his 50s, who had spent about 15 years in prison for a vicious assault on a woman,†was interviewed by the three members of the new Board of Parole.

It was 1961 and I was writing a series of reports on parole for The Hartford Courant. This particular inmate, I wrote, had four to five years left to serve, but “looked like an excellent prospect for parole. His record in prison was excellent. He had relatives ready to give him a home and job and he seemed repentant.â€

But the excellent prospect’s chances changed when one board member asked him why he had carried a rope with him when he broke into the home of the woman he had assaulted 15 years earlier.

“Why, to strangle her,†he replied.

“The board decided he could spend a few more years in Wethersfield,†I wrote, “preferably under a psychiatrist’s care. But they hope they can put him in the care of a parole officer before his mandatory release date.â€

I had used the anecdote to support the parole board members’ view that even though they studied complete case histories of each inmate, they “have seen many prisoners make or break their chances for parole during interviews.†The parole process then was the same as it was in the movies. The inmate appears before the board, tries to convince the members he’s learned his lesson and is a new man and the board decides if he’s worth the risk to society before paroling him.

It doesn’t quite work that way in Connecticut today, as we learned following the home invasion and the horrible deaths of three members of a family in Cheshire last month.

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Before Connecticut had its first Board of Parole in 1957, paroles had been granted somewhat haphazardly by the warden of the Wethersfield prison and his board of directors. That first board had all-star cast: P.B. O’Sullivan, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court; Richard Donnelly, a Yale law professor, and Jackie Robinson, who had just retired from baseball after being traded by the Brooklyn Dodgers to the New York Giants.

When I wrote about parole 47 years ago, five parole officers, paid $4,800 a year, supervised 300 parolees. Today, there are about 100 parole officers, earning $40,000 to $60,000 a year, and about 4,800 parolees, including many supervised in group homes and other facilities.

I wrote in 1961 that maintaining a man on parole was cheaper than the $2,300 a year taxpayers paid to keep him in prison. With the annual cost per inmate now more than $40,000, it still is. But the challenge today, as it was then, is to be sure the wrong people aren’t paroled.

Connecticut’s parole board has had a rocky half century. It was merged with the Board of Pardons in 1968 and then voted out of existence in 1981 by a misguided Legislature intent on slowing rampant gang and drug crime by sending the bad guys to prison and throwing away the key. This policy had terrible consequences.

The Legislature soon found itself with a prison population explosion that even several new prisons couldn’t control. Inmates were being released without supervision after serving as little as a 10th of their sentences until the Legislature finally acknowledged its mistake and brought back the parole board in 1994.

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Before the parole board was abolished, each inmate seeking parole appeared before all three board members, who had made a thorough study of his criminal past and conduct in prison. Today, six of every 10 cases are disposed of in “administrative reviews†by at least two of eight board members who do not see the inmate and base their decisions on written reports and the testimony of the inmate’s parole officer.

In the case of the two Cheshire suspects, 26-year-old Joshua Komisarjevsky appeared before the board while his partner, Steven Hayes, did not. But in both hearings, crucial information, required by law, was not forwarded to the board by police, prosecutors and the courts and the board didn’t ask why.  

So what next? As is customary in Connecticut, this serious issue will be passed on to a special panel Gov.Rell is naming to look at the system. It is a panel that had better act with all deliberate speed before the public is victimized by another tragic parole decision based on inadequate, illegally withheld information.

Having law enforcement agencies obey the law might be a good start.

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.