Tracking sex-crime offenders gets trickier

The examples show here are not typical of the entire class even though the Journalist would have us to believe.

11-23-2009 National:

The pursuit of Lee Shelton began the moment the convicted sex offender was released from prison.

It ended months later with a U.S. Marshals Service helicopter hovering near a D.C. junior high school as Shelton kissed a 14-year-old boy. In between, authorities used two Global Positioning System devices to help track him, learned he was online at the library and seized a secret laptop with a power source in the trunk of his car. His parole was revoked, and he is back in jail.

Shelton, who originally was convicted of molesting boys at the National Air and Space Museum and on the grounds of the Washington Monument, is one of thousands of sex offenders accused of similar crimes after their release from prison or while on probation. His parole violation illustrates the challenges of monitoring hundreds of thousands of offenders.

The nationwide crackdown on child pornography and other sex offenses has created severe manpower shortages and technology challenges for probation officers, police and federal agents struggling to track offenders who are jumping online with cellphones and portable game systems and flocking to social networking and other sites, where children or pornography can easily be found.

There are more than 716,000 registered sex offenders nationwide, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a 78 percent increase since 2001, and that does not include all offenders because some crimes do not require registration. Sex-offender registries have grown even faster in the Washington area, with more than 24,000 people listed. Not all receive the scrutiny given to such offenders as Shelton.

716,000 really? Funny, the chart at NCMEC shows 686,515 (11-23-09). I guess a little sensationalizing is OK..

The focus on crimes against children that began in the Bush administration shows no sign of abating under President Obama. Federal child sexual exploitation prosecutions are up 147 percent since 2002, and the Justice Department is hiring 81 more prosecutors for these cases. Funding for task forces that bring charges in state courts rose this year from $16 million to $75 million.

But many of those offenders are now leaving prison, even as revenue-strapped states are cutting the budgets of probation departments. In Virginia, probation and parole cuts this year totaled nearly $10 million, including $500,000 for electronic monitoring of sexually violent predators. Maryland also has cut its budget.

"The burden on probation and parole officers is going to explode," said Ernie Allen, the national center's president.

The monitoring of virtually all sex offenders is required by law when they are on probation or parole.

The problem has gained national attention with the discovery of 10 bodies and a skull at a registered sex offender's home in Cleveland and revelations that Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped at age 11 in 1991 and allegedly held captive at a California sex offender's house until her reappearance in August. Officers had visited both homes and noticed nothing wrong.

Those cases underscore a troubled registry system that has been the public face of sex-offender monitoring. An estimated 100,000 offenders do not comply with registration requirements. Law enforcement doesn't know where many of them are.

But the most alarming development for officers is proliferating electronic gadgets and the temptations they pose to sex offenders. A man on probation in Iowa for molesting a 9-year-old girl, for example, was recently caught downloading pornographic images of a young girl on his PlayStation Portable -- while walking to his probation appointment.

Sometimes, offenders cannot be monitored even while in custody. David L. Franklin, a church deacon, pleaded guilty in federal court to sending child pornography to an undercover D.C. police detective. While awaiting sentencing, Franklin struck up another online conversation with the same detective, who traced the defendant to an unusual address -- the D.C. Correctional Treatment Facility.

was on his bunk, online, when guards grabbed it, sources familiar with the case said. He was sentenced last month to 135 months in prison. Franklin's attorney, Dani Jahn, declined to comment.

"When a sex offender has access to hundreds of tools, how we can possibly keep up with this explosion is beyond me," said Leonard Sipes, spokesman for the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency in the District, which helped capture Shelton and supervises about 650 other sex offenders convicted in D.C. Superior Court. An attorney for Shelton could not be located.

Sipes said officers are especially worried about social networking sites frequented by children, such as MySpace, which this year said it banned 90,000 registered sex offenders. Facebook has said it is also actively trying to prevent sex offenders from joining its site.

One example: A Virginia man on probation in the District for having sex with a 16-year-old girl as two younger girls watched told officers that he kissed a 15-year-old female runaway he had picked up. Because he was prohibited from contact with minors, authorities searched his computer, which revealed that he was chatting extensively with teen girls on MySpace and stalking a 17-year-old girl in person, law enforcement officials said. His probation was revoked.

Probation and parole officers use GPS devices, polygraph tests, home visits and treatment to track sex offenders, but those tools can be used only during periods of supervision, which often end after three to five years. Parole is post-prison, while probation is generally a sentence in lieu of prison, but the terms are often used interchangeably.

The newest trend in sex-offender management is computer monitoring, which experts said is being done by a majority of state agencies. Maryland began using monitoring software for sex offenders last month; Virginia is researching it. Most federal districts monitor computers in some form.

A monitoring program installed on an offender's computer is designed to capture every keystroke, Internet site and program, including chat and e-mail. Officials can monitor the computer remotely by logging onto a Web site or getting an e-mail if the offender does anything troublesome.

"Anything they shouldn't be doing is going to leap off the page at you," said Jim Tanner, a former probation officer in Colorado and a leading proponent of monitoring. Violations are punished with warnings, harsher parole or probation conditions, parole or probation revocation or new charges if the action constitutes a crime.

Yet even this new tool is flawed. The software won't stop an offender from sneaking a laptop, using a family member's computer or logging on at the library. There is virtually no monitoring equipment for cellphones, BlackBerries or children's gaming devices, which require a time-consuming and expensive forensic analysis.

The monitoring equipment is expensive, so many agencies can't afford it or use a free program that can't retrieve deleted files.

Despite the limitations, proponents say computer monitoring is catching increasing numbers of violations and new crimes. But in the cat-and-mouse game officers play with offenders, old-fashioned police work often wins out.

D.C. probation officers learned, by questioning a man on probation for trying to rape a 9-year-old boy, that he was viewing child pornography on the computer at his mother's home, court records said. Federal agents and police searched his home.

An analysis showed the man, John Anthony, had deleted nearly 3,000 files of what the government called "sadistic and masochistic" child pornography up to an hour before the search, and officials said he was chatting on Yahoo as agents entered the house. Anthony pleaded guilty in D.C. federal court to possessing child pornography and was sentenced last year to 10 years in prison.

Aprille Cole, a nine-year veteran of the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, relies on home visits, hard work and instinct in tracking sex offenders. "They're very smart and manipulative," said Cole. "We get to know their family members, friends and co-workers. We know their girlfriends and whether they have children."

On a recent visit to the Southeast D.C. apartment of a man on parole for molesting his 10-year-old daughter, Cole began firing questions the moment she and her partner, Kevin Jones, walked through the door.

"What's in that box?" she asked as she looked in the closet.

"Who is Sean?" she said as she spotted an unfamiliar name on the kitchen calendar.

"What's up with your girlfriend?"

"I'm not into girlfriends right now," the man answered.

"Then why is there a ponytail holder in your bathroom?" Cole said.

"I know he's lying about the girlfriend," she later told a reporter.

Officers would not disclose the man's name, citing privacy laws. He is not on computer monitoring because he says he doesn't have a computer.

In the man's bedroom, more than 30 stuffed animals were lined up on a table, including an oversize Elmo doll.

He said they belong to a former girlfriend. ..Source.. Jerry Markon, Washington Post Staff Writer

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Barnidge: Dugard case pinpoints need for better communication among law enforcement agencies

Just so folks know a commentary is coming on this article on Sunday afternoon. Why? Because I disagree with the journalist who generally is super on his facts, but this time I disagree. Stop back for my thoughts....

9-6-2009 California:

THE SORDID TALE of Jaycee Dugard's kidnapping, rape and imprisonment for 18 years is the story that launched a thousand newscasts. Less than two weeks after the news first broke, disbelief continues to mingle with outrage.

As one lurid aspect of the case piled atop another and the profile of suspect Phillip Garrido unfolded, you could feel the emotional temperature of the community rising to a full boil. And because public fervor and knee-jerk reaction often are catalysts for new legislation, it's a safe bet that some legislator already is contemplating a bill that addresses the horrors exposed in the case.

It was a similar case, the rape and murder of 7-year-old Megan Kanka in 1994, that precipitated Megan's Law, which gave the public access to information on registered sex offenders.

The rape and murder of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford in 2005 led to the enactment of Jessica's Law, which in California requires newly registered sex offenders to wear GPS tracking devices and prohibits them from living within 2,000 feet of schools and parks.

The kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas by career felon Richard Allen Davis in 1993 provided the impetus for California's adoption of the Three Strikes Law.

So what comes next? Do we need Jaycee's Law?

"No," said U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello, as quickly as the question was posed. "I'm comfortable with the laws and sentencing we have in place. We don't need any knee-jerk legislation."

He doesn't have to look far for supporting views.

"I'm not a fan of more legislation in the criminal law area," said Professor Rory Little of UC Berkeley's Hastings College of the Law. "To me, this case looks like two things: a failure of investigation and failure of detection.

"A guy kidnapped a girl, and nobody caught him. And he hid her in his backyard for years, and nobody caught him. My guess is that a lot of people saw something odd was happening and didn't pursue government intervention. You can't legislate that."

New legislation often serves as a convenient salve for the sudden revelation of heinous crimes. If the old law has a loophole, write a new law to close it. And another after that, if needed. Politicians raise their hands and constituents applaud, but solutions seldom come that easily.

Suzanne Brown-McBride, executive director of the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault, explains that no law is perfect.

"When you look at the Dugard case, neither GPS tracking nor residency restrictions would have made any level of difference," she said. "Garrido was on GPS, and he didn't violate — he was at home where he theoretically was supposed to be. And he wasn't subject to residency laws. But even if he had been, his property was compliant with the requirements."

Some legislation actually results in as many negatives as positives.

GPS tracking and residency restrictions have not necessarily increased community safety, Brown-McBride said.

"For instance, the number of transient offenders — those who are registered in the system but homeless — has gone up over a hundredfold. And the information we've gotten from GPS has come at the cost of massive investment. ... to track the 6,000 or 7,000 people in California ... costs $65 million a year."

More important than new legislation, she said, is better communication and collaboration among law enforcement agencies. In other words, when a Contra Costa County sheriff's deputy was called to Garrido's house in 2006 to investigate a neighbor's complaint, he should have known beforehand that Garrido was a registered sex offender.

Another crying need, Brown-McBride said, is a means of categorizing sex offenders. Some are more dangerous, and they should be tracked more closely. ("The high-risk offenders have a high propensity for repeat offenses," she said.) Public awareness can be far more effective than legislation.

"The problem," said Little, "is people see cases like this and instead of addressing the nuances of why this wasn't detected earlier, they want to write a law that hammers the criminal and anybody who possibly could be put in this category."

That shouldn't be a concern this time. If Garrido is found guilty, you can bet he'll get the biggest hammer the justice system can wield. ..Source.. by Tom Barnidge, Contra Costa Times columnist

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CA- Following a Hunch, Solving a Mystery

This is along the lines of my earlier comments about the community needs to be more involved in offenders lives, rather then being afraid of them. Get to know them, then form your own opinion, do not rely on politicians.

Politicians have misused the public by making them SCARED of former offenders. Politicians did so to get the public to vote for them, public safety issue is a ruse for politicians.

Communities need to make friends with registrants of registries, that is the only way to reintegrate them properly. No one is saying "have them stay at your home" but get to know them, and ignore politicians when they make their hysterical claims. It is the -political way-, causing hysteria, that -in part- led to this terrible crime.

PS: Remember, in 1976 it was a policeman's hunch (Clifford Conrad) that saved the first crime victim. He wondered why a car -w/Calif plates- was sitting outside a storage units in Nevada at 2:30 AM. When he investigated, i.e., knocked on the storage unit door, Garrido opened the door and the woman screamed and Garrido was arrested.


9-2-2009 California:

How intuition worked to free Jaycee Dugard—and why it took so long for someone to speak up.

The FBI spent 18 years trying to find Jaycee Dugard, a girl abducted in 1991, when she was 11, while walking to her bus stop in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. But when the case broke last week, it wasn't a sweeping raid or a well-placed tip that eventually led the FBI to Dugard and the arrest of her alleged captor, Philip Garrido. It was intuition.

"My police intuition was kicking in, but I would say it's more of a mother's intuition," Allison Jacobs, a police officer with the University of California, Berkeley, recently told Anderson Cooper of her meeting with Garrido and his two daughters, 11 and 15. A campus safety officer, Lisa Campbell, had asked Jacobs to sit in on a meeting with Garrido after Campbell had met with Garrido the previous day, and had thought something about the 58-year-old man and his two daughters was off. Jacobs, after meeting with Garrido and the children, grew suspicious too. So she made a call to Garrido's parole officer, setting off a chain of events that would eventually culminate in Dugard's discovery and Garrido's arrest.

"I knew something wasn't right. I could kind of see it in their eyes," Jacobs told Cooper of that first meeting, "although I really didn't know what it was."

How could Campbell's and Jacobs's gut feelings lead to a break in the case and Dugard's reappearance, when nearly two decades of FBI investigation hadn't been able to? Intuitions are difficult to understand but, as this case shows, they can be a powerful force. We trust intuition to the point that the U.S. Army recently began training soldiers in Iraq to rely on their hunches. New studies have even found potential neural correlates, places where intuition may reside in the brain. But at the same time, intuition remains a largely enigmatic process. Hunches happen outside the reach of cognition, automatically and subconsciously, making the phenomenon a difficult one to understand.

So researchers still grapple with some of the most basic questions: how often do we rely on intuition? How often do we describe as intuition what might instead have been luck or look more predictive in hindsight? Perhaps most importantly, how accurate is our intuition? "We don't know enough yet to know how many people profess to be intuitive and how many are guessing," says Gerard Hodgkinson, a professor at Leeds University in England who recently published a review of intuition research in the British Journal of Psychology. "That's where the science continues."

We do know that intuition is not ESP or a sixth sense; it's inherently grounded in our knowledge of the world. "Intuition is really the fruit of experience," says Robin Hogarth, author of Educating Intuition. "In a lot of ways, it's a form of pattern recognition, done in a way that it becomes unconscious." Over the course of our lifetimes, we develop a sense of what is normal—what our house ought to look like when we come home from work, for example, or what to anticipate from an interaction with a colleague or a typical visit to the dentist. Our intuition kicks in when something in the well-worn pattern is different, even if we can't pinpoint what exactly it is. "Knowing with absolute certainty without knowing why" is how Hodgkinson describes it. "It happens so rapidly that you're not even able to consciously articulate why [a new] course of action is necessary." Neurologically, research from the past five years has shown intuitive decision to be correlated with increased blood flow to the amygdala, an area of the brain known to regulate emotions.

Our intuitions can be disarmingly accurate. A much-cited Harvard study from the 1990s found that students who were asked to watch a teacher they had never seen before for six seconds and rate the teacher's confidence assessed the teachers much as students who spent an entire semester in the course did. With a quick look at a chessboard, chess masters (who may have thousands of patterns in memory) can play "blitz chess"—making moves after mere seconds of deliberation—with little negative effect on their performance.

And Jacobs, having developed a sense of "normal" behavior from her years on the police force, was right to describe her sense as a "police intuition." "I think if she wasn't a police officer, she might have noticed it, but it wouldn't have made her nervous in the same way," says Gary Klein, author of the forthcoming Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making. "From her previous work, she had developed an additional sense that something was at risk here."

In fact, it may have been Jacobs's police intuition and Campbell's similar instinct that set them apart from the many neighbors who had a "civilian intuition" about Garrido, spurring them to act while the others kept suspicions to themselves. A few neighbors admitted to thinking Garrido was odd and had even seen the girls in the shed behind his home. But aside from one phone call to the authorities in 2006—which the local sheriff's office recently admitted to failing to follow through on—no one took much action. Unlike Jacobs, Garrido's neighbors didn't have a police officer's history of tracking down criminals, to know what might indicate a potentially criminal situation—the neighbors didn't have that kind of a pattern to begin with. They knew "weird" but weren't as clear with "possibly criminal."

Moreover, their intuition had another strong, psychological phenomenon to contend with: the bystander apathy effect. Even when we recognize a disturbing situation, we don't necessarily see it as our responsibility to act, especially if we think others are also aware of the problem. One classic study, from 1968, simulated a situation in which individuals heard cries for help. When people thought they were the only ones within hearing range, nearly 90 percent of bystanders took action. But when they thought four other people also heard the calls, the number dropped to less than a third. To psychologists, stories and studies like this show that we often do not assume responsibility in situations where, from the outside, it seems we clearly should. Police officers, obviously, have a mandate to protect people, so they are less likely to fall prey to this effect.

And then there's perhaps the biggest question of all: are intuitions, like the one Jacobs had, usually accurate? At the end of the day, are we better off trusting our hearts over our heads? Researchers say the answer is still one of the biggest unknowns in the science of intuition. We do know our intuitions are not completely accurate; prejudices, for example, can lead us astray. We make particularly lousy decisions when we attempt to use intuition without experience to back it up (think gambling or novice stock traders). And we sometimes use intuition as a post hoc explanation for inexplicable behavior, like a lottery winner who claims to have just known the right numbers. "People tend to overestimate their skill at intuition," author Hogarth says. "They say 'I had a great intuition,' but don't say they might just be lucky."

Hogarth suspects that intuition could never be the entire story of human decision-making. The best decisions are likely made using intuition and more analytical, conscious information processing in tandem. Take the case of Jacobs: she didn't flat-out arrest Garrido on a hunch. Rather, the intuition catalyzed an analytical, conscious investigation that would lead to his eventual arrest. "It's not intuition versus other methods," says Hogarth. "As a smart decision maker, you are using both and balancing the two." It seems likely that even the strongest of intuitions—Jacobs's included—need to call for backup. ..Source.. by Sarah Kliff

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Why harsh sex offender laws made Garrido’s crimes easier to commit

9-2-2009 National:

The case of Phillip Gariddo, accused of kidnapping then 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard and holding her hostage for 18 years, sexually abusing her and fathering two children with her, has revealed the paradox at the center of America’s unusually tough sex offense laws. The harsher the laws get, the more people who are caught in the ever-expanding net of offenses, the easier it is for the real child abusers to go undetected.

Phillip Garrido is a case in point. Although forced to register as a sex offender, Garrido was just one of several living in his area. According to an article in today’s Times,

The sheer numbers of sex offenders on the registries in all 50 states — an estimated 674,000 across the country — are overwhelming to local police departments and, at times, to the public, who may not easily distinguish between those who must register because they have repeatedly raped children and those convicted of nonviolent or less serious crimes, like exposing themselves in public.

Abduction Case Shows Limits of Sex Offender Alert Programs (NT Times)

This contradictory situation, where the harsher we are on sex offenders, the less likely we are to catch them, was the subject of an August 6th article in the Economist.

US laws are so incredibly harsh as to merit a plea from Amnesty International to rethink them. For instance, regardless of the act or whether it was consensual and between people of roughly the same age, once convicted of an offense, you’re on the registry and barred from ever being in a school, even if you have children. A recent Illinois law has barred sex offenders from social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn. That might seem reasonable for someone like Garrido, but what about the 17 year old girl who becomes a “sexual predator” for having sex with her boyfriend who is very nearly 16? Or consider the fact that a Human Rights Watch report found:

at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.

I have most certainly urinated in public (if national parks are public) with children, had sex as a teenager, and gone streaking (as a teenager). What that means is that even more of us could be registered sex offenders than the 675,000 Americans already on the registries. That means our photos could be on there, our addresses, we could be targeted for harassment, threats, and in a few recent cases, vigilante-style executions. Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded.

According to the Economist article,

As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.

How did this happen? How did America become both so obsessed with “sexual predators” and simultaneously unable to make children safer? It no doubt started with the Victorians, as James Kincaid suggests in Erotic Innocence- the conflation of childishness with sexual innocence at the same time “ladies” were imagined as innocent as well- so that wanting a sexually innocent lady became entangled with a sexually innocent child.

But more recently, starting in the 1980s, with a Conservative Revolution that included all things sexual, Americans began to worry about “stranger danger.” Instead of focusing on where children are most likely to be abused (in the home, by someone they know), we began to focus on preschools as sites of mass violation of children’s innocence, the stranger behind the bush, and the internet as a site of particular danger.

Laws were passed (in fact, most states only got sex offender registries in the 1990s after the federal government threatened loss of funding if they weren’t established), TV shows and movies were made, educational programs were invented. The result was panic. Panic in Congress and state legislatures as everything from sex between teens to naked photos of one’s children were criminalized. Panic in schools as children were taught that they should worry about abduction all the time. Panic in the homes as parents chose “safety” over “health” and “well-being.”

Not only did it not work since most children are still abused by people they know and this issue wasn’t ever really addressed. But the net’s so big that too many people are being named sexual predators and too few actual sex criminals are being monitored. The latest expansion of this ridiculous net is about “sexting”- when consenting teens send naked photos of themselves to each other or post them on their Facebook page.

According to Judith Levine’s blog,(she’s the author of Harmful to Minors- a book that brilliantly exposes this panic), a proposed Massachusetts bill would make it illegal for minors AND for people 60 years and up to send or post naked photos. So if you’re 61, don’t send photos to your 62 year old lover. And if you’re 17, do not snap the photo of yourself nude for your 16 year old lover.

This sort of sexual panic is so ridiculous that it seems barely worth a comment. But the truth is, people get caught in this awful net and their lives are ruined for committing the most victimless of crimes. Worse, the real creeps, the ones like Garrido, can operate amidst the confusion with little chance of detection.

Oddly, the real lesson from the tragedy of the Jaycee Lee Dugard is that Americans need to lighten up on sex laws in order to keep the public safer from sexual predators. ..Source.. by Laurie Essig

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CA- Experts: Monitoring tools failed to unearth Garrido's secret

UPDATE: To clear up when state officials have a right to search a persons home, IF they are under state supervision. Local police, allowing for certain exceptions (ex: police can see someone is in immediate danger, etc.), will always need a properly issued search warrant. However, allowing for very narrow exceptions (ex: cannot search say, bedrooms of others who live in the same home of the person under supervision.), parole or probation officers ALWAYS have the right to search a parolees or probationers home (personal space) -without any court order-, that right stems from state supervision. There are many court decisions that have upheld these circumstances in every state.

9-2-2009 California:

(CNN) -- Phillip Garrido was registered as a sex offender, required to meet with parole officers and fitted with an ankle bracelet to track his movements -- but nothing prevented him from being around children, according to a victim's advocacy group.

Garrido, who is charged with kidnapping and raping Jaycee Lee Dugard -- a young woman police say lived with her two daughters in a huddle of tents and outbuildings hidden behind Garrido's home - was arrested last week along with his wife Nancy. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Dugard grew up in the compound and raised the girls, now 11 and 15, that she bore and Garrido fathered, police said. Dugard was abducted in 1991 at age 11.

"Here we have a guy who is essentially under every kind of supervision we allow. Law enforcement had every tool available to them, and [the tools] failed," said Robert Coombs, spokesman for the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

Garrido "was technically allowed to be around minors," Coombs said, because his parole stemmed from the November 1976 rape of Katie Callaway Hall, who was 25 at the time of the assault.

He was sentenced in 1977 to 50 years at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, for kidnapping because he abducted Hall in California and transported her across the state line to Reno, Nevada, where he raped her in a warehouse, according to court documents. A Nevada court separately sentenced him to five years to life for the rape conviction, the Reno-Gazette Journal reported.

While in prison in 1978, Garrido sent a handwritten letter to Judge Bruce R. Thompson, saying he was recovering from seven years of LSD use and progressing well.

"I am so ashamed of my past. But my future is now in controle [sic]," he wrote.

Court documents show Garrido requested that his 50-year sentence be reduced to 25, making him eligible for parole in eight years, "where he could be released to the state of Nevada as an educated person and being a rehabilitated person."

According to a 1978 court transcript, attorney Willard Van Hazel Jr. told a judge, "Without the influence of any of this drug involvement, I think Mr. Garrido would pause before carrying out sexual fantasies."

After more than a decade at Leavenworth, Garrido received a federal parole but was sent to Carson City, Nevada, in January 1988 to serve his rape sentence. However, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal, he was automatically eligible for state parole because of the time served in federal prison.

The Nevada Offender Tracking Information System indicates he went four times before the parole board, which granted his request in August 1988, about 11 years after he was incarcerated.

He moved to Antioch, California, where authorities said they learned Dugard, now 29, had been living in the backyard since her abduction.

"He served about 20 percent of his sentence, and it doesn't take a mathematician to figure out if he served only one-third of his sentence, Jaycee Dugard doesn't end up in the predicament that she's in," said Andy Kahan, crime victim's advocate in Houston, Texas.

Citing revised federal sentencing guidelines, Kahan and Illinois defense attorney Stephen Komie concur that this is not something that could happen today.

"If he got 50 years, say, he would have 600 months. He would only get 50 months off. He would do 550 months," Komie said. "So this would not be repeated in the federal system again."

Added Kahan, "You're going to have to do at least a minimum of half of your term without any good time credits before you can even see the light of day or say hello to a parole board member."

In 1993, five years after his release from a Nevada prison, Garrido was jailed on a parole violation, but it's unclear what that offense was. Tom Hutchinson, spokesman for the U.S. Parole Commission, said documents have been requested and should be available later this week.

Garrido was released later that year.

The California Coalition Against Sexual Assault's Coombs said Garrido was required to meet regularly with parole officers, who unearthed nothing about Dugard's abduction or Garrido's backyard secrets.

Another visit by law enforcement was the direct result of a 2006 call a neighbor made to 911, reporting that women and children were living in tents behind Garrido's house.

Contra Costa County Sheriff Warren E. Rupf said he didn't think the deputy knew Garrido was a sex offender at the time and spoke to Garrido in the home's front yard.

"We should have been more inquisitive, more curious and turned over a rock or two," the sheriff said. "We missed an opportunity to bring earlier closure to this situation."

Kahan partially blames the economics of the criminal justice system - not just in California, but nationwide -- and said Garrido likely became less of a priority as the time since his crimes passed.

Despite the heinous nature of Garrido's 1976 crime, it paled to allegedly holding a young girl hostage and raping her for 18 years, Coombs said.

"Nothing in this guy's case history indicated he was capable of such evil, if you will," he said. "It was so far out of the picture, they didn't even look for it."

Rather than there not being enough money to fund the proper supervision of parolees, it's more a matter of priorities, Coombs said, citing the global-positioning system Garrido wore on his ankle.

Although CALCASA has no official tally, it estimates California spends roughly $500 million a year on GPS devices for 6,600 of the state's sex offenders. Garrido was fitted with a device after California voters passed Jessica's Law in November 2006.

Each dollar spent on GPS equipment "is one dollar you're not spending on real, traditional parole techniques, like talking to collateral contacts and neighbors," he said.

Had Garrido's parole officer spoken to the neighbor who made the 911 call in 2006, authorities might have found Dugard three years earlier, Coombs said.

"We know where this guy is, so we think we're safe," he said, "but the place where we knew he was was the place where he was offending. GPS just tells you where they are. It doesn't tell you what they're doing." ..Source.. by Eliott C. McLaughlin

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CA- Questions arise on monitoring of sex offenders

9-2-2009 California:

Every April 5 for the past 10 years, Phillip Garrido registered on his birthday with the Contra Costa Sheriff's Office as a convicted sex offender.

Two to three times a month, he met his parole officer at the parole office or his Antioch, Calif., home. Since at least January, the state monitored him with a global positioning device strapped to his ankle.

Yet police say he managed to conceal Jaycee Lee Dugard, whom he is accused of kidnapping and sexually abusing, in a squalid backyard encampment for 18 years.

The charges are causing authorities to rethink their procedures as they question how a registered sex offender could lead a secret life while under their supervision.

Some legal scholars and people who work with missing children say police are overwhelmed by the number of registered offenders they have to monitor. They say tough laws that require all sex offenders to register, no matter how small the offense, are counterproductive.

"It's causing the workload to be such that you can't keep up with the problem people," says Jeffery Walker, a criminal justice professor at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, who has studied sex offender laws. "The question is how do you separate those who do not appear to be a problem and those who are hiding something?"

There are more than 500,000 registered sex offenders nationwide, says Nancy Sabin, executive director of the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, named after an 11-year-old Minnesota boy who has been missing since 1989 when he was kidnapped at gunpoint. She says the registries should be used to monitor violent repeat adult offenders. It is unclear how many of those registered are considered violent repeat offenders.

Instead, Sabin says, states are requiring anyone convicted of a sex offense to register. She sees little value in registering "Romeo and Juliet" offenders, for example — 18-year-olds convicted of having sex with underage boyfriends or girlfriends a year or two younger.

In Garrido's case, a parole officer did not see the compound of sheds, tents and outhouses because they were hidden by a 6-foot-high fence, trees and debris that appeared to be at the end of the yard, says Gordon Hinkle, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Garrido came in contact with the Contra Costa Sheriff's Office in 2006, when a deputy responded to a neighbor's call that children were living in tents in the yard. The deputy didn't know Garrido was registered as a sex offender. He warned Garrido that the tents could be a code violation but didn't search the property, Sheriff Warren Rupf said.

Jimmy Lee, a spokesman for the sheriff's office, says the department is reviewing the deputy's actions and its system to avoid such mistakes.

He says, "All law enforcement agencies are asking themselves some real tough questions right now." ..Source.. by Marisol Bello, USA TODAY

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