Calculated risks

When the Legislature reconvenes later this month, lawmakers will debate Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s controversial plan to release 27,000 low- and moderate-risk inmates early as part of a cost-cutting measure that could save the state $1.2 billion over the next three years.

And that could just be the beginning. On Tuesday, a panel of three federal judges ruled that the state must reduce California’s burgeoning prison population by 43,000 inmates. The ruling was based on a lawsuit filed by inmates complaining that overcrowding led to dangerous health conditions. Some prisons in San Diego, Chino and Shasta have already begun releasing inmates, including some convicted of weapons charges.

Today, the murder of Lily Burk — a 17-year-old high school senior with a promising future — has poured proverbial gasoline on the fiery debate, strengthening the hand of some law enforcement groups and officials who urge the governor’s office to reconsider the proposals for public safety reasons. Others, such as the California Police Chiefs Association, have expressed more openness to the prison population reduction program, but are waiting to see its final details.

Missing for 16 hours, Lily was found dead July 25, her throat slashed and head beaten, in the passenger seat of her Volvo in a parking lot near Fifth and South Alameda streets in downtown LA. Police say that sometime after 2:30 p.m. — after picking up papers from Southwestern Law University several miles west for her mother, Deborah Drooz, who teaches at the college — Burk encountered Charles Samuel, a 50-year-old “low-risk” paroled petty theft offender out on a day pass from a nearby drug rehabilitation center.

“She was funny, warm, kind and empathetic,” Drooz said in prepared statement. Burk’s family is not giving interviews. “She was deeply and widely loved. Lily was looking forward to going to college, to being a writer, to what was ahead. She had a really bright future and it was cut short.”

The last time Drooz heard from Lily was when she called around 3:30 p.m. the day of the murder. She asked her mother how to withdraw money from the ATM using her credit card. Minutes later, Lily made a similar call to her father, Greg Burk, a former award-winning staffer with the LA Weekly who is now a Los Angeles Times freelance writer. Neither parent found anything suspicious about the phone calls at the time, according to a story in the Times. But footage from surveillance cameras shows Lily with Samuel at the ATM.

Burk’s parents called police and reported their daughter missing at 6 p.m.

Police arrested Samuel near Third and Alameda streets after officers saw him drinking a beer in public. When searched, he had a crack pipe in his possession and Burk’s cell phone and car keys. According to news reports, there was blood on his clothes.

In the past 10 years of contact with law enforcement, Samuel had not committed a violent crime. Detectives later found Samuel’s fingerprints in the Volvo. He has since been charged with murder, robbery and kidnapping. If convicted, he could receive the death penalty.

“We lament the fact that the individual in custody had been arrested April 23 on a parole violation,” wrote Police Protective League (PPL) President Paul Weber. “[Samuel] had been released from state prison in February, where he was serving time after an arrest for petty theft with a prior conviction. Instead of going back to prison, he remained free. This is precisely the type of ‘low-level’ parolee the state no longer wants to take responsibility for.”

But the California Police Chiefs Association, helmed by Pasadena Police Chief Bernard Melekian, agrees with the need to reduce the prison population.

“The plan to reduce the inmate population by 27,000, partly by targeting specific offenders who behave well, are sick or have the least time to serve, takes huge steps in the right direction,” Melekian said. “We support the direction they have taken, but before any endorsement is given we need to see the details and the funding plan. The proof of all this will be in the operational details and the funding. Whether we end up supporting this or not turns on these two questions.”

However, in an earlier statement, Melekian was skeptical that the plan would achieve the hoped-for savings, “because it fails to take into account the 70 percent recidivism rate for those persons released from the state prison.”

According to the PPL, new parolees would have a huge impact on public safety, based on RAND Corp. statistics indicating that in the next three years the 27,000 perspective parolees would commit 182,000 new crimes — 35,000 of them violent felonies.

No other way
The state Department of Corrections says the program’s not entirely about releasing inmates, but also deporting some and not incarcerating others in the first place.

The plan calls for the reduction of the prison population by allowing about 6,300 low-risk offenders with less than 12 months left on their sentences to serve the remaining time at home, in treatment centers, hospitals or local programs. Fifty-three hundred low- and moderate- risk parolees in prison for violating parole would be placed on administrative parole, but would still be subject to warrantless searches and seizures by local officers. Another 8,500 criminal alien felons who have never committed a violent felony would have their sentences commuted and be deported. Some 1,600 other inmates could reduce their sentences by completing vocational training, college degree programs or obtaining a General Equivalency Degree.

Along with that, certain felonies that currently carry prison sentences — including some vehicle theft and other grand theft offenses — could become misdemeanors, carrying lesser sentences to be served in the county jail and, in some cases, at home, reducing the population by another 5,600 inmates.

“A lot of people say this equates to the early release of inmates, but in reality this is about not sending certain people to prison in the first place,” said Department of Corrections spokesman Seth Unger. “We’re trying to implement parole reform, making better use of our taxpayer dollars while at the same time improving public safety.”

According to the three-member panel of federal judges, the state could save $900 million extra annually if it reduces the prison population in California’s 33 prisons, which warehouse 158,000 inmates, by 55,000 over the next three years.

“The evidence is compelling that there is no relief other than a prisoner-release order that will remedy the unconstitutional prison conditions,” the panel declared in its tentative ruling, which has been opposed by former Governor and current California Attorney General Jerry Brown, who is running to replace Schwarzenegger and threatening to challenge the ruling in the state Supreme Court.

But lawmakers worry that any early release order will put on the streets without much monitoring people like Samuel, whose criminal career is filled with misdemeanor convictions for minor crimes such as petty theft, providing false information to a peace officer, drug possession and driving on a suspended license. Samuel was convicted of a home invasion robbery in 1987. He was convicted again in 1993 for burglary. However, that charge was not counted as a strike under the state’s Three Strikes law. Samuel escaped the possibility of spending life in prison when he was convicted of felony petty theft in 2001. He had not been suspected of a truly violent crime until the Burk case.

Since April, at least 89 prisoners have been approved for early release from prisons in Chino, Shasta and San Diego to help reduce inmate populations. These inmates had never been convicted of murder, kidnapping or any sexual offenses, but prison officials said some have been convicted of grand theft, weapons possession, driving under the influence of alcohol and other crimes, according to the Times.

“We have no idea who would be released and no one knows how many inmates would be going to each city,” said Melekian. “We do know that one-third of all prison inmates come from Los Angeles County and they would be released into their community of residence.” Pasadena is the seventh most populous city in Los Angeles County, according to the US Census Bureau, and would almost certainly become home to many offenders eligible for early release, the chief said.

“I believe that until some of the parolees have gone through a program, they should not be released,” said NAACP President Joe Brown. “To just release a bunch of felons won’t serve the community well. There will be just another revolving door and it will spark things up. There is no doubt about that. … I oppose wholesale release of people back into communities where they have committed violent crimes. That just won’t work.”

Local violence
Locally, parolees have been involved in some of the most violent incidents in recent memory. On a warm night in August 2007, convicted robber Johnl Dvon Reynolds allegedly tried to get revenge against the man whose testimony sent him to prison for armed robbery. Brandishing a gun, Reynolds — who had only been paroled three weeks earlier — caught up with his enemy outside the Underground, an unlicensed nightclub for teenagers in Northwest Pasadena. But instead of killing him, authorities say he accidentally shot and killed 16-year-old Ebony Huel.

Police tracked Reynolds down a day later. He is currently in custody awaiting trial. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.
Each of Pasadena’s last two officer-involved shooting deaths involved recent parolees. In 2004, officers shot and killed Maurice Clark in a carport on Howard Street, and in February, police shot and killed Leroy Barnes after he allegedly pointed a gun at them during a traffic stop on Mentone Avenue near Washington Boulevard in Northwest Pasadena.

Barnes was on parole. Clark’s parole had ended a year prior to his death. Both Barnes and Clark had been in prison for gun-related offenses.

After missing meetings with his parole officer in Oakland, paroled gun offender Lovelle Mixon skipped several meetings. Faced with the prospect of returning to prison, Mixon gunned down two Oakland police officers during a routine traffic stop. After officers discovered him hiding in his sister’s apartment, Mixon shot and killed two SWAT officers before being killed by police.

“Our hope is that we won’t have others suffer because of early releases,” wrote Weber on the PPL’s Web site. “But that isn’t likely. Law enforcement will continue the fight to keep other families from having to suffer as Lily’s has, even if politicians work against us for the sake of saving money. Quite frankly, there is no price tag on a human life.”