When the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced in May of 2009 that the state would be relying on a computer program called the Parole Violation Decision Making Instrument (PVDMI) to decide which parole violators would be returned to prison, we objected – warning that the programs’ real purpose was not to increase public safety, but to cut costs by lowering the prison population. Many other groups familiar with the criminal justice system were opposed to the PVDMI program, too, because it removed the most important element in evaluating the danger of an individual: human judgment.

Sure enough, the PVDMI system has been used to avoid sending parole violators back to prison. The program has already been shown to have serious flaws in classifying inmates, incorrectly labeling hundreds of them as “non-serious” felons when in fact many of them have disturbing and violent criminal histories. A Sunday San Diego Union-Tribune article revealed that some of the early releases include Steven Frank Corral, arrested for felony spousal abuse; Isaac Villa, released from prison after raping a girl under 16; and Miguel Olea, who held a 17-year-old girl in his room against her will for days, raping her repeatedly.

The Department of Corrections achieved a public-safety double whammy when they started releasing inmates in January 2010. In addition to early release, the prisoners were placed on non-revocable parole – meaning they would neither be supervised nor returned to prison for a parole violation. Corrections spokesman Gordon Hinkle bizarrely announced that non-revocable parole was an incentive program for local law enforcement to capture and convict these inmates when they committed new crimes. We denounced both the releases and the modifications to the program.

As parole authorities now scramble to locate those mistakenly released inmates who are roaming our streets freely, we repeat our call to end both the early release program and the use of the flawed determination system. We have been fortunate that no innocent civilians or police officers have been killed by a wrongly released felon. We can only hope that we will continue to be so lucky until this program is discontinued.