Prosecutors urge change in parole system

Some state prosecutors say the recent slaying of a North Little Rock woman, and the subsequent arrest of her parolee boyfriend, is a signal that more changes are needed in the state’s parole system.

Johnny Lee Davis, 56, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder on Dec. 10 in the stabbing of his partner, Jada Young, less than a year after he spent seven months in prison after having his parole revoked for stabbing Young in March 2012.

Saline County prosecutor Ken Casady said that parolees like Davis - serial offenders sent back to prison for half a year, only to re-offend upon release - are too common.

Casady thinks the state’s Parole Board should re-evaluate its long held and widely applied six-month standard for parole revocations and hold some parolees for the duration of their sentence.

“When dangerous felons, they’ve done dangerous things in the past and have been paroled for that dangerous thing they did and then do another dangerous thing, they need to be revoked for the balance of the time that they have,” Casady said. “That’s low-hanging fruit, low-hanging years, to put them away and off our streets.”

Davis was arrested on March 19, 2012, and charged with felony domestic battery shortly after police found Young with several stab wounds to her left arm and breast.

With several prior convictions, including a felony battery conviction, Davis had just paroled out of prison five months before the March 19 stabbing after serving just seven months of a three-year sentence for a breaking or entering conviction.

Eight months after being sent back to prison on a revocation, he was released again Jan. 4. On Dec. 9, police found Young lying dead outside Davis’ former residence with several stab wounds. Davis was eventually arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

Parolees in Arkansas can be sent back to prison on a revocation if they are arrested and charged with a new felony or violent or sexual misdemeanor, or for violating other conditions of their parole. But they don’t go back to serve the remainder of their sentence.

Arkansas Parole Board policy mandates that a parolee sent back to prison after a revocation hearing will serve only six to 12 months before being re-released.

Such a policy is at odds with common sense and what much of the public expects when a parolee is revoked, according to Casady and Crawford County Prosecuting Attorney Marc McCune.

“Parole should be a privilege and not a right, and if you’re granted that privilege and you mess up, the penalty should be stiffer than six months,” McCune said. “If it’s a minor offense, and you’re on parole and do something nonviolent … six months can be a deterrent to that. … But for a violent crime? … Six months is not a deterrent for them, and it’s a slap in the face to victims.”

Added McCune: “It’s a waste of everybody’s time.”

Neither McCune nor Casady knows how, or why, the short revocation stints came to be.

The policy is decades old, said John Felts, head of the Arkansas Parole Board, and is meant to create opportunities for parolees to reform rather than be locked up for the duration of their sentence.

“It’s a part of the big picture. Do we want to lock up everybody who comes back, or do we want to use that discretion?” Felts said. “In the total of the big picture, where, again, do we want to allow someone to go back out under supervision believing that maybe a program they completed, maybe the light came on and ‘Hey, this is no way to spend my life.’”

State corrections officials said they don’t have the requisite software to track the average stay for parolees sent back to prison on revocations, but Felts said the proportion of parolees who stay for only six months represents an “overwhelming majority.”

The policy, Felts said, provides consistency to the review process.

Felts pointed out that the Parole Board can hold someone more than a year if they deem that person a risk to the public, but he was unable to say how often that has occurred in recent years.

Leroy Brownlee, Felts’ predecessor, required any revocation hearing judge to get prior approval from him before revoking someone for a full year.

Felts said the recent tumult in the state’s parole system, one that has led to a new head of the Department of Community Correction and a broad range of new parole policies, prompted him to change that practice and allow parole revocation judges more latitude when sending parolees back to prison.

Pulaski County Prosecutor Larry Jegley said he sympathizes with McCune and Casady’s wishes for longer stays for serial parole violators who are revoked back to prison.

But he described the practice as “a real tightrope to walk” and sees the practical complications that would follow if the Parole Board did such a thing.

“The revocation issues have obviously been mishandled or manhandled [in the past] … in some cases I wouldn’t argue with [Casady and McCune],” Jegley said. “But you got to have beds to do that stuff. Beds are real expensive. I’ve not had any sense, for many years now, out of the legislature that there’s any willingness to figure out a funding mechanism for additional beds.”

The state’s prisons are over capacity, according to state corrections officials, who said the facilities currently house 14,261 inmates, putting them at 105.8 percent of capacity for men and 107.4 percent for women.

The clogged prisons have led to a clogging of county jails holding state inmates. As of Friday, the “backup” list was at 2,618.

Those ranks swelled since new parole policies went into effect in the wake of a much-publicized case of a serial parole offender, Darrell Dennis, who went on to be arrested in the slaying of a Little Rock teenager just days after his release from jail.

Casady described the changes made in the past six months as “common sense” fixes and thinks that holding some revoked parolees longer than six months would be another common-sense policy.

“[State prisons are] still saddled with space issues and overcrowding issues … I understand that,” Casady said. “But the people who are on parole for violent crimes and who commit violent crimes, we can’t make it about a space issue with them.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/23/2013

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