The state Board of Parole on Thursday rescinded a policy that for six years allowed parolees to successfully complete their terms even if they stopped reporting to their parole officers.
Now, parolee no-shows will see their sentence “clocks” stopped, which will lengthen their terms. Only when absconders are back under supervision will their clocks restart.
“This was brought to our attention about a week ago,” board Chairman John Felts said before asking fora vote. “I think that the process should be as intended. If they abscond, the time stops there.”
The policy stems from a 2007 memorandum sent by former board Chairman Leroy Brownlee to the state Department of Community Correction. The memorandum ordered the department to release absconders from state supervision if their sentences were up. An absconder is a parolee who fails to report to his officer or goes into hiding.
After Brownlee issued the memorandum, dated April 4, 2007, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette obtained a copy of it through the Freedom of Information Act and published an article.
The memorandum stated: “This week, the Board is in the process of auditing all warrants. Effective immediately all absconders that are [past] the original discharge date will be discharged. I am asking all area offices to assist by auditing your absconder files and pulling those that fall under these criteria. One exception: If the original offense is of a sexual nature that offender will remain on abscond status.”
Brownlee sent the order after five Community Correction Department employees were assigned the task of determining how many absconders remained free after warrants were issued for their arrests. The audit was ordered after the Democrat-Gazette reported in January 2007 that of the 311 arrest warrants issued in December 2006 by the Parole Board, only 45 had been served within a month’s time. Sixty percent of the outstanding warrants were for absconders.
That article, along with the need for such an audit, prompted Brownlee to send the order to release absconders whose sentences had run out. It was addressed to Dan Roberts, deputy director at the Community Correction Department, and copied to G. David Guntharp, then the department’s director.
In response, the Community Correction Department adapted Brownlee’s directive to a specific policy that if a parolee or probationer was within 60 days or less of completing his sentence - and if he had not been arrested for new crimes - then his file would be closed, Guntharp said at the time.
In a Democrat-Gazette article that ran April 10, 2007, Brownlee said his intent when issuing the memorandum was to purge a backlog of old files, some of which were more than 10 years old. He called it an “one-time thing” and said he didn’t believe his order would encourage other violators to go into hiding.
“We aren’t going to allow that,” he added. “It’s a special situation.”
Guntharp, however, worried that media attention to the memorandum might prompt some parolees to stop reporting. “It might encourage [other absconders] to say, ‘The last 60 days I can take off.’”
A parole officer told the newspaper that Brownlee’s memorandum “pretty much destroyed whatever morale was left.”
One officer, who asked to remain anonymous in the 2007 article, said: “I can’t believe he’d put that in writing.No one with any common sense would agree with that decision.”
Somehow, Brownlee’s directive became a permanent policy at the Community Correction Department although it appears that in recent years, many absconders’ files haven’t been closed until their discharge dates.
Part of the confusion over absconders and when they should be discharged stems from the fact that while Brownlee told the Democrat-Gazette that his order was due to a “special situation,” he didn’t include an expiration date in his memorandum to the Community Correction Department.
The Democrat-Gazette attempted Thursday to reach Brownlee for comment, but a phone number for him couldn’t be found. The newspaper also couldn’t locate Guntharp, who moved after his retirement in 2010.
Sheila Sharp, the interim director of the department, said she put a stop to the practice as soon as she learned of it. Sharp took the job a few weeks ago after David Eberhard abruptly resigned.
The Parole Board’s vote on Thursday killed the policy for good.
Parole Board members said they first learned of the memorandum and its long-lasting effects when lawmakers asked about it at a July 18 informational hearing with the Parole Board and the Community Correction Department.
At that meeting, state Sen. Eddie Joe Williams, R-Cabot, pulled out a copy of Brownlee’s directive and asked if it remained in effect.
Roberts, the deputy director for the Community Correction Department’s parole and probation services, said it did.
Williams pressed further, asking, “Absconders that go past their discharge date … when they go past their discharge date, you go back and pull their warrant for arrest and completely discharge them, is that true?”
Roberts said yes and that it had happened recently.
“So if a person is absconded, he’s not reporting [to a parole officer], he lays low for two or three years … basically, call him a free man. If he escapes the law for two or three years and gets beyond that … because he failed to report, we’re actually going back and purging that warrant?” Williams asked. “We just discharge the warrant, no harm, no foul?”
“So you can see where the public might find that troubling?” Williams added.
“Yes, sir,” Roberts said.
On Wednesday, Roberts landed on the hot seat again when Sen. David Sanders, R-Little Rock, handed out copies of the Democrat-Gazette’s 2007 article at a joint meeting of the Legislature’s judiciary committees.
Sanders said such a policy should have been an eyebrow-raiser for both the Parole Board and the Board of Corrections, which oversees the Department of Community Correction.
But the policy should have been specifically addressed by Roberts, Sanders added, who was deputy director before the policy went into effect and remains in that position today.
Roberts told Sanders that he was unaware that the memorandum was “temporary,” despite the 2007 newspaper article.
“Did you recall ever going up the chain suggesting [the policy be reversed]?” Sanders asked.
“I did not address it, no, sir,” Roberts said.
“Do you think you should have done that?” Sanders asked.
“I probably should have. I should have checked on it. … I did not,” Roberts said.
At their meeting Thursday, members of the Parole Board said they weren’t aware Brownlee had issued such a directive.
When Brownlee left in 2011, board member Joe Peacock said he hoped the next chairman would give the board a bigger role in matters such as setting the board’s budget and hiring and firing employees.
In July 2010, Peacock and three other board members signed a letter to Brownlee saying they wanted to be involved in those tasks. Instead, Brownlee hired a clerical employee without seeking the board’s approval.
“He’s had the job too long, and he got the opinion that he was not a chairman, that he was a director,” said Peacock, who was appointed by Gov. Mike Beebe in 2008. “He didn’t understand that as a chairman, he didn’t have the authority that he thought he had.”
Brownlee’s influential role was clearly on the minds of board members Thursday. In moving to rescind the policy that resulted from Brownlee’s 2007 memorandum, Vice Chairman Jimmy Wallace said he’s now concerned about what else might surface.
“I would like all policies and memos sent out by the former chairman to be reviewed,” he said, “so there are no more surprises.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/26/2013