We all deserve better

A murdered body in the middle of a city street is a horrible, horrible thing.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

But I can’t quite retrieve an adequate word for murder in the street that is alleged to have been committed by a multiple felon and repeat parole violator who clearly ought to have been back in prison.

There isn’t an easy word because the outrage seems literally unspeakable. Yet we must speak of it.

And someone in state government must be called to account.

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If established prison policy had been followed and if prison officials had done their jobs, it appears that an 18-year-old Fayetteville youth might not have wound up dead in the middle of the night about a month ago near the intersection of 11th and Woodrow streets in Little Rock.

Sterling front-page reporting in this paper Monday revealed that the arrested suspect, 47-year-old Darrell Dennis-first imprisoned in the 1980s on violent offenses, released, then convicted anew and paroled in November 2008-had at least 10 new felony charges pending and had violated parole repeatedly since 2009.

Once he was arrested on a drug charge and parole officials apparently applied their discretion to await adjudication of the charge before taking action.

From time to time Dennis would get let out of jail by filing for a mental evaluation under what’s known as Act 3, then abscond on parole.

In April, a parole officer wrote that Dennis had filed for the Act 3 mental evaluation “just to get out of jail,” adding rather unambiguously: “This offender will not report.”

Yet parole was not revoked.

Then, on May 8, about 32 hours before the discovery of the murdered body on the city street, Dennis had been let out of the county jail under Department of Community Correction authorization.

Presumably he was to be electronically monitored as he awaited relocation by his own initiative to a technical-violations center within 24 hours. Another parole officer wrote that day, “He stated that he knows he needs to report and that he is ready to do better. We discussed his goals and his decision-making.”

Guess what? Dennis’ decision was not to report. He met that goal.

On Tuesday morning, a press spokesman for Gov. Mike Beebe said the governor was upset by some of what he’d read in the newspaper and had summoned David Eberhard, director of the Department of Community Correction, for a meeting.

It would seem to be time.

Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola has been complaining for years about parole abuse and its dire consequence for crime in the city.

He stood at a Political Animals Club meeting at the Governor’s Mansion in January when Beebe was speaking. He asked the governor for greater coordination between state and local authorities to solve parole problems.

The governor, who is quick to defend his anti-incarceration initiative for nonviolent offenders, advised Stodola to push the issue.

It was the mayor who had the most startling quote in the article Monday. The Dennis case, he said, “appears to be the norm.”

State Sen. David Sanders of Little Rock, an early critic of the new law to relax incarceration for nonviolent offenders, says this tragic case “is not the exception.” He said greater reliance on parole had overstressed the system and that bad guys had learned how to game that system.

A seemingly smart concept, that of saving money and improving lives by keeping nonviolent offenders out of prison, cannot be permitted the unintended effect of keeping people like Darrell Dennis out of jail as well.

Stodola told me Monday that the nonviolent-offender law had not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in resources for the parole system, which he described as “in dysfunction.”

What we also have here is a political issue.

When I linked the aforementioned article on Twitter, saying it was big and that someone in state government had to be called to account, there came this reply from Republican gubernatorial front-runner Asa Hutchinson: “Agreed. Someone should explain why a parolee arrested for selling drugs is not automatically set for revocation hearing.”

Stodola also said: “It’s a state issue and it affects the citizens of this city and they deserve better, quite frankly.”

Indeed, the people of Little Rock, especially those dodging bullets in the darkness in near-war zones, deserve better.

Don’t forget homeowners. Stodola recently produced statistics showing about half of burglaries in the city were committed by persons who were supposed to have been under parole monitoring, but weren’t.

And, by the way, there was someone else who deserved better. He was that 18-year-old kid from Fayetteville.

His name was Forrest Abrams.

He apparently put himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But you could make an argument that the state of Arkansas helped dump his murdered body at 11th and Woodrow on the night of May 10.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 13 on 06/18/2013

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