Legal Commentary

Police and parole authorities in Northern California are wracked with guilt and self doubt today as they struggle to understand and explain how a registered sex offender who had been on continuous federal and then state parole for decades could have kept a girl he kidnapped in 1991, and later the two daughters she bore him in captivity, undiscovered for 18 years.  The horrifying saga began when eleven year old Jaycee Dugard was dragged into a car from a Lake Tahoe school bus stop in 1991 (as her stepfather watched helplessly from their hill top home a block away).  Garrido apparently brought her to his Antioch, California house, where he kept her, secreted in a walled off section of his heavily treed backyard in the semi-rural neighborhood 25 miles or so from San Francisco (an area recently known for methamphetamine and foreclosures).  As Maria L. LaGanga and My-Thuan Tran report in the LA Times, the Gothic horror of the story is giving way to anguished search for an answer as to how such a monstrous plot could be carried out by someone under the surveillance of multiple law enforcement agencies.  The oversight is especially embarrassing to the state's parole service which had full powers to search without a warrant, and was charged with visiting Garrido at least twice monthly in his home.  How could they have missed this?

Parole is already in the news these days for its role in California's prison overcrowding saga.  The agency sends nearly 70,000 of its charges back to prison every year for parole violations, tens of thousands of them for "technical violations."  This aggressive use of the administrative revocation power of parole has been part of California's tough on crime commitment to the use of mass incarceration as a tool of community security for more than twenty years (much the subject of my 1993 book, Poor Discipline).  This has been high criticized by criminologists as a "catch and release" system (the revocation sentences are usually only a few months) whose churning of the prison population creates an administrative nightmare and undermines community reintegration. 

So how could they miss Garrido?  Because parole like its close cousins probation and juvenile justice was born out of the criminological optimism common in this country ever since the late 19th century, that signs of incipient criminality could be detected early, before violent crime results, through the systematic use of surveillance and classification.  This continuum of deviance from small misbehavior to serious crime lies behind the whole system of peremptory intervention that has shaped crime control for more than a century, unfortunately, it is largely a fallacy.  We would all like to believe that the worst crimes could be prevented by paying attention to minor crimes, just as we would like to believe that prostate antigen screening and mammograms can detect deadly tumors while they are easily treated, unfortunately, it is often not true. 

Why did the parole agents fails to aggressively search Garrido's compound even though he was a serial rapist and kidnapper who told neighbors that he was a sex addict?   Because on a daily basis he did not appear to be  deviant.   Against the background of a system that associates unemployment, homelessness, and drug addiction with crime, Garrido was a screaming success story.  He lived with his wife in a home he owned.  He worked at this own business (Phil the printer).  He was a man of religion.  He apparently did not use illegal drugs, or engage in street level gang antics.  Like Charles Manson or Ted Bundy, Garrido did not fit a threat profile directed historically at the urban poor and minorities, so he went undisturbed while he commited unspeakable crimes agains the most vulnerable imaginable victims.