Thomas Hawk / flickr

California officials are preparing to implement the state’s latest steps toward a transformed parole system for incarcerated youths.

The changes were spearheaded by state Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Oakland, who led two bills through closely fought battles in Sacramento. Senate Bill 261 and Senate Bill 230 were both narrowly passed. The first “will expand those hearings to include inmates who committed their crime before the age of 23,” as the Sacramento Bee reported, while the second “mandates that prisoners be paroled once they are found suitable by the board. According to supporters, some inmates continue to be held for years after they are deemed suitable for parole because of enhancements that the board can add to their base terms, such as for additional criminal charges that did not result in a conviction.”

Hancock has played a key role in criminal justice oversight this year. She took the lead in investigating statewide prison abuse, especially at the remote High Desert State Prison in Susanville. A report on the abuse, drafted by the Office of the Inspector General, “was issued after the Senate Rules Committee asked the OIG to review the practices at the prison after a number of allegations surfaced that raised concern about whether some members of the HDSP staff were engaged in a pattern or practice of using inappropriate and excessive force against inmates and whether there was adequate protection of inmates from harm at the prison,” Hancock’s office said in a statement. Earlier this year, Hancock called for the closure of the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, calling the state prison “decrepit and unsafe.”

Persistent challenges

Californians have been haunted for years by the thorny challenges involved in reforming parole rules without adding uncomfortable risks. This year, changes to residency restrictions on paroled sex offenders began taking significant effect. “As a result of California’s policy change, more than 4,200 of the state’s 5,900 offenders no longer qualify for the residency restrictions,” the Associated Press observed. “However, their whereabouts still are monitored with tracking devices and they must tell local law enforcement agencies where they live.”

Political risk

But Gonzalez, although he displayed the kind of exemplary behavior in prison that made him the first to be affected by the new rules, was not an American citizen. Upon release, he was to be deported. This year, the intersection of unlawful immigration and crime has become a hot-button election season issue — especially in California, where the San Francisco release of a five-time deportee with seven lifetime felony convictions drew withering criticism after the man shot and killed Kathryn Steinle as she strolled along the city’s tourist-heavy waterfront with her father.

The episode captured nationwide attention, fueling the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and sharpening the already fierce divide within the state Republican Party over its approach to immigration and deportation. “Trump called for building a wall between the United States and Mexico after tweeting his ‘heartfelt condolences'” to Steinle’s family, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Meanwhile, revising its party platform, the state GOP “approved wording that Republicans ‘hold diverse views’ on the fate of millions of immigrants in the country without proper papers, and omitted language that said allowing them to stay ‘undermines respect for the law,'” recalled the Los Angeles Times.

In early May, the California Supreme Court handed down a unanimous ruling that allows judges to opt against denying juveniles the possibility of parole, based on their age and the seriousness of their crimes. That decision cuts against lower courts, which have long assumed that justices should favor sentences of life without parole for juveniles convicted of murder with especially heinous or so-called “special” circumstances.

At the same time, release on parole continues a steady climb in California. In just the past five years, over twice as many convicts serving life sentences have been paroled than in the last two decades combined, according to The California Report. Meanwhile, Gov. Brown has stood clear of some 80 percent of state parole recommendations. A third of “lifers” facing parole hearings now receive parole, as a result of several wide-reaching events.

Brown has struggled for years with lawsuits trying to force change on the California prison system. Brown’s administration faced allegations of constitutionally unjustifiable overcrowding, which culminated in a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against him in the Brown vs. Plata case.

By this year, Brown was able to secure two years more time to meet criteria used to show overcrowding has been adequately reduced. Nevertheless, as NPR reports, parole is one effective way to reduce prison populations, which Sacramento officials have been especially keen to do in the wake of Swarthout vs. Cooke, a separate U.S. Supreme Court decision handed down in 2011. Brought up on an appeal of a California verdict, the case resulted in tougher standards for denying parole to inmates no longer considered dangerous.

Shifting perspectives on crime

Some of the anecdotal evidence is encouraging when it comes to the real-life impact of parole on life sentences. But more broadly, these developments come at an uneasy time. California parole officials were recently humiliated when two sex offenders who had been granted parole wound up allegedly killing at least four women while subject to “close” state or federal monitoring.

Then, the shocking Isla Vista shootings by University of California, Santa Barbara student Elliot Rodger stoked fears that complicate the issue of parole. California already faces significant debates surrounding juvenile crime, mental illness, access to guns, government monitoring and recidivism.

In an added wrinkle, differing opinions on criminal justice reform don’t match up with party lines. Sacramento Democrats, for instance, are divided over whether to tighten the state’s already stringent gun-control laws even further. California’s restrictions are among the severest in America. But in the wake of Isla Vista, three state Democrats are pushing for a new measure.

A so-called “gun violence restraining order” is being advanced by Assemblyman Das Williams, D-Santa Barbara; Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley; and state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara. Their proposed legislation would permit individuals to warn courts and law enforcement that they’re worried a friend of family member might become violent.

As the New York Times reports, leading Democrats are wary of the move, even though gun-control activists have taken up the “restraining order” cause in the legislatures of states like Connecticut, Indiana and Texas.

While Brown has a mixed record of signing some gun-control laws while vetoing others, state Sen. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, told the Times his fellow Democrats’ proposal has a “potential for abuse.” New legislation along the lines they support “would have to be very carefully crafted,” he cautioned, “because you do not want the law to get into the middle, or just to be used as a pretext or excuse for leverage in an intergenerational family fight.”

Liberalized parole laws create the same possibility for potentially dangerous gray areas. On the other hand, they have also been shown to begin the process of rehabilitation into society that even tough-on-crime advocates tend to support. As California’s growing parolee population returns to public streets and private homes, their actions may shape public opinion more quickly than lawmakers themselves.