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.

“Three-quarters of California’s paroled sex offenders previously banned from living near parks, schools and other places where children congregate now face no housing restrictions after the state changed its policy in response to a court ruling that said the prohibition only applies to child molesters,” the Associated Press reported, citing statewide data compiled at its request.

“The rate is far higher than officials initially predicted. The state expected half of the 5,900 parolees would have restrictions on where they can live or sleep lifted when the corrections department changed its policy following the March ruling. Instead, data shows that 76 percent of offenders no longer are subject to the voter-approved restrictions.”

The pronounced shift underscored the structural dilemmas policymakers have faced in dealing with the state’s significant population of sex offenders. “In some more urban jurisdictions offenders can’t legally live anywhere so they’re forced to live on the streets in some cases,” the Eureka Times-Standard noted — a domino effect that has led to fears of greater crime and recidivism.

But the new policy has already been accused of dramatically overcompensating. “[E]ven some whose offense involved a child no longer face the 2,000-foot residency restriction, officials disclosed in explaining the higher number,” the Times-Standard added. “That’s because the department’s new policy requires a direct connection between where a parolee lives and the offender’s crime or potential to re-offend. Only rarely is the assailant a stranger to the victim, the type of offender whose behavior might be affected by where he lives.”

Extralegal punishment

Although elected officials have shown an understandable unwillingness to appear soft on sex crime, attention has turned in recent years to the ways in which the state’s array of punishments can expose sex offenders to threats and risks well in excess of the law itself. Last month, convicted Vallejo predator Fraisure Earl Smith was ejected from a Motel 6 after having been released from a psychiatric hospital. Homeless, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Smith wound up “living out of a vehicle somewhere in the Vallejo area under the watchful eye of security officers for Liberty Health Care Corp., the contractor that the state hired to handle his release.”

Sex offenders have also faced sharp difficulties in prison. This month, a report issued by the state Inspector General revealed systematic abuses against inmates, with sex offenders singled out for extralegal harm. Investigators found “rising violence statewide in special housing units designed to protect vulnerable inmates, including sex offenders, gang dropouts and prisoners with physical disabilities,” ABC News reported. “Guards can now use an electronic state database to easily see which inmates have an ‘R’ coding that designates a sex offender. Some spread that information, knowing sex offenders are often marked for retribution, the inspector general found.”

Persistent problems

Other recent anecdotes, however, have told a different story. “A sex offender with a stolen boarding pass got through airport security in Salt Lake City and checked in at a gate for a flight to California before he was caught” this November, as the Associated Press observed. A recent three-day sweep of Sacramento’s American River Parkway found many transients there to have run afoul of the law. “Sixteen people were arrested for outstanding warrants,” KCRA recalled; “another 12 were not properly registered as sex offenders.”

The sheer number of offenders has grown large enough to pose a bureaucratic problem, making it harder to determine which are more likely to re-offend than others. Sizing up that challenge, the state board overseeing California’s sex offender registry rolls recommended to state legislators last year “that only high-risk offenders, such as kidnappers and sexually violent predators, should be required to register for life,” as the San Francisco Chronicle noted. “Others could be removed from the registry 10 to 20 years after the offense.”

The next time you grab a ride with Uber or Lyft, a California lawmaker wants to make sure a registered sex offender isn’t behind the wheel — something the ride-hailing companies say they already go the extra-mile to prevent.

Sen. Cathleen Galgiani, D-Stockton, recently introduced a bill that would ban ride-hailing companies from using any driver who is required by law to register as a sex offender.

Lyft, Uber and other smartphone-based ride-hailing companies already use private background checks on potential drivers. But there’s no California law explicitly banning sex offenders from driving for the companies.

“At a minimum, registered sex offenders should not be a part of this industry,” said Trent Hager, Galgiani’s chief of staff, told CalWatchdog.com on Tuesday.

Reports of alleged assaults by ride-hailing drivers on their passengers have surfaced in recent years. Galgiani’s bill was not sparked by any such incident in California, but instead seeks to prevent one from happening, Hager said.

In a written statement, a spokesman for Uber said the company’s “policy already prohibits publicly registered sex offenders from partnering with Uber as drivers on the platform.”

The company added that all Uber drivers “are required to undergo an extensive background check, which is performed on our behalf by Accurate and/or Checkr. Both are accredited by the National Association of Professional Background Screeners.”

On its website, Lyft states “We also do not allow individuals to drive who are registered on the National Sex Offender Registry and DOJ50-State Sex Offender Registry at the time our background check is conducted, regardless of how long ago the individual was put on that registry.”

The industry’s growing popularity has exposed it to extra scrutiny in California, where state officials say ride-hailing firms should be regulated like taxi companies.

In the taxi industry, driver applicants must pass criminal background checks administered by local agencies, including police and sheriff departments.

Rick Wright, of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department’s licensing division, which performs background checks on taxi driver applicants in the San Diego region, said being a registered sex offender would disqualify a potential taxi driver.

Galgiani’s bill was introduced July 8 as a “gut-and-amend” replacing a bill she previously introduced on an unrelated topic.

It is expected to be heard in the Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee in August, after lawmakers return from a summer recess.

To become law, it must be approved by the Senate, Assembly and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown.

It was supported by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, as shown in the nearby photo.

Billed as a tough new way to protect children, Jessica’s law prevented “registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park where children gather, regardless of whether the crimes involved children.” Plaintiffs, four paroled sex offenders in San Diego, argued the rules had the unintended consequence of making it nearly impossible for them to live anywhere, turning a recordation on the registry into a virtual sentence of lifelong transience.

What’s more, they claimed, no public safety interest offset the unforeseen problem.

The justices agreed, striking down the restrictions in San Diego County and freeing would-be plaintiffs around the state to challenge them elsewhere. The court held that, although sex offenders had narrowed their own so-called “liberty interest,” Jessica’s Law went too far in infringing it for no good reason — a violation of constitutional law. They wrote:

“Blanket enforcement of the residency restrictions against these parolees has severely restricted their ability to find housing in compliance with the statute, greatly increased the incidence of homelessness among them, and hindered their access to medical treatment, drug and alcohol dependency services, psychological counseling and other rehabilitative social services available to all parolees, while further hampering the efforts of parole authorities and law enforcement officials to monitor, supervise, and rehabilitate them in the interests of public safety. It thus has infringed their liberty and privacy interests, however limited, while bearing no rational relationship to advancing the state’s legitimate goal of protecting children from sexual predators, and has violated their basic constitutional right to be free of unreasonable, arbitrary, and oppressive official action.”

Lower court action

The move was consistent with inaction from the court last year on an important lower ruling that countered local ordinances cooked up to chase away sex offenders. As CalWatchdog.com reported in May, parents in some areas had begun to pursue a strategy of creating public parks in parts of town where sex offenders could live, specifically for the purpose of making them off-limits.

That led one plaintiff successfully to challenge an Irvine ordinance under state law — and led the state Supreme Court to allow the challenge to stand. Now, the court has taken its rather libertarian approach one proactive step further.

California has not been the only state to reconsider its methods when it comes to the sex-offender bureaucracy. Across the country, reformers have given recent consideration to slimming down registry rolls themselves — risking potential public outcry in an effort to get a handle on the growing problem of an ever-expanding population of permanent pariahs.

High costs

But California, where the costs of coping with sex offenders pile up, has been at the forefront of reform efforts. “The state has spent millions of dollars trying to find housing for some sex offenders, rather than letting them slip under parole officers’ radar,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. “Police in many heavily urban areas struggled to enforce the buffer zone around schools and parks. In Oakland, one motel along Interstate 880 basically became a sex-offender barracks.”

Formulating a successful approach to the state’s sex offenders has become a burdensome task any way the bureaucracy slices it. Last month, the group tasked to oversee that process — the California Sex Offender Management Board — filed its annual report in Sacramento.

In an effort to reverse the costly and inefficient ghettoization of offenders, the board proposed that legislators and Gov. Jerry Brown consider reshaping restrictions on a case-by-case basis. “Having an alarmingly large number of transient sex offenders in California does not make communities safer,” the board argued, counting nearly 6,700 transient registrants and over 1,300 parolees both transient and homeless.

Substantial changes to the law are underway at both the legislative and judicial levels. In Sacramento, lawmakers are seriously considering a plan that would pare down California’s sex registry rolls. At the same time, a high-profile court decision has triggered a wave of legal activism successfully targeting city and local ordinances banning offenders from some public areas.

The state’s sex offender registry is overseen by a body known as the California Sex Offender Management Board. In a report issued last month, the Board recommended that the Legislature alter the way it maintains the registry, which has ballooned to nearly 100,000 names. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, the Board reasons that perhaps thousands of registrants “do not necessarily pose a risk to the community,” including about 900 who have not engaged in a sex crime for over half a century.

Registry

California began its sex offender registry in 1947 — the first state to institute such a program. Today, 46 other states have sex registry programs that use a tiered system to differentiate between types of offender, based on factors such as time spent on the registry, risk of re-offense, and the severity of the initial offense.

As legislators expected, however, floating changes to California’s registry process is highly controversial. Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, supports the Board’s plan, but admits the mere notion of slimming the registry is “radioactive.”

Opinions may be poised to shift, however. California is one of a handful of states that opted out of the so-called Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, a registration mandate that included juvenile offenders and was passed by the U.S. Congress in 2006. To secure state compliance, Congress threatened to withhold millions of dollars in federal enforcement grants.

Now, some compliant states are questioning whether the law makes it effectively impossible for once-youthful offenders to reintegrate into society even if they never offend again. The same logic is at work in the recommendations of the California Sex Offender Management Board.

Constitutional questions

Even more important than public opinion, however, is the latest turn of events in the courts. Last month, the California Supreme Court allowed a lower court ruling to stand that struck down local ordinances meant to keep sex offenders away from children in public places. Instrumental in the ruling was the case of a registered Irvine sex offender. By visiting a tennis court at a local park, he violated a local ordinance. Despite pleading guilty, his public defender successfully claimed that state law trumped the ordinance.

In California and other states, public park rules have taken on a strange life of their own. In areas where sex offenders are clustered — thanks to widespread legal restrictions on where they can live — parents have pushed to create public parks simply to keep them away from their children. The strategy underscores a simple yet nettlesome dilemma: pushing sex offenders to the margins of society keeps them at bay in the immediate term, yet increases the kind of nothing-to-lose attitude many communities fear most from predators.

The California Supreme Court’s implicit stance on the matter has emboldened advocacy groups keen on rolling back similar ordinances statewide. An organization called California Reform Sex Offender Laws has contacted cities around the state, warning of federal lawsuits if public-places ordinances are not eliminated or changed.

In response, cities in Orange and Kern counties have already taken action or likely soon will. As many as half of Orange County cities have public-park rules of the kind affected by the Supreme Court’s inaction.

The future of California’s approach to sex offenders may depend on the momentum of similar debates in the state over drug crime, punishment, and the possibility of rehabilitation. The constituency supportive of drug abusers is larger and more powerful than the constituency willing to push for an agenda that is, by any measure, softer on sex offenders.