According to State Senator Ted Lieu, around 800 California parolees who were assigned GBS monitoring have either cut off their devices, or never kept their appointments to get the things put on the first place.
With these GPS scofflaws in mind, Lieu told KPCC’s Rina Palta, that there needs to be a bigger, badder consequence for not wearing your GPS on when you’ve been assigned one. In January, Lieu plans to introduce a bill to fix the matter.
Here’s a clip from Palta’s story in which Lieu explains the problem:
“It is not a crime, it is a parole violation, and you will get up to 180 days in county jail,” Lieu said. He notes: “when you count in the overcrowded county jails and good time, sometimes they don’t serve any time or sometimes it’s just a few days.”
Under California’s realignment policy, most parole violations are no longer punished with prison time, to avoid overcrowding. But Senator Lieu wants to change the law in this case. He plans to introduce legislation next month to make it a felony to cut off a GPS monitor. Lieu says the threat of serious prison time would be a powerful deterrent.
Frankly, I completely agree. As we’ve made clear here at WLA, we believe that realignment is a positive step forward in much needed corrections and parole reform. BUT, there are parts of realignment that are going to need a lot of fine tuning, this business with the GBS devices being a prime example.
(Non-revokable parole is another important reform that still needs some rejiggering as this new proposal from the LA County Board of Supervisors indicates. But lets us hope that we do it with a scalpel, not a meat cleaver wielded in response to the latest crime. More on that soon. In the meantime, the Daily News has this report)
TUESDAY MORNING I WAS ON AIRTALK WITH LARRY MANTLE, briefly discussing Senator Lieu’s proposed bill.
You can find the podcast here. I’m in the second half of the segment, after my pal Frank Stoltze.
(However, as you will note, I was so stuffy-headed and miserably cold ridden that, at one point, I suddenly called Larry Mantle “Warren”—as in Olney. Note to self: Avoid doing live radio after taking large doses of over-the-counter cold medicine.)
Yes, let’s ask our under educated children on how to run things. We obviously haven’t got a clue!! I wish you liberals would listen to concerns about REALIGNMENT! A family is dead! And not one word of apology from you!!I’m not looking for a fight but are you really surprised at the death and other violent crimes being committed?
Probation officers cried and cried to get more of their peers armed-they saw the ab-109 loopholes from the get go and everyone ignored them. Now you have four killed in northridge. The probation chief -a certain county supervisor..cough cough…molina and even Gov. Brown are all against arming officers….they couldn’t even get an arming bill pass legislation-more specifically through Gov. Brown’s veto desk. Now you really think he will sign off on a bill that has to do with protecting the community…..Not!!!! All he cares about is the state budget, saving
Money, his personal political agenga or appointing his friends to key positions. Hell- in no way does he care about saving lives’ – victims of crime or protecting our overall communities.
Why are all the other state counties being tough on crime and LA County continues to pamper and hug these post release criminals? That touchy touchy huggie huggie crap evidence practice bullcrap doesn’t work. Maybe its due to the fact that probation is ran by your typical super liberal executive who works as a pastor or reverene -…preaching “let my people go!”
If there was anyone who made a mistake with the main suspect in the Northridge murders, it was the DA’s office, who put him in drug diversion when he clearly wasn’t eligible. http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_22176458/l-prosecutor-agreed-probation-man-now-suspected-quadruple
However, we do need an overhall in the way parolees are classified as N3s, which this guy was because his last conviction was for meth, only. But his previous convictions suggested he should be more high control. The system isn’t wrong, the method of triage is inadequate. We shouldn’t be looking only at the last conviction to decide if someone’s an N3 (non-non-non), and thus eligible for county supervision. We need to look at the whole record to see what patterns there may be. Again, the system needs fine tuning. However the bad ol’ broken and overburdened parole system certainly didn’t work any better, for crying out loud.
Probation didn’t want this guy because he had a record of absconding from parole. (Clearly parole hadn’t done well with him at all.)
To put this terrible terrible quadruple murder at the foot of realignment or “liberals,” is preposterous. What do you imagine would have been magically different if he’d been on parole rather than probation? He wasn’t let out any earlier because of realignment. I agree he was wrongly classified as an N3, but, please tell me how that had any bearing on his murdering of four people?
PS: For the record, I’m fully in favor of arming probation officers if they wish to be armed. Have felt that way for the last 20 years, after spending several years in the early 1990s hanging out nights with juvenile POs on the Eastside gang unit. And that most recent bill on the topic not passing has exactly zero to do with Jerry Brown.
Okay, I’ll get off my soap box and get back to work. However, I do wish everyone would stop framing these things as liberal or conservative issues and deal simply in facts. It makes discussion easier.
“Okay, I’ll get off my soap box and get back to work.”
WOW!!! At 1:02 A.M. in the middle of the night.
WOW!!!