Society’s Smart Reaction to Garrido Case

The horrifying case of Phillip Garrido has captured the public’s attention, and like most sensational, high-profile cases it is leading to investigations of the system and calls for reform. It's a sign that we’re making progress in our criminal justice system, however, that rational reforms are taking prominence over tough-on-crime talk.

High-profile cases like this can help us identify fixes for real problems in the system, but they’re also notorious for leading to knee-jerk policies that move us backwards. I’m encouraged to see that most of the uproar this week seems focused on the efficiency – and not the expansion – of parole and sex offender registries.

Garrido is accused of kidnapping Jaycee Lee Dugard in 1991 and holding her captive for 18 years while raping her regularly. It’s a crime of almost incomprehensible evil, and it has led to some scattered calls for harsher sentences and bigger sex offender registries. But more efficient monitoring of sex offenders and high-risk parolees, however, would be a productive result of this case. And most of the media and the public is getting the story right.

More effective, targeted parole is the answer, not a wider net. An even-handed article in the Wall Street Journal today examines California’s parole system and finds strong evidence of this. The failure of parole officers to uncover Garrido’s unthinkable crimes is a result of a system breaking under its own weight.

Under a risk-assessment system called Static 99 - used by many jurisdictions but usually not applied to people convicted before 2007 – Garrido would have been marked as high-risk and would have been under closer monitoring. Instead, he was monitored just as closely as lower-risk parolees.

California has 90,000 registered sex offenders and the state doesn’t do enough to distinguish between high- and low-risk parolees. In Garrido’s county, the WSJ reports, 200 sex offenders got about the same number of visits, regardless of risk.

Communication between agencies is also key. Police responded to Garrido’s house in 2006 when a neighbor called to say women and children were living in tents in the backyard. That’s pretty specific. Not only did the responding officer fail to do his job – he questioned Garrido on his front lawn and left – but the parole office wasn’t notified, so officers didn’t know about the allegation. That’s a missed opportunity to free Dugard three years ago, because of a lack of information sharing.

By moving from tough-on-crime to smart-on-crime, we can catch perpetrators and prevent violence without destroying the lives of low-level offenders caught in an indiscriminate system.