Members of the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole would love to gaze into an inmate's future before releasing him back onto the streets.

"I wish we had a crystal ball, but all we have is good hard-headed common sense and a sensitivity to human nature," said Curtis Garner, board chairman.

The five board members -- two of them new this year and all lawyers with experience in the criminal justice system -- also have each other.

"A real strength is our ability to run thoughts and ideas past each other," Garner said.

Even though they make thousands of life-changing decisions every year, board members work largely in obscurity.

Current fiscal woes, however, have generated new respect for the parole board's role.

"In past years, the board has been a footnote in the discussions of state government," Garner said. "That is less and less so these days.

"The board has come to be seen as a relief valve for population problems at the prison."

In 2001, the board agreed to free more than 200 inmates up to nine months early to reduce overcrowding.

Meanwhile, the board "builds bed-space sensitivity" into each decision by asking, "Who most needs to be in those beds," Garner said.

The question is decided case by case, Garner said. But the trend over the past 10 years has been that violent offenders and sex offenders are doing more time, while drug and low-level property offenders are doing less.

Garner, who has been on the board for 17 years, said he welcomed this year's additions of longtime Salt Lake County prosecutor Angela Micklos and Robert Yeates, a former juvenile court judge, who also worked as a prosecutor.

Vice chairman Clark Harms, another former prosecutor, was appointed to the board three years ago. Jesse Gallegos, who had worked in Corrections, has been on the board for six years.

The board members wield plenty of power, and they know it.

In Utah, judges hand down indefinite, or so-called indeterminate, sentences, such as zero to five years, one to 15 years and five years to life. It is the parole board that decides how long inmates actually spend behind bars.

Garner stressed that inmates are not entitled to a release date. "They have to earn it," he said.

The board has the same information judges do at the time of sentencing, and records and reports of everything an inmate does -- both good and bad -- while at prison.

"Public safety is the first concern, tempered by an equal concern for fairness to the inmate," Garner said. "We could keep the public safety by locking everyone up forever. But that would be wrong."

It would also be impossible since the state prison has only 6,700 beds, including space leased from county jails.

The board conducts about 4,500 in-person hearings a year. That equates to 4,500 inmates telling the board: "I take full responsibility for my actions."

"They all say it," Garner said. "We joke about it."

Garner added: "We get lied to a lot. We know that.

"But you can't become completely jaded. People do change and you need to be open to that possibility."

In fact, Garner said, statistics show that most inmates who come into the system at the age of 20, are out by the age of 40 and don't come back.

Yeates said an inmate's actions often speak louder -- and more honestly -- than his or her words.

"We look at programming," said Yeates, referring to substance-abuse counseling, sex-offender therapy and enrollment in high school and college classes. "What are they doing beyond their words?"

Harms said that one of the beauties of Utah's indeterminate sentencing system is that decisions are made with the passage of time.

"A judge doesn't know how an inmate will behave or how a victim will feel over time," Harms said. "We have that benefit."

Garner noted that the board often sees "a more philosophical victim" than judges do during sentencing hearings.

"They have put in perspective the impact," Garner said. "In some cases, the impact is smaller than they once thought. With sex offenses, it's often much greater.

"A child victim, who is now an adult, and has been through two divorces might say, 'I can't have intimate relations with men because of what happened.'

"That is something she could never know at the time of sentencing."

Harms said the parole board often acts as an equalizer between the state's eight judicial districts, where judges may treat similar cases much differently.

"We try to bring some consistency," Harms said.

On rare occasions, the parole board must decide whether to commute a killer's death sentence. The last time it happened was in 1989. The then three-member board voted 2-1 against sparing William Andrews from lethal injection. Two years earlier, in 1987, the board allowed Andrews' co-defendant, Pierre Dale Selby to be executed. The so-called Hi-Fi killers had been convicted of killing three of five tortured victims in an Ogden stereo shop in 1974.

The weighty question perennially confronting the board is whether to keep someone behind bars for the rest of their life. This year so far, the board has decided to keep 10 inmates in prison for "natural life."

Asked about the difficulty of such a decision, Garner said, "Sometimes the large, dramatic cases are actually the easiest decisions. Sometimes the public safety concerns are so compelling you don't need to spend a lot of time on the case."

Despite their heavy responsibilities, board members said they enjoy their jobs.

Yeates said, "I like grappling with the depths of humanity, making something good out of a negative situation," Yeates said.

Garner called it "the best job in the world."

"I get paid to read, firsthand, stuff that other people pay money to buy crime novels to read about," he said. "It's fascinating. I don't know how anybody cannot be interested in it.

shunt@sltrib.com