This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
If Utah's effort at rebuilding its criminal justice system is to succeed, we're going to have to get parole right.
Gov. Gary Herbert Thursday announced a comprehensive review after a series of questionable decisions from the state's Adult Probation and Parole Division, including the parole of the man who killed Unified Police Officer Doug Barney last month. The governor's announcement came the same day two top administrators in the division resigned.
Parolee Cory Lee Henderson had disappeared from a halfway house before he shot Barney. The Board of Pardons didn't know about Henderson's pending charges when they decided to parole him. Earlier this week, another parolee who walked away from the same halfway house allegedly stole a car and rammed a police car before running away. In another January case, a parolee who was mistakenly released was shot by police.
Currently there are 260 parolees at large who are wanted for violating parole, failing to appear in court or other violations. In conjunction with Herbert's review, the state Department of Corrections announced it will step up efforts to find them. The department is also suspending further halfway-house placements for parole violators until the appropriateness of those placements is reviewed.
The death of Officer Barney is reason alone for getting to the bottom of these problems, but solving them is really about the future of criminal justice in Utah. The evolution in thinking in corrections is largely based on one undeniable fact: Almost all prisoners eventually get out. If the system doesn't do more to improve their transition to life on the outside, they'll inevitably be back on the inside after committing more crimes.
So a cornerstone of that thinking is not letting them out until they're ready. That will never be a foolproof decision, but it's one that has to be as close to foolproof as it can get.
The governor is careful to say that recent reform efforts are aimed at non-violent offenders, not hard-core criminals. It's obvious that violent people should not be freed, but it's a reality that at least some with a violent history can and should be released once they've paid their debt to society and have given some level of proof that their violent days are behind them. If that is going to work, it will require that corrections people know what that proof looks like. Recent events say they don't.
People are watching this experiment in prison reform. If the state can't convince them it is safe, we'll be going back to the throw-away-the-key days.