By Just A Guy
Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. His blogs typically run twice a week.
It was a good week for Jaycee Dugard, who was discovered after being imprisoned for 18 years in an Antioch backyard. But it wasn’t a good week for the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office, which missed several opportunities to solve the case, including two visits to the home of Phillip Garrido, the paroled sex offender who is charged with kidnapping Dugard.
But at least Contra Costa Sheriff Warren E. Rupf had the courage to admit the mistakes, ask forgiveness and take steps to assure that something like this would never happen again.
What was the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation response? Remember, CDCR is responsible not only for people in prison but for people on parole. In typical fashion, agency spokesman Gordon Hinkle denied that anything had gone wrong or that CDCR had been remiss in any way, and said that that the parole agent had gone in Garrido’s backyard but because of the way it was situated didn’t find anything strange.
Wait: These agents visited a registered sex offender’s house once a month, yet found nothing awry?
Far be it for the people at CDCR to even admit that they are doing a poor jobs. They never admit responsibility for anything. Yet they are tasked with rehabilitation.
Isn’t a key component of the rehabilitation process admitting your mistakes? What kind of example does it set when the entity so concerned about the public’s safety is incapable of admitting it has done something wrong performed poorly?
Examples like this should make it obvious that CDCR is not protecting you but protecting itself through a continuous enterprise of lying, hiding the truth, covering up the facts and skewing information in order to paint a picture or inmates as unrepentant evildoers bent on destruction — while coloring itself as a benign bureaucracy with the unenviable job of keeping us at bay by “walking the toughest beat.”
The beat is so “tough” that the parole agents didn’t thoroughly investigate the back yard of a convicted sex offender. I guarantee my parole officer would investigate my back yard if it were in such disarray – at the very least, the yard was ripe to be a meth lab and Garrido’s deranged rants would be a cause for concern.
But you know what one of the big problems with the scenario is? The parole agent probably had 200 people to watch, 100 of them no nonviolent offenders, so he or she didn’t have time to thoroughly investigate what was going on.
Wait – it was 18 years! Good job, CDCR.
Government’s number on priority is to protect the public, but with that comes a responsibility to define what the public is being protected from. Do we really need to be protected from a casual drug user, or even addict (any more than we need to be protected from a casual drinker or even an alcoholic)? If drugs were decriminalized, taxed and regulated by the FDA — or even handed out free to registered addicts – a large percentage of our property crimes would disappear. The black market would collapse, prices would drop and drug-related murders would decline.
But most important, parole officers wouldn’t have to be so overwhelmed that they don’t have the time to investigate the jungle-like backyard of a convicted rapist who believes he was inspired by God to commit atrocities on teenage girls.
Who are the real criminals here?