arifhidayat.info

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Nov 4, 2009 | by John Simerman

Had state parole agents leafed through Phillip Garrido’s federal parole file when they took over his supervision in 1999, they would have known his property near Antioch didn’t end at the backyard fence.

They might have found Jaycee Dugard and her two girls back behind that fence, perhaps in the soundproofed shed that federal agents knew about, the one Garrido called his recording studio.

But state agents never saw the file. They never even asked for it.

Had Garrido’s most recent parole agent asked questions about a 12- year-old girl he came across last year during a visit to Garrido’s Walnut Avenue house, he too might have unlocked a sordid, nearly two- decade-long mystery.

Instead, state agents classified Garrido at the lowest risk level for a sex offender. Later, parole agents ignored hundreds of alerts that the GPS device strapped to Garrido’s ankle in 2008 failed to transmit a signal, along with GPS data showing he’d veered far from the 25-mile radius recording studios under his parole terms and often stayed out past his midnight curfew.

Four times — in 1999, 2004, 2005 and last year — California parole officials wrote to Nevada authorities, recommending they release Garrido from a lifetime parole term for the rape of a South Lake Tahoe woman he kidnapped in 1976.

Those were among myriad missteps and missed chances in a scathing report released Wednesday by the state watchdog agency that oversees the California prison and correctional system.

The 38-page report by the state Inspector General’s Office chided parole officials who have repeatedly claimed Garrido complied fully with his parole conditions. The only reason Garrido had no violations: Parole agents didn’t look hard enough, the report found.

Matthew Cate, secretary of corrections and rehabilitation, apologized at a news conference and pledged several changes in parole oversight of sex convicts. Cate, who did not dispute any of the report’s findings, cited poor training for lapses in the case.

“We agree that serious errors were made over the last 10 years,” he said. “The department needed to do a better job training their agents. There’s no question about that. We absolutely regret the fact any mistakes were made.” He would not explain how state parole agents could have missed Dugard during at least 60 home visits that agents made to the house since 1999, some of them unannounced.

Garrido spent more than a decade in federal prison on the kidnapping charge. He served 11 years of a 50-year federal sentence and was released on federal parole in 1988. After his federal parole term ended in 1998 — seven years after Jaycee’s abduction — California parole agents took over under an agreement with Nevada, which had placed Garrido on lifetime parole for the rape.

David Shaw, the inspector general, called the federal parole file key