State long aware of Wake’s trouble with probation; lawmakers look to technology to aid officers
By Sarah Ovaska, Joseph Neff
The News & Observer
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RALEIGH — Last month, state probation chief Robert Lee Guy stood in the glare of the television lights, saying he was embarrassed at how his division’s Wake County office bungled the case of Demario Atwater, a suspect in the slaying of UNC-CH student body president Eve Carson.
But documents and interviews show that Guy had known, at least since 2004, about shoddy work in Wake County that could threaten public safety. Officers were leaving in droves and weren’t being quickly replaced, so that hundreds of convicted criminals lacked significant supervision.
Beginning in 2001, files at the Division of Community Corrections show a series of warning signs from the Wake office, which watches more than 7,500 offenders, including drunken drivers, sex offenders, wife-beaters and thieves.
Top-level management teams parachuted into the Wake office in 2004 and 2006 to untangle the problems. High vacancy rates meant overburdened probation officers juggled large numbers of offenders, who often got little supervision. Probation officers spent too much time in the office and not enough checking on offenders in their homes or workplaces.
Each time, the office imposed a crisis plan to sort out the mess. One plan encouraged managers to serve punch and snacks to boost recruitment.
A 2006 internal audit revealed the Wake office was failing basic tasks such as filling out time sheets, making work schedules and tracking state-owned cars and office supplies. Subsequent audits found that many problems went unsolved.
The problems in Wake’s office, now with a staff of 153, went unnoticed by the public until Atwater was charged with Carson’s murder. Laurence Lovette, who is also charged in the Carson case and in the killing of Duke graduate student Abhijit Mahato, was supervised in Durham County.
Guy went before the cameras at his news conference to release a report about the probation cases of Lovette and Atwater. It said that Atwater’s probation officer had failed to contact him for more than a year, while Lovette never met his probation officer.
Guy told gathered media that he had questions about why things went wrong.
“As many of 10 staff including officers, supervisors and managers, touched this [Atwater] case and saw these deficiencies and red flags and did not address them,” Guy said. “That is unacceptable.”
But, as he acknowledged this week in an interview, he and his staff have seen the red flags for years.
“I’m very shocked it’s back in here again,” he said. “We’re through trying to come in and put Band-Aids on this and two years later it’s right back where it was again. I thought we addressed it. Maybe it’s on me.”
The state legislature, which convenes Tuesday, is expected to review recommendations on how technology could help probation officers. Guy said an internal review of the breakdowns in Wake and Durham counties will be finished within two weeks.
No other county, save Durham, has had the history of problems that Wake County has, Guy said. Other urban areas in the state, including Charlotte and Winston-Salem, have the same heavy volume of cases but don’t buckle under the stress.
“I don’t have these problems in other areas,” Guy said. “You don’t have the problems floating up like I’ve seen in the last four years in Wake County.”
Distress signals
One of the first warning signs was an action plan drawn up in 2001 by Doug Pardue, the manager of the Wake County office, also known as District 10. Pardue, who had spent three years in the job, wrote to reassure management of his commitment to District 10 and to prevent “future shortcomings.” Among other things, Pardue promised to improve his management, to “refrain from making excuses or ‘passing the buck,’ ” and to “take ownership in District 10’s operations and strive to correct deficiencies.”
A second warning sign floated up in 2004, when Guy conducted town meetings with the Wake County probation staff to assess the poor morale and tensions. There were other problems: not enough equipment and too many vacant positions.
Guy met with rank-and-file officers to discuss the problems. Guy and his assistants helped devise a plan to smooth tensions and fill jobs with the leaders in Wake County, including Regional Division Chief James Fullwood and Assistant Judicial Division Administrator J. David McDuffie and Pardue, the Wake office manager.
The plan’s goals included improving recruitment and hiring, but the turnover continues. Last year, Wake County saw 14 percent of the probation office leave for better jobs or retirement, higher that the state average of 9.5 percent.
Rampant vacancies
At the start of 2006, 28 of Wake’s 94 probation officer positions were vacant.
Pardue, the head of the Wake office, drew up an emergency plan. Officers had to work mandatory nine-hour days. Time off was discouraged, except for valid sick leave.
Managers reassigned all cases so that each offender had a probation officer; many offenders had been assigned to vacant positions, meaning that the entire office shared responsibility for the offender. All officers carried caseloads that exceeded guidelines: Community officers supervised 200 offenders; guidelines called for 110. Domestic violence officers watched 55 offenders; guidelines called for 30.
Because of these heavy caseloads, officers used their offices to meet with their offenders. Probation experts prefer field visits, where an officer can see an offender’s home, talk with family members and get a sense of the social surroundings.
Heavy caseloads also take a toll on the probation officers, as Lawrence Lindsey, the lead chief probation and parole officer, noted in late 2005: “My officers and chiefs simply can’t handle the type of pressure that is generated from all these cases. ... We can’t keep officers to do the work, and almost anybody you talk to is seeking other employment. ... I hope that someone can understand our pain.” The last two words were in bold type.
Four weeks after Guy put the crisis plan into effect, Pardue declared that the Wake office was close to being back in order, and put his staff back on eight-hour days. “Obviously our work is not finished,” he wrote, “but with the continuing arrival of new hires and staff continuing to do good quality work, the end of the tunnel is much closer.”
Just as Pardue was calling the emergency plan off, Atwater slipped out of reach. Atwater had cycled through four probation officers. He was assigned to Officer Chris Gladney, who made one unsuccessful phone call and didn’t try to contact him again for more than a year. During that time, Atwater was arrested several times and picked up a felony conviction for weapons possession in Granville County. Atwater told a judge there that his probation officers stopped calling him.
“We have had too many offenders falling through the cracks,” said Fullwood, the manager in charge of 21 counties, including Wake and Durham. “Each one is a walking time bomb.”
In October 2006, internal auditors at the Department of Correction found a host of problems with how the Wake office was being run. While the internal audit focused only on routine office management, Guy agreed that the audit was a warning of festering problems with the operation of the office.
Nine months later, Guy received a complaint about a troubling practice in the Raleigh office: Offenders were being called in from their jobs to meet probation officers.
A DWI offender from Knightdale had been spending weekends in the jail and working during the week, and had paid all his court costs, jail fees and probation fees. The offender had to leave work for office appointments; on at least five occasions, his probation officer was either absent or significantly late when he arrived downtown.
“You do not ask an offender to leave work and come to an appointment,” Guy said. “You do not. Period. That’s Probation 101.”
Guy said he has ordered the Wake and Durham offices to cut back on office appointments and spend more time in the field. He said he’s tired of problems constantly surfacing in Wake and Durham counties.
“These are veteran, seasoned managers,” Guy said, “and if anything, maybe I had too much faith that they were going to get things done.”
By the numbers
STATEWIDE: 2,012 certified officers oversee 128,000 convicts, or one officer per 64 offenders.
WAKE: 121 officers oversee 7,593 offenders, or one officer per 63 offenders.
PRISON POPULATION: 47 percent of new entries are revoked probationers.
Copyright 2008 The News and Observer