By Anne Blythe, Staff Writer
The News & Observer
DURHAM, N.C. — Troubled that Durham probation officers have lost track of 20 percent of the people assigned to their watch, city and county officials appealed to the state this week for help.
Ellen Reckhow, chairwoman of the Durham County commissioners, and Howard Clement, a City Council member, sent a letter after a recent meeting with John Lee, who oversees the probation office in Durham.
The office has been under scrutiny since the exposure of the lax oversight of one of the suspects charged with killing UNC-Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson and Abhijit Mahato, a Duke University graduate student.
Lee took the reins in Durham first as an interim manager in May and in August as the new judicial district manager overseeing 86 employees who supervise more than 4,300 offenders on probation or parole.
At a recent crime cabinet meeting, Lee said he was having trouble filling vacancies.
Lee described 831 of the 4,161 offenders assigned to Durham officers as “absconders,” people who had missed curfew checks and office meetings for at least a month.
“Having such a high rate of absconders should raise a flag that we have major problems that require immediate attention ... ,” Reckhow and Clement wrote in a Sept. 23 letter to Theodis Beck, secretary of the state Department of Correction.
Durham’s absconders rate was nearly twice the 2005 national rate, Reckhow and Clement wrote. They asked Beck to send Durham a significant portion of the $2.5 million state legislators added this summer to the state probation system’s budget.
Copyright 2008 The News and Observer