By David Gambacorta
The Philadelphia Daily News
PHILADELPHIA — Few things infuriate the city’s law-abiding citizens as much as when they hear that a convict has committed a heinous crime while out on probation or parole.
That frustratingly familiar scenario keeps officials at the city’s Adult Probation and Parole Department up at night - and for good reason.
APPD has 262 officers monitoring about 50,000 offenders a year, said the department’s chief, Robert Malvestuto. Inevitably, some of those parolees and probationers end up in gruesome murder scenes, either as suspects or as victims.
The city’s budget crisis has eliminated any chance of adding more officers to the APPD’s ranks, so the department instead is overhauling the way it supervises its clients to make better use of its manpower.
Malvestuto said that the APPD has started using a statistical forecasting tool developed by criminologists at the University of Pennsylvania to determine which parolees and probationers pose the biggest risk to society.
The worst of the worst - probationers likely to commit a murder, rape, robbery or aggravated assault in the first two years of their sentence - will be assigned to a new, high-risk unit, he said.
The unit will consist of about 50 agents who each will manage about 15 cases. Malvestuto said that the smaller caseloads will allow the agents to more aggressively supervise their most criminally inclined clients.
Medium- and low-risk units also are being created for other offenders. Low-risk, nonviolent offenders - about 75 percent of APPD’s clients - will receive less supervision when the overhaul, which began in March, is finished later this year.
Penn criminologist Larry Sherman, who helped develop the reorganization plan, said that the APPD’s use of a cutting-edge forecasting tool could become a model for big-city probation departments.
“We’re very confident they’re going to lead the way for people across the country,” he said.
Skeptics of the plan, including several APPD officers who spoke anonymously to the Daily News, said that they worry that low-risk offenders will commit more crimes if they get less supervision.
Everett Gillison, the city’s deputy mayor for public safety, said that APPD’s overhaul is necessary, not risky.
“Let’s face it, [the department] is understaffed,” he said.
“We can’t be everything to everybody equally. We have to use our resources in a targeted way to address the small minority of people that cause a lot of our problems.”
It could take up to two years for the city to determine the impact of the overhaul, Gillison added.
‘A pioneering effort’The APPD started working with Penn criminologists four years ago. Sherman, of the Jerry Lee Center for Criminology, said that parole and probation officials wanted to figure out a better way to manage their huge caseloads.
Penn brought in Richard Berk, a professor of criminology and statistics at UCLA, to work with Sherman and others on a new plan for the APPD.
The criminologists studied more than 60,000 county parole and probation cases, trying to predict which offenders were likely to commit murder.
They created a computerized forecasting tool that analyzes the criminal history of a parolee or probationer. The software uses a host of factors - including a parolee’s current age, age at the time of first arrest and the number of prior arrests for gun offenses - to paint a statistical portrait, Sherman said.
Some of the findings were not surprising - at least not to anyone who has paid attention to news in the city in the last few years.
“Offenders in their late teens and early 20s are far more likely to be charged with a homicide or attempted homicide” than someone over 30, according to findings published by the Penn professors in 2007.
A parolee or probationer with 10 violent arrests was twice as likely to be charged with murder than a criminal with no violent priors, the study found.
Indeed, 17 percent of APPD clients have been fatally shot each year, and another 18 percent have been arrested for shootings since 2006, Malvestuto noted.
Many of them slipped through the cracks because they were like needles in a haystack, Sherman said.
“For as long as we’ve had probation and parole, a one-size-fits-all approach has been quite standard across the U.S.,” he said.
The forecasting tool developed by Penn can help APPD officers determine which clients are likely to slip through the cracks and harm society - making the department more effective, Malvestuto said.
“This is a pioneering effort,” Sherman added. “It will be a widely replicated process.”
Sherman noted that members of the state board of probation and parole have inquired about having Berk and other criminologists analyze their cases.
‘We have questions’Any new effort - pioneering or not - has its skeptics, and the APPD overhaul is no different.
In addition to figuring out how to predict the next parolee who could end up shot dead or holding a smoking gun, the Penn criminologists determined that APPD officers were providing too much supervision to low-risk offenders.
The roughly 30,000 low-risk offenders have an average age of 40 and usually have convictions for minor offenses like shoplifting and check fraud, Sherman said. Statisically, they pose little threat of committing a violent act.
About 80 officers will each handle 500 low-risk cases when the overhaul is completed, which means that many of those offenders won’t be aggressively monitored.
“We’re taking the approach of giving more supervision to individuals that need it, and less for those who have shown by actions and data that they don’t,” Gillison said.
But several APPD officers who requested anonymity said that they worry about granting too much leeway to low-risk offenders.
“We have questions about this new formula,” said one veteran officer. “I mean, anybody is capable of anything. You can’t just assume they [low-risk offenders] won’t pose a problem.”
Another officer said that rank-and-file officers felt that they weren’t given enough of a role in shaping the new supervision approach.
“We don’t want to give people a chance to go out and commit more crimes,” the second officer said.
To that end, Sherman noted, Penn and APPD did a trial run from October 2007 to October 2008, during which less supervision was provided to 1,400 low-risk parolees and probationers. The results will be released in a report later this year.
“It proved to be very safe, and this [approach] frees up more officers to work on moderate and high cases,” he said.
Gillison seemed unfazed by the potential criticism of the APPD overhaul. “People are afraid of change,” he said.
“The way they’ve been going about [the overhaul] is sound. It’s a proactive approach, and we have to give ourselves a chance to see if it works,” he said.
Rank-and-file officers, Penn profs and city officials all agree on one thing - the need for more officers.
“It would be great if we had millions of dollars to do everything the way we want to do it, but we don’t,” Gillison said. “We have less money and are actually required to do more.”
Malvestuto was unable to provide estimates of APPD’s projected budget, either for the last fiscal year or the next.
Probation and parole “is the most critical phase of the criminal-justice system, and yet it has the fewest people to do it,” Sherman said.
“The question becomes, ‘What’s the best way to do it?’
“We’ve been at it for four years and really have just started scratching the surface.”
Copyright 2009 Philadelphia Newspapers, LLC