For years, parolees did crime, no time

The state’s parole system failed George Johnson. It failed Tanya Hollifield. And, according to homicide detectives, it failed Jeffery Hughes.

Hughes, 49, was fatally stabbed - multiple times - on June 18, 2011. Police arrested his neighbor and onetime lover, Marie Ashford, a parolee who had stopped reporting to her parole officer for nearly five years.

Johnson, 48, was murdered in his room at a Little Rock extended-stay hotel by Steven Witzke, who, like Ashford, had been a parole absconder for years. Despite multiple run-ins with law enforcement, Witzke was not served a parole-absconder warrant.

Hollifield, Witzke’s former girlfriend, endured several domestic disturbances with Witzke while he evaded parole supervision. When she tried to alert police that Witzke was a wanted parolee, no one did anything.

Over the past few years, the machinery of the Arkansas parole system produced thousands of paper warrants like those issued for Ashford and Witzke. And officials often have pointed to the documents as evidence of efforts made to track down parolees who have dropped out of sight.

But documents and interviews with current and former parole officials show that those warrants were largely worthless and were often more for bureaucratic cover than for making arrests.

Parole warrants were inconsistently served, and revocation requests often were ignored by law-enforcement and parole officials. The problem grew worse when some parole officers began to consider such instances unavoidable - even a necessary and routine part of their jobs.

That was particularly true in Pulaski County, where Witzke and Ashford were supervised, parole officials have acknowledged. There, most parole officers had caseloads that were nearly mathematically impossible to handle.

But the enforcement failures added up, for years allowing many parolees to evade returns to prison, and a few to remain free until their arrests in violent crimes, including murder.

This summer the Ashford and Witzke cases came back to haunt parole officials.

Witzke’s case surfaced in records turned over to state legislators as they investigated the handling of parolees who had committed serious crimes after their prison release.

And a report written in June 2011 by Ashford’s parole officer set off a chain of events that led to the firing of a high-level parole administrator this August.

Combined, the two parolees and numerous other cases made public over the summer reveal years of systemic problems within the Department of Community Correction, the agency responsible for Arkansas’ parole system.

Dina Tyler, the parole agency’s new deputy director of communications, agreed that the department suffered from numerous ingrained problems.

Lax follow-through on parole violators reduced the parole system to a “toothless tiger, and that’s absolutely the wrong message,” said Tyler, who arrived at the Community Correction Department in late August.

Nonenforcement of absconder warrants was just a symptom of a larger problem of inaction on “low-level” parole offenses that stretched back five or more years, Tyler said.

A single meeting or department memorandum can’t explain the years of inaction under previous parole administrations, she said.

A culture of futility spread on its own.

“Erosion doesn’t take that long. It really doesn’t,” Tyler said.

The problem was particularly acute in the agency’s Little Rock office, which has the biggest workload and most staff burnout, said Sheila Sharp, who took over the Community Correction Department in August.

“They had 50 percent turnover in staff … you almost throw up your hands and quit,” Sharp said of the conditions faced by parole officers on a day-to-day basis.

Tyler added: “If you have an overly burdened, overly taxed system that is trying to grind and grind and grind, there comes a point where the gears don’t work anymore.”

BIG LOOPHOLE

When police found Jeffery Hughes dying near a North Little Rock apartment in 2011, detectives notified a parole officer that they were holding Ashford in the man’s murder.

Hughes had been stabbed several times before police reached the Shorter College Gardens Inc. apartments at 10:28 p.m. on June 18. Police say the wounds resulted from an argument between him and a woman.

Both lived at the complex and were once romantically involved, according to charging documents.

By 11:20 p.m., Hughes was pronounced dead. Within hours, Ashford was arrested and charged in his killing.

Ashford’s record, which included nearly five years as a parole absconder, came to light this year after the Aug. 19 termination of Damian McNeal, who had been the assistant director of parole and probation services.

Documents obtained under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act indicate that McNeal, then a parole supervisor, falsified information about Ashford’s parole supervision two years ago.

The documents also indicate that at least one parole and probation supervisor, Brad Coyle, sent proof to Community Correction Director David Eberhard that McNeal had doctored Coyle’s reports on Ashford.

But there is no record in the documents obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that Eberhard did anything about the allegations when they were brought to his attention in June 2011.

In fact, six months later, on Dec. 25, 2011, McNeal was promoted to assistant director.

Ashford’s records show that she has been in and out of state custody and under parole supervision since 1997.

After serving less than two years of a six-year sentence for robbery and burglary, Ashford was paroled in August 2003. She was arrested seven months later and charged with burglary and second-degree battery, both felonies.

Prosecutors negotiated a guilty plea with Ashford on the battery charge in early 2005, and she was sentenced to five years of probation.

After her probation was revoked the next year, she received an additional three-year probationary term on Aug. 17, 2006, all while an active parole-violation warrant issued in August 2005 was never served.

Before the end of August 2006, Ashford again stopped reporting to her parole officer, according to parole officials, and a new warrant was issued.

Over the next four years, Ashford had dozens of contacts with law enforcement, including a stop by North Little Rock police in May 2010.

That day, police called parole and probation officer Arzo Johnson and told him they had nothing to hold Ashford on other than her parole warrant.

Johnson told them to tell her to report to her parole officer the next day, and the officers released her.

She never reported to her parole officer, according to parole records.

Unheeded parole warrants enabled Ashford to roam free for five years.

The same disregard allowed Witzke to run out the clock on his parole term, despite several new arrests and years of not reporting to his parole supervisor.

Witzke was arrested in the Jan. 10, 2012, killing of a man in a Little Rock hotel, just a month after Witzke’s parole term ended.

Despite several run-ins with the law and even a two month stint in a county jail, Witzke’s parole-absconder warrants were never served.

His former girlfriend, Tanya Hollifield, said the couple’s relationship was turbulent and often ended with calls to the police and protective orders from the court.

At one point, Hollifield told police that Witzke was a parolee, hoping that the information would land her ex-boyfriend back in jail. It didn’t.

“Just tell me how someone’s on parole, keeps doing all of these things and gets away with it?” she asks now. “I mean, he called the police regularly.”

On July 24, 2009, officers chased Witzke after getting a report that Witzke had assaulted a man and broken a door window at the man’s house.

Once they caught him, Little Rock officers learned through a criminal-database check that Witzke was a parole absconder, and he was booked in at the North Little Rock holding facility.

Although police records indicate that the next day Witzke would be “extradited to ADC” (the Arkansas Department of Correction), the newspaper could not ascertain what happened next.

Records from the holding facility were destroyed after it closed on May 23, 2011, and Pulaski County jail officials could find no documentation indicating that Witzke was ever booked into that facility.

Eventually, Witzke was back on the street and continued having run-ins with the law. And he was not hard to find.

In fact, at one point, he even appeared before the Little Rock Board of Directors to complain about his landlord. At that time, there was a 2-month-old parole-absconder warrant out for him.

“He was all over the place. And when you do that, you start to think you’re invincible,” Hollifield said.

On Dec. 8, 2011 - even though Witzke was still wanted on active absconder warrants - the Community Correction Department declared his sentence served.

Witzke was the beneficiary of a parole agency policy put into effect in 2007 by then-Parole Board Chairman Leroy Brownlee that allowed parole terms to run their course even if a parolee had failed to follow parole rules.

Witzke - known more commonly by his middle name, Mikao (MEE-ko) - pleaded guilty in September 2012 to the January killing of Johnson and is serving a 35-year sentence. His estimated parole-eligibility date is July 2036.

Boyce Hamlet, a former Little Rock parole officer, said Ashford’s and Witzke’s stories are not uncommon - parolees routinely evaded their parole supervisors and parole officers, and police routinely took no action on parole warrants.

Most jails didn’t take in parole violators unless the parolees faced new criminal charges because county jails have no financial incentive to keep absconders, said Hamlet, now a member of the Arkansas Council for the Interstate Commission for Adult Offender Supervision.

The state will pay for jail space to hold people awaiting transfers to prison but not for those waiting to be handed over to their parole officers, he said.

“If it’s only on an absconder warrant, you could call a parole officer, but what will they do?” Hamlet said. “It’s a big loophole that said ‘You need to report to your parole officer.’”

THE BUREAUCRACY

Parole Board Chairman John Felts said law-enforcement officers should have been contacting parole officers when they came into contact with parolees who had outstanding absconder warrants. The parole officers then should have requested that the parolees be held until the officers could meet with the parolees in person.

But Felts acknowledges that didn’t always happen.

“In any type of bureaucracy you can always have ‘This is the way this is supposed to work,’” he said. “Unfortunately, when you have so many different law-enforcement agencies throughout the state - county, municipalities -some of those aren’t going to follow through.”

Overcrowded jails were partly responsible, Felts said.

Pulaski County sheriff’s office spokesman Lt. Carl Minden agrees. His agency runs the state’s biggest jail.

Without any state money for holding parole violators, Pulaski County’s jail policy was to not hold parolees unless they faced new criminal charges.

While it was a practical consideration to keep the jail from being overcrowded, Minden acknowledged that the policy made law-enforcement officers uncomfortable.

“As a police officer, it’s frustrating when you have someone you know is on parole and their officer has filed [a warrant], but you have no recourse other than to let them go,” Minden said.

But jails weren’t the only flaw in the parole bureaucracy, Felts said.

Parole officers sometimes wouldn’t take the time to meet with the parolees while they were in custody. Instead, they’d tell law-enforcement officers to advise the parolees to report to their supervisors, the Parole Board chairman said.

Law-enforcement officers also sometimes couldn’t confirm whether a warrant was still valid because each parole warrant entered in the state’s crime database listed a telephone number for that parolee’s parole officer. If the parole officer didn’t answer his phone, the police officer had to turn a parole absconder loose, Felts said.

With tighter policies enacted over the summer, including a requirement that parole officers put a hold on any parolee arrested on a new felony charge, jails stand to again feel the strain.

But Sharp said cooperation between her office and local law-enforcement agencies has improved, and she is confident that parole violators are learning that they will be held accountable.

“I think we’ve turned a corner on that,” Sharp said. “ People are getting the message. People are showing up for their hearings.”

Sharp’s department also has acquired its own constantly monitored terminal at the state’s Community Corrections Center to help speed communication to law-enforcement agencies about which parolees need to stay in custody.

Beth Huebner, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, said the handling of parole-absconder warrants in Arkansas is an example of a nationwide problem.

“In general, both agencies get so ingrained in their own patterns that they just don’t think about what the other agency is thinking,” said Huebner, who specializes in the study of corrections and parole.

“A lot of times, contact with the police will fall through the cracks,” she said.

But parole officers need to know about those contacts because they can indicate wheth-er a parolee will be more likely re-offend.

“If we look at these small things, even though they might not seem like a big deal to other people - and sometimes they’re not a big deal - it’s important to keep as much data as possible because then we can predict better what people will do in the future,” she said.

That not only benefits parole officers but signals to offenders that there will be consequences for getting off track, she said.

“If there’s some consistency that I’m out on a warrant and I get picked up, I’m going to jail. That word gets out,” she said.

Sen. Eddie Joe Williams, R-Cabot, said the Ashford case was not the result of one or two inattentive case officers.It was the cumulative effect of parole administrators who were more worried about looking good than doing good.

“If a warrant is out for five years on someone, we’ve got major problems,” Williams said. “When you begin to telegraph messages to your people … they get discouraged and they quit fighting and quit trying.”

Sen. David Sanders, R-Little Rock, who has been active in the legislative reviews of the state’s parole agency, said parole warrants often amounted to little more than added paperwork.

“When a parolee absconds, it means he or she is not complying with the terms of his or her parole. … If you’re not complying with your parole, it means it’s a good indication you’re probably doing other things you shouldn’t be doing,”Sanders said.

“Instead of [being] a marker, or a place holder, [a parole warrant] should be a giant, red flag,” he said.

In addition to better communication, Sharp said, her agency is re-evaluating its models for parolee risk assessments and discipline schedules.

Moreover, Sharp said, there is a new emphasis on individual cases rather than on evaluating parole officers largely on the basis of the number of cases they handle.

“Our message [to parole and probation officers] has been public safety first,” Sharp said. “Follow the policies, follow the sanctions - but if in your gut you know it isn’t going to work on this [parolee], jump up and down. If you don’t get your supervisor’s attention, call me.”