Had the department identified Garrido as a high-risk offender and supervised him at the more intensive High Control level, it would have been able to focus more attention on his activities. The parole administrator who completed the case management review assessment reached a similar conclusion in his review, finding that the department should have supervised Garrido at its High Control level of supervision because of his previous sexual criminal behavior. Because at the time of this assessment Garrido was not monitored by a GPS monitoring device, the even more intensive Specialized Caseload level of supervision would not apply.
In June 2006, the department implemented a new assessment tool, “STATIC-99,” designed to estimate the probability of sexual and violent recidivism among adult males who have been convicted of at least one sexual offense against a child or non-consenting adult. The department issued instructions that the assessment must be used to evaluate all sex offenders being paroled from prison; however, remiss from that directive were sex offenders, like Garrido, who were currently on parole. Instead, the department later told staff that additional policies would be forthcoming.
The department revised its STATIC-99 policies in 2007 and again in 2008; however, neither of these revisions included instructions on applying the STATIC-99 assessment to sex offenders who were currently on parole. To date, the department has never developed those written policies.
In July 2009, one month before Garrido’s arrest, a parole supervisor completing a case review directed a parole agent to request a STATIC-99 assessment for Garrido. On September 17, 2009, three weeks after the arrest, the department performed the assessment, which finally correctly identified Garrido as a high-risk sex offender. This finding corroborates our conclusion that the department’s decision to place Garrido on minimum supervision was a grave error.
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