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Parole and probation are really quite similar, as far as the restrictions placed upon you are concerned. Parole is a term of monitoring attached to your release from prison and probation is a term of monitoring attached to your sentence.
When people take a plea bargain, in almost every case, lifetime probation is part of the deal. People have no clue what the impact of lifetime probation is actually going to be on their lives. Do you own a house and planned to live in it when you are released? Is it within 3000 feet of a school? If it is you can forget about living there forever. You might as well sell the house for all the good it’s going to do for you. Do you like using computers, digital cameras and Polaroid cameras? You'll never see one again for the rest of your life. Even if computers and cameras are not a factor in your crime. Do you like beer? Forget it, you'll be drug tested for everything once a month and sometimes more. Do you like Playboy magazine? Forget it, you can’t even have a swimsuit calendar in your garage. These are just the biggies and it gets far worse than this. On parole there is a specific area set by artificial lines on a map you are not supposed to cross even if you're unconscious and being taken to the hospital in an ambulance. There are no extenuating circumstances. It's just too damn bad you didn't die. That's the way the state looks at. People don't think of these things and that's how they get sent back to prison. Every one of these incidents I've seen with my own eyes. The recidivism rate for S.O.’s is around 5.3%, far lower than any form of crime, so they have to mess with people this way to get people back into prison.
One of the things that really boils my blood are these talking heads on television who tell their viewers that the recidivism rate for sex offenders is astronomical, yet they offer no proof of their claims. Well here is the proof and it comes from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service operated by the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics.
"This report presents, for the first time, data on the re-arrest, reconviction, and re-imprisonment of 9,691 male sex offenders, including 4,295 child molesters, who were tracked for 3 years after their release from prisons in 15 States in 1994.
The 9,691 are two-thirds of all the male sex offenders released from prisons in the United States in 1994. The study represents the largest follow-up ever conducted of convicted sex offenders following discharge from prison and provides the most comprehensive assessment of their behavior after release. Highlights include the following: Within 3 years following their release, 5.3 percent of sex offenders (men who had committed rape or sexual assault) were rearrested for another sex crime; on average the 9,691 sex offenders served 3 1/2 years of their 8-year sentence; compared to non-sex offenders released from State prisons, released sex offenders were four times more likely to be rearrested for a sex crime; the 9,691 released sex offenders included 4,295 men who were in prison for child molesting." Recidivism of Sex Offenders Released From Prison in 1994 by Patrick A. Langan Ph.D.; Erica L. Schmitt; Mathew R. Durose, November 2003.
From: http://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/abstract.aspx?ID=198281 So there you go. Now compare the above with these recidivism statistics for other crimes, again from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics:
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Tell me people, do the statistics justify the paranoia?
One other favorite tactic probation officers use is the five-year plan. You get out and are as good as can be. You organize your life till it's a well oiled machine. You're always early for everything. You're a model of perfection for five straight years. Then your probation officer searches your house and violates you for the most minute infraction. They recommend your full or remaining sentence be imposed, claiming you are incorrigible and a threat to the public and after five long years of exemplary behavior you are sent to prison and that plea bargain becomes piece of paper that only got you five years of freedom and what you hoped to avoid by taking a plea bargain in the first place has now come to pass. That’s why if you do accept a plea agreement it shoulg be a “BINDING PLEA AGREEMENT” which can’t be revoked for any reason. But people don’t know such a thing exists and never ask for it. We're not talking about small time sentences here. We're talking about long time sentences and long time periods of probation and how they use the two of them to suck the last ounce of life out of you. Although it is completely illegal, I know of people who are incarcerated and as a result of probation violations coupled with their original sentence, have actually spent more time in prison as a result of taking a plea bargain and they would have, had they simply gone to trial. This is the major reason not to take a plea bargain. It only delays the inevitable and if that's what's going to happen to you anyway, you might as well fight because you've got nothing to lose and everything to gain. The five-year plan has become so successful at filling the prisons there is actually a bill to eliminate this power from probation officers unless there was a commission of a new crime.
There are two types of probation. Regular probation and intensive probation or (IPS). On regular probation you do your drug testing, community service, and see your probation officer once a month. On IPS you have to submit a movement schedule. Any deviation from that schedule must be reported. A deviation can be anything more than one minute. I know of a man who had his IPS revoked for being five minutes late for putting gas in his truck. People on IPS also have to submit to more home inspections. Home invasions is a more accurate word. On IPS it can be once a month, on regular probation it could be every couple months. On all probations a surveillance officer will be following your every move and will stop you from time to time to give you a breathalyzer to make sure you're not drinking.
Probation officers for sex offenders will enter your place of employment notify your employer and fellow employees that you are a sex offender, just to make sure they know in the event you didn't tell them. They will appear at your job just to create a general nusance of themselves, hoping to get you fired. If you get a girlfriend they will demand her name and phone number, so they can call her and tell her you are as sex offender. Go to church? They'll call them too. I'm not making this stuff up. Every probationer I've met had one or more of these things happen to them and were sent back to prison, where I met them and heard their story. There is a group of sex offenders in California who were forced into homelessness and destitution as a result of the conditions they were forced to deal with outside prison. They united together to file a class action lawsuit against the state of California because of it.
Being a sex offender is a lot like taking a long journey in a strange land. Except in this case the strange land is the country you grew up in but never really knew anything about. Once you are branded a sex offender, the America you used to know ceases to exist. You are given the option of certain roads to travel. You can fight your case or take a plea. If you fight your case and lose you pretty well know what that road ahead is going to be like, but even that road has some surprises and most of them are pleasant. Take a plea, and you start down a road you know nothing about because nobody will tell you in advance and you've never been there before. That's why this chapter was written.
So is there something you can do about it? Every sex offender gets lifetime probation, so sooner or later every sex offender experiences life on probation. Recently in the courts lifetime probation has been attacked successfully as cruel and unusual punishment. The basis of this argument is that even murderers don't get lifetime probation and that it is in effect double punishment. It is important to remember that although sex has been going on as long as humans have been in existence, the current methods of the application of these laws has only been around a short while. Consequently it takes some time to amend the application of the law to something a little more just. We are in exactly this adjustment period. What you need to know is that after two to three years on probation with no violations you can request a downgrade in your probation status or your removal from probation altogether. The only problem with this is that it takes a lawyer to do it and they don't work for free. Consequently many sex offenders don't do this and wind up back in prison. This is another reason why you need to study the law because there is nothing to stop you from doing this yourself. The other problem is that most people assume lifetime probation is for life and never learn it can be fought in court so they never try.
I know this guy that is physically handicapped with Limb-Girdle Muscular Dystrophy (LGMD), and is 56 years old, and confined to a wheelchair. He faces the problem on probation that most S.O.’s don’t, and that is, he basically has three handicaps; (1) first, is of course the physical handicap, which makes it hard to find an apartment due to the fact that he has to function in it and most apartments that are in his price range are not wheelchair friendly, (2) second is, that he has the financial handicap of only getting $637.00 a month on SSI, which severely limits the type of apartment that he can afford, and (3) is of course the ‘SOCIAL HANDICAP’ of being an S.O. and barred from 90% (or more) of the possible apartment complexes to rent from, because the cities here in Arizona have made apartment complexes ‘CRIME FREE ZONES’ meaning that they are not allowed to rent to anyone with a felony, especially an S.O. felon. He has been living in a homeless shelter for the past 6 months due to the fact that he could find no place to live, and finally he found a place to live which is a very small studio apartment and his rent is $475.00 a month that does include utilities. That only leaves $162.00 dollars to buy things that he needs to survive. Could you live on this under this condition?
The probation officers don’t care, and don’t even try to help him in his plight, simply because they would rather put him back in prison to help the state obtain more federal funds for their prison and injustice system budgets. It makes no difference that he already spent nearly 15 years in prison, they’d just as soon as send him back for another 7 years, which would end his sentence entirely (killing your number). Of the two, probation is far harder to complete than parole, because you have two different types of criteria to meet and different types of thinking between the prison arm and the court’s arm.
To make things worse for this guy, he was innocent and has spent nearly every waking hour while incarcerated studying the law and the facts of his case as applied to what he learned. He is very well versed in the law and writes pleadings as good as or even better than some lawyers, but because he represents himself, it is nearly impossible for him to get any play from the courts. One reason could be, that he writes very blunt pleadings calling the judge[s] criminals of the master kind and clearly demonstrating how they blatantly violate their own ‘public records’ law (i.e., here in Arizona is A.R.S. § 13-2407) and also the state employee’s statute on ‘making and giving a false certificate’ (i.e., A.R.S. § 38-423). He rubs their nose in it knowing full well that no prosecuting attorney will ever file criminal charges against their fellow brother[s]-of-the-bar, especially judges whom they have to go in front of every day. He merely does it to make a record for future events. Every lawyer (both defense and prosecutor), as well as judges make false statements in [ALL] pleadings and court orders, and of course, these pleadings and orders are public records. However, they will never be prosecuted because they won’t prosecute their own. I’m encouraging my friend to write a detailed book on this subject and he will if he can stay out of the clutches of the state long enough to do so. He filed a criminal complaint with the courts and prosecutor’s office against 36 lawyers and judges, but they would not prosecute. They did not say that he was incorrect in his accusations against these lawyers and judges, merely that he could not be the one to file a criminal complaint.
Anyway, back to probation and parole. If at all possible, if you take a plea bargain (a horrible term, because there is usually no bargain in it, it is just one sided to benefit the prosecution), try very hard to not take any probation in the deal, if necessary, take a longer time in prison rather than probation, as probation of any kind is just a trick bag to get you back in prison.
So now you know what you are really fighting for. You are fighting to get your life back and get Uncle Sam out of your business, by proving your innocence in court, or even if your guilty, to fight them when they lack the evidence to convict you. Don’t be a SAP and roll over for them! If you don’t think that’s worth fighting for then enjoy your LONG stay in prison, because my friend, that’s all you’ve got left. Is it even possible to win? Oh yes! It most assuredly is possible, but as anyone who’s done it will tell you, it’s not easy.
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