Tennessee Parole Officers Report that Parolees are Walking Dead

Either Tennessee's crawling with zombies, or the state's Board of Probation and Parole has been caught neglecting to monitor former offenders under community supervision.

According to an audit published in September 2012 by Tennessee's comptroller, at least 82 parolees reported as being alive and under supervision by parole officers were actually dead. After the release of the audit—which cited "inadequate supervision" of parolees by the agency—and a legislative hearing that followed, a top parole official was forced to resign after 40 years with the agency.

"If parole officers are supervising dead people, this is a waste of taxpayer dollars and makes us wonder about the supervision of parolees living in our communities," said Comptroller Justin Wilson.

During the audit of the parole board—which is an arm of Tennessee's Department of Correction (TDOC)—the comptroller's office compared a list of Tennessee's offenders under community supervision as of January 2012 with a list of death records from the state's Department of Health through December 2011.

The audit found that one parolee had been reported by a parole officer as "bedridden at home" long after his October 2011 death. Another officer claimed to have contacted a parolee who had actually been dead for 19 years.

Tennessee's parole board, which is responsible for supervising 60,000 former offenders, has for years dealt with heavy caseloads and high employee turnover, with most officers tasked with monitoring about 100 offenders each. According to the Nashville Tennessean, the agency's resources have been stretched thin in recent years (it operated a $91 million budget in FY 2012) and has rarely met its supervision standards.

But the comptroller's report suggested that the parole board's own mistakes and lack of oversight are mostly to blame for the agency's apparent incompetence.

"Taxpayer resources were used in an ungrateful way," said Deborah Loveless, the comptroller's assistant director for state audits.

Just days after the audit's release, a state legislative subcommittee held a hearing on the comptroller's report, where Gary Tullock, TDOC's assistant commissioner for community supervision, defended the parole officers who falsified reports on dead parolees. But after failing to explain to lawmakers why those officers were simply fired rather than arrested, Tullock was compelled to resign his position.

Tullock began his career in 1972 as a parole officer and was promoted to director of field services for the parole board, overseeing all of the state's parole officers, in 2004. "This is about accountability and our commitment to the public. We want the citizens of Tennessee to have full confidence in our ability to supervise offenders," TDOC Commissioner Derrick Schofield said in a written statement. "We will continue to work diligently to ensure we will not compromise public safety when it comes to the supervision of felony offenders."

After the hearing, Schofield–whose department will assume total responsibility for supervising Tennessee's parolees and probationers on Jan. 1, 2013–ordered a full investigation into the comptroller's findings.

"While 82 is a small number compared to the over 60,000 offenders monitored each year," the audit said, "the board (and now the Department of Correction) should consider regularly comparing offender information to either state or social security administration death records."

The comptroller's report further said that the parole board was failing to meet its own standards for supervising other offenders (besides the dead ones) and that it obviously wasn't ensuring that offenders were actually being supervised.

Half of the case files auditors examined had not been reviewed by supervisors, a problem that was first noted in a 2006 audit of the parole board. Having dozens of dead parolees on the agency's rolls likely would have been addressed sooner, Loveless said, if supervisors were doing "top-to-bottom" reviews.

According to the audit, officers also were entering inaccurate information on home visits or face-to-face meetings with parolees into the Tennessee Offender Management Information System (TOMIS), indicating to auditors "many instances where there was no evidence of an attempt at supervision by the probation and parole officers."

The board also needs to ensure compliance with public meetings law, the audit said. Currently, notices about public meetings are posted only in the elevator lobby on the 13th floor of the parole board's central office, which, according to the Tennessean, "is far from being in compliance with state law requiring 'adequate public notice' of scheduled meetings." The board said it would begin posting meetings online and elsewhere.

Sources: "Performance Audit: Board of Probation and Parole," State of Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury, September 2012, www.comptroller.tn.gov; Nashville Tennessean, www.tennessean.com

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