MORATORIUM ON VALLEY PAROLEES ANY RELEASED INMATES MUST HAVE TIES TO AREA, STATE SAYS.

Byline: Jim Skeen and Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writers

LANCASTER - State corrections officials have agreed to stop sending prison parolees to the Antelope Valley unless they had valley connections predating their imprisonments.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation also agreed to add more parole agents to watch local parolees and to start using Global Positioning System devices to track high-risk sex offenders.

``The department has not kept good tabs on what has been going on with the Antelope Valley in terms of placement,'' said state Sen. George Runner, R-Lancaster. ``I believe the department has gotten lax on how and where it is the department places parolees in Los Angeles County.''

Antelope Valley's parole population has more than doubled in the last 15 years, while the valley's population overall has gone up a little more than 50 percent, records show. Of the approximately 1,700 parolees assigned to the Antelope Valley, Runner said he believes 25 to 30 percent shouldn't be.

(Actually, the number of paroles assigned to the valley is less than it was in 2000, when state officials said there were about 2,000.)

State parole agents will re-examine the valley's roster for parolees now there without family connections or employment, officials said.

The parolee moratorium, announced Friday by Runner and his wife, Assemblywoman Sharon Runner, R-Lancaster, is similar to one imposed last year for about nine months in Desert Hot Springs in Riverside County because of that tiny community's disproportionate number of parolees, officials said.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich has also been talking with state officials about whether the Antelope Valley has more than its share of parolees and has a meeting scheduled Monday with Lancaster officials and Jim L'Etoile, director of the state's adult parole operations, Antonovich aide Anna Pembedjian said.

In the Antelope Valley, there were about 700 parolees in 1991, when the population was about 220,000. The population now is over 340,000, excluding east Kern County communities such as Rosamond.

``It's great to see the state take a leadership role in bring in more resources,'' said Capt. Carl Deeley, commander of the Lancaster sheriff's station. ``The core problems is drugs, gangs, parolees, and, to a lesser extent, probationers. If we can mitigate their effects we will have an impact on crime.''

The Antelope Valley moratorium is believed to be the only one in place now in California, a state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman said.

``We have been working with the Runners on any number of solutions to their concerns,'' corrections spokeswoman Elaine Jennings said. ``We're actively moving forward with implementation right away.''

In Desert Hot Springs, parole officials agreed to impose a moratorium in January 2005 after concluding that nearly 3 percent of the community's 17,000 residents were ex-convicts on parole.

In comparison, about 0.5 percent of Antelope Valley residents are on parole, according to state numbers. The Desert Hot Springs moratorium ended last fall, but by that time the parolee numbers had been reduced greatly, officials said.

``I think the word got out that we were no longer allowing people to just walk in,'' said Doris Mahlum, who manages the state parole region that extends from Riverside to the Colorado River.

Desert Hot Springs seemed to draw parolees because their families moved there for housing they could afford, because one hotel operator was hiring them and also providing housing, and because they had ex-convict friends there and thus could find drugs and crime partners, Mahlum said.

Antelope Valley officials and law-enforcement officials have been questioning the rise of the parolee population since the 1993 opening of the Lancaster state prison, which opponents worried would draw inmates' families to settle down.

Parole officials have said repeatedly over the years that inmates were not released directly from the prison into Antelope Valley and that they didn't steer parolees to the valley - though they acknowledged that state law could bring in paroled offenders from other areas.

State law says that parolees must be released in the county from which they were convicted, so Los Angeles County residents on parole can move anywhere in the county. However, another state law says they must be kept at least 35 miles from victims or witnesses if their convictions were for a number of serious offenses, including murder, rape and child molestation.

For example, a parolee who spent nearly 18 years in state prison for raping and molesting children in Pasadena was sent in 2004 to Lancaster, where his mother - a foster parent - lived. The Runners and other civic leaders protested to state officials about it.

In other cases, parolees in the Antelope Valley are here in violation of their parole terms, sometimes because they are hiding out from police in other cities. Local officials said they saw an influx of Los Angeles street gang members after the Los Angeles Police Department started a crackdown in late 2002.

Last October, a Los Angeles parolee was shot to death by Lancaster sheriff's deputies who stopped him as he walked along a street in an industrial area where the businesses were all closed for the night. When they searched him, a pistol fell out of his pants, a struggle ensued, and he grabbed at a deputy's gun, officials said.

State officials' decision to turn nearly a quarter of California State Prison-Los Angeles County in Lancaster into a reception center for newly convicted inmates will have an impact on the number of parolees, Sharon Runner said.

Instead of 1,100 inmates serving out their sentences at the prison, those space will be filled by inmates being processed into the state prison system and who will be transferred to other prisons after about 90 days.

That will reduce the number of families who relocate to the region to be close to imprisoned relatives, Sharon Runner said.

Jim Skeen, [phone]

james.skeen(at)dailynews.com