Fitzsimon File

The headlines are difficult to read these days, as more details emerge about the murders of UNC student body president Eve Carson and Duke graduate student Abhijit Mahato.

The latest revelation is that the probation officer assigned to Laurence Alvin Lovette, one of the two people charged in the murders, never met with him even though he had been on probation since January 16 for larceny and breaking and entering. 

The News & Observer reports that the probation officer also entered backdated accounts of meetings that didn't happen. A Department of Corrections official says efforts to revoke the probation of the other suspect, Demario James Atwater, should have been well underway after he was convicted of a firearm charge last summer.

The new twists on the tragedies have a disturbing familiarity about them. Lovette and Atwater fell through the cracks of the state probation and parole system, and there are plenty of them. The state caseload standard is 60, but probation officers in Durham and Wake Counties frequently are assigned more than 100 offenders to supervise.

Turnover is high among probation officers, whose starting pay is $32,000 a year. Not much for a job that's stressful, dangerous, and vital to protecting the public and helping offenders stay out of trouble. The technology in much of the state's court system is woefully out of date. 

A few weeks ago, the News & Observer published a series on the state's troubled mental health system, the latest paper to document the shocking failures of a system charged with caring for some of the state's most vulnerable citizens. The N&O series revealed abuse of patients and unreported deaths at the state mental hospitals.

Administrators and mental health advocates pointed to low pay and high turnover for hospital staff. Inadequate technology also played a role. Health and Human Services Secretary Dempsey Benton told lawmakers this week that cameras will be finally be installed in all restraint rooms by June of this year. No one can explain why that never made it to the top of any priority list before the recent scandals.

Benton also said that turnover among nurses was 31 percent in the last fiscal year at Dorothea Dix, 22 percent at Broughton Hospital. State nurses and health techs are low paid, despite working in a job that is stressful, dangerous, and vital to protecting people's lives.

And it's not just a problem with hospitals and probation offices. There are similar problems in other agencies that provide vital services that protect the public. High caseloads are common for staff that investigate farmworker standards, OHSA compliance, rest home operations, etc.

The problems are not secrets. They pop up every year as the General Assembly puts together the state budget and finds a few hundred thousand dollars to lower an impossible caseload to simply an unmanageable one. Reports by national groups and state advocacy organizations often draw attention to the crisis in human infrastructure in the state.

A national report on the state probation and parole system in 2004 identified many of the problems that the recent cases have tragically highlighted.

The problem is that governors and legislators aren't lining up to fight for major new investments in state agencies like Corrections or Facility Services. Not much glory in that.

Lawmakers will vote for new prison beds in a heartbeat and brag about it on the campaign trail. But spending more on managing the people who leave prison is another thing altogether, so the shocking caseload numbers on the budget sheets remain just that,  numbers on a sheet of paper.

The salaries of hospital techs or probation officers get even less notice and the high turnover rate is almost never mentioned. They only surface now, when we all want to know why people in mental hospitals are dying, and why offenders on probation aren't supervised.

It's not one specific person's fault, though the people who run the agencies owe it to the public they serve to demand more funding, better paid workers, and the latest technology.  

The public debate about the state budget is mostly waged between politicians who support more funding for public schools and occasionally for human services, and those who constantly complain that state government spends too much and use misleading research by the market fundamentalist think tanks to try to prove it.

That leaves little room for a crucial discussion, how to make the major investments in the human infrastructure and technology to have the state government we need to protect public safety and care for the people under the state's watch. How many more tragedies will it take before we seriously ask that question?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 4:28 am and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.