If you have been paying attention to Chris Vandervein of nine News, He's got a great Twitter feed. He has been on this story, and I feel like it's been a while now that Chris has been sort of digging into our parole system, how people are parolled, information that the parole board uses in order to decide make decisions about parole and Chris, first of all, welcome.
Back to the show.
Thanks Manny for having me. Yeah, this has been a lengthy investigation. I think technically we started working on it in early twenty twenty four last year after a parole lead by the name of Vincenzo Moscoso was accused of murdering two people in northwest Denver, and since then we've really like tried to focus in on, I think identification of the what I think are some potentially systemic gaps within the parole system of Colorado.
So let's start really quickly with how the parole system works in the sense that these evaluations that we're going to talk about next, what role they play and whether or not someone is paroled. Because the parole board is just made up of people who come to a meeting with information they get evaluations. They get that stuff. So we're talking about the evaluations that are done by who does these evaluations.
Yeah, by corrections officers, Department Corrections officers when they're on inside. There's there's a number of assessments that are done and in order to understand the story you really understand, like basically think of this. Every six months or or every year, the Department of Corrections, whether you're an inmate within prison or you're arrolling who's out of prison, will try to
assess your risk level to reoffend. And it's really this idea of like, can we ask you a series of questions that we'll get to the heart of.
Let's take Chris Vanderfiedt, the felon.
Unfortunately I'm not. But let's let's take that as a as a hypothetical hypothetical example that I will answer a series of questions with a parrole officer crrect softs in front of me, and they will come up with a score that will determine am I low risk to reoffend? Or am I very high risk to reoffend? And based upon the answers that that assessment gives, you can sort of like give finely tune the level of care, treatment.
Supervision to that person.
So it's like it's it's getting into the weeds a little bit, but I think it's important to sort of understand that base level. Yeah, and the higher the score that you have, the more risk that you have. It's not predictive fully in nature, that means to guarantee that Chris biannit means going to reoffend if he's high risk or very high risk to reoffend, but it means statistically speaking.
I'm more inclined to reoffend. And you want to know.
That when somebody's out on parole, are there some of you got to watch closely or some of you don't have to watch this bock so and.
One of the things, I mean, there are things, and I want to believe that people are capable of change and capable of rehabilitation. So I would assume that some of those measures could change dramatically over the course of one's incarceration. But some of those measures are should be static, right, They should be the same on every report. How many felonies this person has committed, has this person violated parole in the past. I mean, these are numbers, These are
hard data that should never change. And that's kind of where we're talking about here, right, That's where the.
Issues are, and that's what we're the investigation is really sort of concentrating on because they're there. They're the more the once more obvious errors in these assessments.
And think about it this way.
There's a question, were you ever expelled from high school or school?
If the answer to that.
Question is yes, If Chris, if I were expelled from what Thomas Jefferson High School is the school I went to here in Denver, if I was expelled from TJ, and the answer to that is yes in twenty fourteen, then the answer that twenty twenty four would still be yes.
That is what they call in the.
Business a static schoore, And and what we've been finding these static scores is that sometimes, like Chris Vannery twenty fourteen, ever expelled from DJ, yes, and twenty twenty four No, that's a mistake, that's an error. And what conversely what happens with that is that you know, you get one point for answering yes to if you've been expelled from school, and then you know years later if it's no, then it's zero points. And as I talked about the amount
of points matters. The higher the points, the higher the risk. And if you mess up on those scores, now, all of a sudden, your risk level is getting lower than
it should, right, And that's what's happening. So you know, and you know, lots of times it may be it may be relatively inconsequential when we're talking about two points or whatever, but sometimes it's so much that suddenly somebody who is who is who should be like very high or high risk, is now moderate risk or in the example that we've talked about last a couple of weeks ago, low risk. And that means you're not not getting a lot of interaction with your prole officer, you're not being
drug tested as much. And again, you'd like to think that people who are high risk to re offend they're getting the most interaction with right role because that means that they're checking in on them, are they are they noticing maybe they're spirally, maybe they need more care. This is when I say I think we've identified a systemic problem.
I'm convinced of it, because you know, while it doesn't mean that the people that we've identified, it doesn't mean that that absolutely they would not have murdered somebody had they caught this. It just means that as a whole, we're not catching people as much as we should in terms of assigning their risk level, and it means overall we're less inclined as a state to provide the right level of care and treatment and supervision to people who can be inherently dangerous.
I'm I'm more I mean, I'm more suspicious than you are about about the beginning part of this, and I think that that's the part and all of your points you made about levels of supervision are spot on. I mean, if you have somebody that has a propensity for violence, yeah, I want them, if they get out of prison, to be carefully monitored, right.
I want to know that they're.
Being looked at and being.
Followed up on.
But the reality is is that we have kind of a significant issue right now, and it's either sloppy record keeping or a system that is so cumbersome that it lends itself to sloppy record keeping and that in and of itself needs to be fixed, or it's someone being lazy and not doing a good job that needs to be fixed, or it's more malicious.
You know, the suspicious level.
In me, I'm like, is it something more malicious where you have people that are getting numbers changed because of either relationships within the prison or or you know, even something more nefarious than that. And I don't want to cast dispersions, but I think all of that should be the focus of an intense investigation. I think whatever the answer is, and it could be something really simple to solve.
I think that not only we.
The public, but also the men in prison deserve to know that their records as they are are not being meddled with, right because how do we know they're not being meddled with in the other direction, making low risk prisoners.
I agree with that.
I there's a there's a man in the name of Brian Lovin's we interviewed in our story recently. He helped create the assessment system that Colorado uses, and he was a verse of the idea of like actually criticizing Colorado because he didn't want to go in that direction. But what he did say is this, and I think it's really important. He says it is worse to get assessments wrong than to not do assessments at all, Meaning if you're going to do them, you need to do them
correctly because you can assign. Let's say, let's say you do have somebody who is inherently low risk and they're treated as high risk, and you're having too much too much resources devoted to a person who is at low risk to reoffend. Ideally, what you want to do is devote the most amount of resources you can to the people who are statistically speaking, most likely to reoffend. This is we don't have all the money in the world. It's sort of like put towards parole. People on parole.
Not all of them are going to reoffend, but statistically speaking, they're much more likely to reoffend because they've already offended in the first place. They're on parole, they've gotten out of prison, and so you want to believe that the state is doing a good job of saying, Okay.
Chris fanitmy is high risk.
We're going to devote like you got to check in with your prole officer every two weeks or every week because we want to know how you're doing. But if Chris Fantamin is low risk, then you don't have to give as much resources. I don't have to check in as often with the prole office, and we do have a problem in this state when it comes to crimes, high profile crimes that are admitted by paroles, and there are a number of high profile crimes that have been
committed by people on parole. Next week, we're taking a deeper look into a man by the name of Ricky Lee Royball Smith who was on parole and he's now accused of a double homicide in Aurora on colfax. And he's also the main suspect, by the way, in a death inside the Denver jail and a death that happened in twenty twenty two.
This is a guy that is potentially very dangerous and.
The state did not do a good job of assigning his risk level.
It's clear as day.
So when it comes down to what needs to happen, I think I said these two before when I talked to before, like it shouldn't just be up to a reporter at nine News to investigate this problem. I openly admit there's eight thousand people on parole in the state Colorado right now. I cannot single handedly, with the help of my team, look into all eight thousand cases and see how the state is doing.
But the state does have the resources and.
The power to care a little bit more about this and actually identify, Okay, what is the extent of the problem. And what scares me the most is that we don't know the extent of this problem right now.
And that is significant because we don't know how many other paroles are out there probably shouldn't be in the community, or I mean, even as I said, it's like, it sounds like a silly thing to worry about that someone who is a low risk offender would be kept in prison right as a member of the population or likewise
it's still a criminal. But for me that does matter, Like I want the people in our justice system to be treated the way our justice system is designed to treat them wherever they are, right at wherever level they are. But have you seen any consistency in the records that you have pulled? This seems to be more pervasive in one prison or another, or does it seem to be consistent across the whole system.
I think what I've seen so far is that it's consistent across the board. And I think what we've just started to get into recently, we talked a lot about assessments of people on parole, But there's assessments of people.
That are inmates that are in prison.
And keep in mind, I'm sure you're well aware of this. I think this is surprising for the public is if Chris Pannamine is given a twenty year sentence to prison, statistically speaking, I'm going to do about ten years of that prison sentence and then I'm going to be on parole for a certain period of time. A lot of parole that happens in the state of Colorado is discretionary parole, where the parole board gets to say, yeah, we think
you're ready to be parolled. And one of the tools they're using to decide if somebody should be parolled discretionarily early are these assessments. And so if you're getting the assessment, we know they're getting these assessments wrong in prison because we've found documented cases where they're getting these assessments wrong. And it doesn't mean the pro board's going to release
this person. But if if you're looking at somebody that you might may or may not release the prison and they're low risk THY offend or modern risk thy offense.
You may be more inclined to proll.
That person as opposed to very high risk toy offense. That's a problem too.
Amen to that, Chris. I appreciate the story. I've been following along as you add. Every time I see a new face on your Twitter feed, I'm like, oh, Chris has found another one in his little back of Chris, have you spoken to the Attorney General's office about this and said, hey, would you guys or.
Could you guy?
Or can someone just get to the bottom of this, because to your point, the state does should have the resources to figure out what the problem is.
I would I would yes to the AG's office. But I think specifically, it is the governor who appoints the head of the Department of Corrections. It is the Department of Corrections that will not go on camera with us, and it is the governor who will not go on camera with us to discuss specific questions that we have have and I do think the responsibility here lies the governor. The governor appoints the executive director of the Priment of Corrections.
That's the boss of DOC. That's the person that determines how this goes. That's the person that determines, Hey, we need to look further into this to see if you know, does Chris have some wack of doodle idea of what's going on in the pro system or is he on to something?
Right?
I think I'm onto something, but I think I would not sort of like a lot of responsibility here lies with Governor Polis one hundred percent.
Well, you and I are in a similar vote. He won't come on my show either, so I can appreciate that. But Chris, keep up the good work. We're going to keep sharing the story. I think it's a really important story. And we've had way too many high not even just the high prof We've just had way too many people whose lives were destroyed or taken by people who probably
shouldn't have been walking around. And I think that that's significant and something that we should all be concerned about as we're trying to move prime in the right to direction in Colorado. I think all of this is connected. So I appreciate you making this your cause and just keeping the digging in and hopefully maybe the Attorney General's office and the governor we'll hear some pressure and begin to actually say we should probably figure out what's going on.
You talk about victims of crime, there's a man bit of the name of Jesse Schaeffer, who was murdered back in late June, allegedly at least according to the Royal Police Department, by this Ricky Lee roy Ballsmith. I talked to his family not too long ago. They live in Salida. Their story we're going to have on Tuesday Night. This is devastating. Victims of crime need to be heard and they are curious about what we found, and quite frankly, I don't blame that that's going to.
Be on Tuesday Night's nine News. I appreciate your time today, Chris very much. That's Chris Vandervein. Thanks Andy, all right, have a great day, man,