Two high-profile killings shook North Carolina in the past year, and police accused homeless men with lengthy criminal histories of carrying out the crimes.
On Wednesday members of a bipartisan state legislative committee took a closer look at the state’s probation and parole system. They raised concerns about whether the state is doing enough to ensure people being released from prison are receiving the proper levels of oversight and, when necessary, mental health treatment.
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The killings of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte and teacher Zoe Welsh in Raleigh received national attention after they originally happened and have continued to reverberate in policy debates. Zarutska’s mother was a guest of Republican President Donald Trump’s during his State of the Union speech last month, as he highlighted her case in calling for change.
North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Josh Stein, has also cited Zarutska and Welsh in his own efforts to push for reforms. Stein signed an executive order last month pushing for closer collaboration between law enforcement officers, state prison officials and mental health experts. Similarly, Republican state legislators cited Zarutska’s killing in passing a law last year to restart the death penalty in North Carolina.
Darren Jackson, the former Democratic state lawmaker and North Carolina Court of Appeals judge who has led the state’s Post-Release Supervision and Control Commission since 2023, told lawmakers Wednesday that his office sets the conditions of someone’s post-release supervision. But it’s up to a different agency, the Division of Community Supervision, and its hundreds of probation officers to ensure that the rules are being followed.
State Rep. Carla Cunningham, a Charlotte Democrat, appeared to reference DeCarlos Brown — who is charged with murdering Zarutska — at one point in the meeting, although not by name.
“The incident that we had with the individual being released into Charlotte, they were not supposed to be a danger to society,” she said. “… But when they were released, they weren't connected to mental health resources.”
Jackson said it’s illegal to force people to take medications even while they’re in prison, let alone after they’re released. So while his office can and often does require people with mental health issues to seek out treatment, he said, there’s really no way to ensure the treatment is successful.
He also noted that even some people with serious mental health problems can do well in prison, in part due to the strict rules and routine schedules, but then unravel when they get out, particularly if they wind up homeless.
It can be hard to predict who that will happen to, he said. In part, he added, that’s due to a law that prevents him from looking at people’s medical records when deciding what to require of them after they’re released.
“You'd be surprised how many people are ‘perfect offenders’ while they're in custody, but they really do have a lot going on,” Jackson said. “But the regimen, the discipline of custody, kind of hides that because that works for them.”
4 minutes per case
Every year, tens of thousands of people are released from North Carolina prisons. That means that Jackson and the three other people in charge of setting all of those people’s rules for re-entering society under probation or parole must handle 100 or more cases every single day.
That low level of staffing forces them to speed through decisions, Jackson told lawmakers Wednesday.
He estimated he spends probably four minutes, on average, deciding what should or shouldn’t be required for someone reentering society from prison. That could include decisions about whether or not to order substance abuse treatment, mental health therapies, ankle bracelets, curfews or conditions on where they can live, and with whom.
Adding to the caseload, he says, is a state law that says their decisions require two of the four commissioners to sign off. He asked the legislature to help ease that workload — if not by giving him more staff, then by allowing post-release decisions to be made by a single commissioner instead of two of them.
“Instead of four minutes on considering somebody, if I had to vote half as many times, I could spend eight minutes,” Jackson said.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said they hadn’t realized these decisions are being made so quickly.
“It's going to impact somebody for the rest of their life,” said Rep. Reece Pyrtle, R-Rockingham, a former police chief, expressing shock at Jackson’s four-minute estimate.
Rep. Phil Rubin, D-Wake, a former federal prosecutor, suggested the staff making those decisions should be about quadruple the size it is now.
“Four minutes per case is awfully fast, to put you in that position to make decisions on that,” he told Jackson. “And in some cases, I recognize it might be a real quick decision. But in other cases, you should have the time.”
Jackson said he would happily accept more help, but that it’s up to the legislature to budget that help. “If the General Assembly wants us to spend more time on these things, we’d need more commissioners,” he told the committee.
He also noted that the initial decision made after those few minutes of deliberation isn’t always the final word on what rules someone should face once released back into society. Jackson said there’s not any requirement for his office and the state’s probation and parole officers to stay in contact, but that it often happens anyway.
Once the officers on the ground interact with the people they’re tasked with overseeing, Jackson said, they often get back in touch with his office to recommend changes to the person’s probation. Sometimes they suggest the rules become more strict. Sometimes the rules become less strict, for instance, if someone was ordered to do something they already completed while behind bars.
“They come back to us and say ‘You ordered this, but they need so much more,’” he said. “Or, ‘Did you know they did this in prison? So maybe we should take that off.’ It should be a two-way conversation.”