You are 100% right. Parole and probation violations are a common misstep in our system, and account for an enormous amount of our prison population. I can speak from experience. I had a one-year probation sentence, on the very last day with only a few hours until my probation was set to expire (I even had a preliminary release letter from my probation officer with the date and time of expiration and had completed my final assessments), I was packing a moving truck preparing to move out of the state. I did not intend, nor was there any possible way I could have finished packing and had everything wrapped up in that time, to leave prior to my probation being expired. Instead an off-duty sheriff deputy who knew I was on probation just happened to see me packing decided he was going to stop and arrest me for on a violation for attempting to violate by moving. Although when I went before the judge 24 hours later he dropped it, the fact of the matter is that I was still violated, spent 24 hours in a holding cell waiting to see the judge, all because someone was a little overzealous in their job and had a zero-tolerance attitude.
Now I see and hear the stories every day of individuals who are violated for the dumbest reasons (i.e. bus crash in front of probation office, witnessed by probation officer, individual taken to hospital, violated for missing probation appointment by same officer that witnessed the accident in the first place. Given a 90-day sentence for violating their probation. And those were the facts as provided by the officer, not the individual. The officer essentially was laughing at how much control they have over someone's life in these incidents.).
I call this the police-judicial complex; they have a "problem" in that between the end of the demographic Baby Boom and the partial reversion of the soft on crime '60s and '70s, there is much less real crime. Per the thesis of Arrest-Proof Yourself (http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Dale-C-Carson/dp...) that means in much of the country they'd have to downsize if they didn't "feed" upon a steady stream of what the authors refer to as "the clueless", most especially the sorts of people who can't realistically follow all their probation restrictions.
Obviously much, much better than them suffering layoffs. And I'l criticize the media again with their "if it bleeds, it leads" bias, how many in the US realize crime is down so much from that old peak?
I've always wondered if I would take parole, or complete my sentence? If it was just a few extra years, and I was in decent health; I think, I would say no to parole?
The rules they put on paroles are beyond unfair. They might have made sense in the 50's, but so much has changed. We don't have jobs. We don't have any housing. The few guys I knew who got out of San Quentin were given $180, and dropped off at the bus station in San Rafael. (The ones with caring family did a little better than the single guys, but all of them went back eventually because of parole violations.)
Whenever I hear a state administrator explain our current parole system; I know he's lying to the public.
A Stanford Mathematics grad student spent twenty-five years unsuccessfully struggling to obtain his PhD then beat his advisor to death with a hammer.
After serving quite a long time in prison, he was offered parole, with the only condition - at least as reported in the press - being that he not set foot on the Stanford campus ever again.
He refused parole, served out the remainder of his sentence then was released. I don't know what became of him after that but his plan was to work as an electronics technician in Silicon Valley.
While he did wrong to murder his advisor, I regard his refusal of parole as one of my inspirations for being so bluntly outspoken myself. There is no doubt whatsoever that what I blast all over the Internet makes me damn near unemployable but I work to benefit others that are unable to speak for themselves.
As bad as things do get for me sometime, there are billions of people alive today that have it far worse.
Now I see and hear the stories every day of individuals who are violated for the dumbest reasons (i.e. bus crash in front of probation office, witnessed by probation officer, individual taken to hospital, violated for missing probation appointment by same officer that witnessed the accident in the first place. Given a 90-day sentence for violating their probation. And those were the facts as provided by the officer, not the individual. The officer essentially was laughing at how much control they have over someone's life in these incidents.).