After rising from patrol cop to Denver’s police chief, David Michaud might have been expected to be a throw-away-the-key type of parole-board chairman.
But during his three years at the helm, Michaud instead looked for reasons to give deserving inmates second chances.
Michaud, who has announced he will step down as of May 1, said he earnestly sought signs that inmates were ready for parole release, making sure each time to give them and their relatives their say during hearings.
“I have made an effort to change the culture of how we do the hearings,” he said Friday.
As a consequence, in three years, parole-release rates went from 13 percent to about 20 percent.
Before Michaud took office, inmates believed the only way to get out of a Colorado prison was to stay until their mandatory parole-release date, he said.
That approach led to a process in Colorado in which the only way to keep pace with soaring incarceration rates was to build a new prison costing millions every few years.
For the first time in decades, Colorado’s incarceration rate has been receding during the past 10 months, in part because of measures by the parole board and also because of steadily dropping conviction rates.
Michaud said he wasn’t a pushover though. A budget-cutting plan last year to save $19 million by releasing inmates up to six months early from prison garnered only a fraction of that amount in savings because he refused to parole hundreds of offenders, Michaud said. He said he would not release inmates just to save money at the expense of public safety.
Michaud often asks parolees to pick one word that describes how they would succeed on parole. The answer Michaud coaxes them to pick is “sobriety.” Inmates who attend anger-management, drug-treatment and work programs have a better chance of earning parole, he said.
Michaud also has sought savings by paroling inmates who are illegal immigrants and will be deported or paroling prisoners who also have convictions in other states.
Michaud, 69, said he is retiring because the demands of doing his share of 16,000 parole hearings and 6,000 parole-revocation hearings a year have worn him down.
“I think my wife is sick of seeing me at the table going through those case files night after night,” he said.
