Barred for Life

For the first 15 years behind bars, trouble and Debra seemed to go together naturally. She was busted for possessing drugs and drug paraphernalia. She got into fights, was punished for disrespecting staff. Finally, though, something clicked and she thought this was an idiotic way to while away a life. Like many other prisoners who've been behind bars for much of their lives, prisoner W-15265 got religion. She enrolled in vocational training and self-help programs, and got certified in masonry and home and auto upholstery.

As the 21st century got underway, Mattie's psych evaluations were all positive. In 2004 her counselor's report deemed her a "low degree of threat to public safety." A year later her psychological assessment said she had a "low to moderately low" likelihood of acting violently upon release. She lined up a place in a drug-treatment transitional housing setup in Hayward, and got herself five job offers.

In September of last year, more than a decade after she was first eligible for parole, Mattie beat long odds and got the parole board to recommend she be let out of prison.

Since there are about 29,000 lifers in California, and the board only recommends a few dozen a year for parole, clearly Mattie — and Carbone, who filed a document listing 17 reasons why she was a good parole candidate — had convinced some inherently cynical people that she had really turned her life around.

But Mattie didn't get to go home. Shortly after the parole board issued its recommendation, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed the decision, his two-page release review, dated Sept. 22, 2006, declaring that "the negative factors weighing against her parole suitability presently outweigh the positive factors tending to support it."

It was not an unusual case. "We don't need to apologize in being extremely tough in looking at people who have killed and abused others in horrendous ways," explains Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Dave Dahle, who is in charge of his office's "lifers division," which monitors the current sentencing status of the 12,000 lifers in the system who originate out of L.A. County. "Is it capricious? No. Is it tough? Absolutely. To get yourself back into society, an inmate has to be as focused as a student working on a Ph.D."

And so, despite those who deal with her daily believing she is no longer a public threat, 54-year-old Mattie remains behind bars. Soon, she will begin her fourth decade of incarceration. If she lives another 20 years in prison, at current costs the state will be spending about $1 million incarcerating her for the time period afterthe parole board deemed her rehabilitated.

"Society sentences us to life and then they forget about us," Mattie wrote from the Central California Women's Facility. "The parole board found me suitable and Arnold reversed their decision. He has no faith in his own appointed board members. I have done all I can possibly to do to [sic] become a better person. I am not the person I was 27 years ago."

Since 1988, when voters passed an initiative restructuring the parole process, governors have had the power to reverse parole recommendations for murderers. All four governors since then have used their veto vigorously.

Gray Davis, the only Democrat of the quartet, was so concerned about being perceived as "soft on criminals" that he went out of his way to stress that he would neverrelease a murderer serving life; and, almost true to his word, he vetoed all but six of these parole recommendations, arousing the wrath of civil liberties groups but protecting his flank from attacks by tough-on-crime Republicans. And the handful Davis did ultimately release were easily understood to be "sympathetic" cases; in particular, women who had murdered their partners after suffering years of domestic violence and psychological abuse.

Thus, while most lifers in California are sentenced to between x years and life, building in the possibility of parole should those individuals dramatically change their lives and moral values while incarcerated, in practice Davis converted almost all of their sentences into life without the possibility of parole.

When Schwarzenegger was elected, he held a press conference at the state Capitol announcing he would take a more nuanced approach to the issue. For a few years, he kept his word on this. In March, the San Francisco Chroniclereported he had overturned 90 percent of the parole recommendations for lifers sent his way in 2006. Recently, however, his parole veto pen has been wielded more often — though, to be fair, he is still paroling far more lifers each year than Davis did during his entire tenure.

"If I sound a little angry," Mattie's letter continued, "I am and have good reson [sic] to be angry. Yet, bitter, I am not. I accept full responsibility for my crime. I blame no one for my actions. I cannot unscramble an egg. I can't go back in time and change what I did. If I could, I wouldn't be here. And yes, I am very remorseful."

"It's case by case," says Bill Maile, spokesman for the governor. "And the underlying criteria in each case is the threat to public safety." And do politics ever play a role in the decision-making process? "No way. Absolutely not." Which begs the question: What hands-on criteria does the governor use when he and his legal staff peruse a parole file, and then he denies a parole that has been recommended by a panel of experts who themselves have had to consider an array of testimony provided by all those who work with the parole applicant?