Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 12, 1994 TAG: 9409140022
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRANK GREEN RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH FOR THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Without pardons from a governor or the blessing of any judge or jury, stick-up artists Nathan Jerome McCall and James Albert Steele III were released from Virginia prisons years before completing their sentences.
By the time prison interrupted their careers, their gunfire had left one victim crippled and another near death.
Behind bars, each was a model inmate, and each was returned to the streets early by a system built of 40 laws, 123 legal opinions, decades of political tinkering and a five-member Parole Board.
In Steele's case, parole was a mistake.
A few months after he left New Kent Correctional Center, he robbed and killed a clergyman who had tried to help him. It was a crime so cold-blooded it helped elect George Allen governor and sent Steele back to prison - at least for 10 years until he's again eligible for parole.
In McCall's case, parole paid off.
After leaving the St. Bride's Correctional Center, McCall entered Norfolk State University and graduated with honors three years later. He is now a reporter for The Washington Post with a best-selling book, a Hollywood contract in his pocket and an open road ahead.
Allen has proposed abolishing parole and establishing ``truth in sentencing'' as ways to reduce the risk of crime. Cases like Steele's, where a parolee commits a highly publicized, violent crime, have created support for Allen's ``Proposal X.''
But while parolees commit many violent crimes, 60 percent of those who have been paroled do not return to prison within three years of their release. A recent state study showed that, between 1990 and 1992, 4 percent of the state's murders, 2 percent of its rapes and 9 percent of its robberies were committed by people on discretionary parole.
Steele and McCall are among thousands of killers, rapists and gunmen released into society by Virginia's Rube Goldberg system of parole and ``good time'' sentence reductions - widely regarded by criminologists as the most complicated method of determining prison time in the United States.
It is a mystery to the public, often inaccurately reported by the news media and, perhaps, only fully mastered by prisoners and a handful of state experts. Long-term inmates study its nuances and vagaries; it can allow them to serve as little as one-sixth of their sentences.
``This patchwork effort in sentencing and parole reform has resulted in a sanctioning system that is so complicated it truly may only be fully understood by the career criminal,'' said Richard Kern, a state criminologist.
As McCall and Steele demonstrate, the critical, high-stakes trick in granting discretionary parole is determining who should get a second chance. Erring in Steele's case cost Virginia the life of a man who could have done much for the commonwealth.
Erring in McCall's case would have done the same.
The two men illustrate extreme opposites in the public debate over Allen's plan. Allen cites Steele's case as an example of why parole should be abolished. McCall criticized Allen's proposals last month when the two appeared together on CNN's ``Larry King Live'' television show.
For Allen and many Virginians, the threat posed by a parole system is too great. Others fear prisons will become prohibitively large and expensive powder kegs without the hope that parole gives inmates. For them, the risk of ending parole is too great.
The cases of McCall and Steele show just how unpredictable the outcome of a parole decision can be, even when the backgrounds and prison behavior records of inmates are similar.
Each man grew up in a two-parent household and had at least two brothers. Each started getting in trouble with the law for petty larceny around the age of 14 or 15, moving from minor to more serious offenses.
Their formative years were spent in a juvenile culture characterized by such status symbols as ``eight-ball'' leather jackets and expensive athletic shoes. They were driven to maintain face at all cost, exposed to drugs and familiar with the intoxicating power of the handgun.
Each lost childhood friends to prison, narcotics and homicide.
But there were differences in their backgrounds, too. McCall grew up in Cavalier Manor, a working-class neighborhood in Portsmouth; Steele in Richmond's Blackwell area, a crime-plagued and impoverished neighborhood.
Each started his criminal career with minor thefts, but Steele's misdeeds grew more violent more quickly. At age 16 he was convicted as an adult for shooting a teen-ager in the face.
The wound cost the victim an eye and slowed the movement of one of his arms. Steele said it was self-defense, but a judge thought differently and in 1986 hit him with a 10-year sentence.
According to state records, Steele was caught lying once, but otherwise was seen as an exemplary inmate. In part because of the violent nature of his crime, he at first was rejected for discretionary parole.
Through a combination of good conduct time and Parole Board approval, he was released on July 5, 1990, from the New Kent Correctional Center - little more than three years after beginning his sentence - on the condition he be placed under intensive supervision, which included frequent contacts with a parole officer.
Freed to kill
Steele returned to Richmond where Harvey Leo Webb, a divinity student who had recently gained his own church, befriended Steele and tried to help him as he had other ex-convicts trying to readjust to freedom.
In January 1991, Webb, the father of a 3-year-old girl, was shot to death at the Wonder Bread Bakery Thrift Shop where he worked part time as bakery manager.
After killing Webb, Steele took the cash he stole from the bakery and took his girlfriend on a shopping spree in Webb's car.
The two mugged for a camera that evening at a night club. Steele posed in a leather jacket he bought with the money, holding the rest of the cash in his hands.
Webb was found the next morning slumped in an office chair, a bullet hole in his head.
In an interview earlier this year, Steele said he was not guilty and, therefore, would not talk about why his parole failed. Steele had pleaded no contest to the slaying.
He was sentenced to life plus 68 years by a judge shocked by the photograph of Steele partying with his girlfriend at the club. He is serving time at the Greensville Correctional Center.
While he was a good inmate during his first term, Steele has been anything but well-behaved this time around. While awaiting transfer to the state system, he assaulted a Richmond jail inmate and received an additional seven years.
As of the end of June, he had racked up 11 Department of Corrections citations for offenses including possession of weapons, fighting, assault and threatening bodily harm.
He will be eligible for parole consideration in April 2004.
In a television spot aired during last fall's campaign, Allen stood outside the bakery where Webb was killed, described the crime, identified the killer as a parolee and argued that the case illustrated why parole must end.
Freed to succeed
McCall warns that ``if you take away that incentive you're [going] to have an explosive situation in prisons. You're taking away hope.''
McCall, out of prison for 16 years, recalls that ``while I had done some bad things, intrinsically I knew that I was not a bad person. I think that's the case with many people in prison.''
``Clearly there are some people, and I've seen them, who are rotten through and through and are incorrigible and who should not be let out,'' McCall said.
``But I would wager it's certainly not the majority of people.
``One of the things that encourages many inmates to work hard and improve themselves is the potential for getting out early'' on parole.
``I set that as my goal from day one'' when entering prison, he said.
McCall, too, was a hood by the age of 14. By the time he was 15 he had participated in gang sex on girls, and by the time he was a high school senior he was committing robberies, burglaries and using drugs.
When he was 19 he shot a man who nearly died. He claimed self-defense and served 30 days in jail for assault. By the time he was 20, he was serving a 12-year state prison sentence for robbing a McDonald's and holding a gun to the manager's head.
McCall entered prison in 1975 when the parole and good-time system was similar, but not identical, to the current one. A counselor informed him that, if he behaved, he could get out after serving a quarter or less of his sentence.
Until 1983, inmates met in person with members of the Parole Board, but logistics and travel costs led the state to abandon such interviews by 1984. Since then, prisoners have been interviewed by parole examiners.
``When I found out my parole eligibility, I then set out to work hard and do everything necessary to make myself eligible - and that included reforming myself,'' McCall said.
He would later write passionately in his autobiography, ``Makes Me Wanna Holler,'' about his effort to make parole when he first became eligible:
``I knew my case would be a tough call for the Parole Board. There were a few matters working against me:
``I was a repeat offender. I was on probation for another felony when I stuck up the hamburger joint, and both crimes involved the use of a gun ... but there were also some things working in my favor:''
Except for a few minor infractions, he had been a model prisoner. He also had a stable family to return to and had won a one-year tuition scholarship to study journalism at Norfolk State University.
``On the day I went before the Parole Board, I was so nervous I was nearly paralyzed. I was scared that when it was time for me to speak, all my suffering would come to the surface and all my emotions would bum-rush my throat, and nothing would come out. So I did deep-breathing exercises and prayed for the best.
``When my name was called, I went in and took a seat before the board members - several white men and a black woman - who sat behind a long table. It was a stern-faced, tight-butt bunch. They asked a few questions about my crime, my family, that sort of thing. Then, after several other minor questions, came the bigeye: `So, Mr. McCall, what do you plan to do to better yourself if you get out, and what arrangements have you made to carry out those plans?'
``When they hit me with that question ... I was ready.
``I rapped. I rapped hard. I rapped harder than I'd ever rapped in my life. I took all the skills I'd picked up rapping with those penitentiary philosophers out on the yard and threw the whole handful at the parole board. I told them all I'd done to improve myself in the nearly three years that I'd been locked up, and shared my plans to go home to my family and to enroll at Norfolk State. I told them that robbing that hamburger joint was the stupidest thing I could have done, and that I'd spent a lot of time thinking about that and other mistakes I'd made in my life. The bottom line was, I came straight from the heart. I came from so deep within the heart that I surprised myself. But I meant every word I said. I was changed. I knew it, and I wanted to make sure they knew it.
``When my letter from the board finally arrived, I took it to my bunk and sat down alone. I looked at the letter in the sealed envelope a long time before attempting to open it.
``Then I opened the letter. For a long while, I just sat there, staring at the words, making sure I'd gotten it right. I thought, I made parole. I made it. I'm getting out. They're goanna let me go. I can go home. Soon. I made it. I can't believe it. I made it. I made parole!
``I remember clearly that snowy February (3) day in 1978 when I was released from the joint. My homes gathered on the sidewalk that morning and watched me leave. As I climbed into the car and my mother drove off, I cast a long, hard look at the prison, and tears began streaming down my face. I felt a strange mixture of pain and pride. I was mostly proud that I had survived, and I told myself, then and there, I can do ANYTHING.''
McCall said that ``one of the reasons I think these kinds of get-tough proposals like ending parole are so ludicrous is that the people who normally commit crimes don't know about these proposals in the first place.
``I didn't think about the consequences ... because I wasn't planning on getting caught. Had I been thinking along those lines in the first place, I would not have done what I did.
``Sometimes I wonder how I endured when so many others were crushed.''
He said he believes that successful, hard-working parents and neighbors demonstrated to him that there were alternatives to life in the streets. ``That made all the difference in the world.''
In the end, McCall wrote:
``My background and those of my running partners don't fit all the convenient theories, and the problems among us are more complex than something we can throw jobs, social programs, or more policemen at.''
``For those wooed like answers, I have no pithy social formulas to end black-on-black violence. But I do know that I see a younger, meaner generation out there now - more lost and alienated than we were, and placing even less value on life.''
This is fourth of a five-part series on parole. It is a combined project of The Associated Press, the Daily Press of Newport News, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Roanoke Times & World-News and the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk.
by CNB