As a side note, in my past life as a parole officer, no case was as miserable as a Virginia case. Virginia gives huge suspended sentences but
never activates them. One of my first interstate cases was a guy on for armed robbery. He was arrested for new crimes and absconding 8 times and returned to VA, serving 3 months at most each time. Understand that under the auspices of the Interstate Compact that governs state to state transfers, there are easily met mandatory criteria that mean a different state can send you the worst case on the planet and you can't reject it, and you will only have the authority over him the sending state gives you. In most states, absconding gets you the whole bid or close to it. A conviction beyond the tiniest misdemeanor or traffic offense tends to as well. He finally got a new charge for robbing a gas station and is locked up in my state still... presumably VA will activate his sentence when he gets out but I wouldn't be surprised if he gets extradited to VA and they slap him on the wrist and reinstate his supervision again.
Speaking to officers from other states at well, their experiences with VA were similarly horrible. Most other states were pretty uniformly easy to deal with- hey, I need this judgment modification. Hey, get your DA to sign this. Hey, we can't fulfill this condition under our laws, what do you want to sub for it? No problems with most places. But not VA. Part of it is probation and parole officers there are powerless- they're not really much like law enforcement like they are in many states. They cannot even issue their own warrants (a "capias", as VA likes to do everything fundamentally similarly but with different names) and they rely on local cops to serve their own warrants. But they're also completely fucking incompetent. I never found a state with officers and supervision that was so poorly managed, and even now it's not even a little rare to arrest or investigate some guy, charge him with something, and then find out his VA probation officer took out a violation on him... six months to a year after he was last seen and only after he got busted for a major crime.
In contrast I have generally had no complaints about the conduct or professionalism of most VA cops and state police (although VSP are serious road nazis and proud of it) and I think their jails and prisons, which I occasionally end up travelling to for work, are better run than most. But their probation and parole officers are damn useless... and it seems to be by design given their lack of authority.
Unless Chris commits a serious new crime on release, which is IMO really unlikely, they will push him through the system.
Changing subjects a tiny bit, the common evaluation used by many states and most Anglosphere countries to determine risk of recidivism for those charged with sex offenses is the Static-99.
Here is the quick and dirty scoring sheet. It isn't very complex although there is a little nuance in the classwork and books you use to do them.
(Are images blocked on this subforum? You can see the quick and dirty scoresheet
here.
Chris would assess out as a "2" (assuming his past charges included an element of violence in the conviction, and diversionary sentencing agreements also count for the purposes of this scoring), which is in the low-moderate range. My coding guide tells me that generally speaking those who assess in his risk range have a rate of recidivism of 3-7% over a five year period.
Curiously, if he turns 40 before conviction, he drops down to a 1- with a 2.5-5% rate of recidivism over a five year period.
Personally, I think those are actually very likely to reoffend, but those are the rates for which they get caught or self-report anyway.
The static99 are important guidelines for determination of conditions at sentencing and often make or break ankle monitor terms. That said I doubt Chris will be on lifetime GPS, he might get one for house arrest or a curfew I guess.
