California’s senior parole is re-traumatizing victims

By Jen Carson, especially for CalMatters

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David Allen Funston is serving three life sentences for sexually abusing multiple children he lured into his car with candy in Sacramento County. Under California’s Elderly Parole Act, he was granted parole at a hearing and was released from the Chino prison—and arrested again on another charge.

This is not an anomaly. This is the statute works as written.

The same 2014 law that opened the door to Funston’s hearing is the same law that has repeatedly forced the families of my father’s victims back into the parole process. This will give my father, serial killer Michael Bear Carson, his third parole hearing in three and a half years. My father and his wife were dubbed the San Francisco Witch Killers after a spate of deaths in the 1980s.

California’s senior parole process began with a 2014 federal court order aimed at reducing prison overcrowding. The Legislature later codified it and expanded it to apply generally to inmates who have reached the age of 50 and have served at least 20 consecutive years of imprisonment.

it does not guarantee release. But it mandates that cases be reopened based primarily on age and time served.

This choice has real consequences.

Most people serving life sentences are in prison for murder, rape and child sexual abuse. These are not cases of drug possession or technical violations. These are the most serious crimes in our system.

The Parole Hearing Board reviews these inmates’ institutional behavior, participation in rehabilitation programs, psychological evaluations, and overall risk to public safety.

These precautions matter. But eligibility is automatically triggered by age and time served — not by previous proof that an individual’s risk has changed significantly.

The burden of this automatic trigger falls on the families of the victims.

Any parole hearing requires notice, preparation, and often personal testimony. Families should review test reports, autopsy reports, and impact reports. In serial cases, hearings may be repeated on a predictable schedule.

The law may not guarantee release – but it does guarantee repetition.

Automatic renewal of these cases does little to reduce prison overcrowding. What it does is force the victims’ families to relive the trauma over and over again.

I support effective prison reform. Mass incarceration was and remains a profound moral failure.

And the reasoning behind parole for the elderly is understandable. Research shows that recidivism rates generally decrease with age.

Older inmates are more expensive to house and often have significant medical needs. California’s aging prison population is real fiscal and humanitarian challenges which deserve thoughtful decisions.

But reforms must be targeted and evidence-based. The automatic age threshold should not apply equally to serial killers, serial child predators, and individuals whose crimes were situational or addiction-driven.

Age alone is not evidence of reduced risk. Time served alone is not proof of rehabilitation.

Victim-centered reform should not treat repeated trauma as an inevitable side effect. California has other options.

The state could expand its secure geriatric medical units and hospice care in its correctional facilities. This could strengthen compassionate release procedures for individuals who are medically incapacitated and at a demonstrably low risk.

It could develop more precise risk assessment tools that distinguish between categories of violent crime, rather than assuming that age reduces risk in the same way for everyone.

And can invest earlier in prevention, diversion programsaccess to treatment and economic stability—where research shows the strongest long-term reductions in incarceration.

We reduce the prison population by preventing crime through economic stability, affordable treatment, and effective diversion of nonviolent crimes—not by focusing reform on a narrow group of long-term violent cases.

Public safety matters. Victims matter. Effective reform must protect both.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.