What Campbell and Jacobs observed was not a legally defined problem. It was a cluster of observations that combined to produce professional concern. The girls appeared subdued, pale, and rehearsed. They were with a man who was making extraordinary claims and whose background check had revealed a serious criminal record. They were apparently not in school on a weekday.
None of these individual observations, standing alone, is a sufficient basis for detaining either Garrido or the girls. Together, they produced a level of concern that Campbell and Jacobs chose to communicate to the parole office rather than to set aside.
The decision to communicate that concern was consequential. The decision not to communicate it—the decision to send Garrido away with a permit application and a note to try another office, or to conclude that the permit request was unusual but not actionable—would have been understandable. There was no obvious legal mandate to call the parole office. There was no protocol that required notification to a parole officer when a registered sex offender sought a campus event permit.
The notification happened because Campbell and Jacobs, individually and together, concluded that the information they had was worth conveying. The formality of the institutional channel—calling the parole office—was available to them, and they used it.
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## The Changed Landscape: Parole Supervision After 2009
The Dugard case became a reference point in discussions of parole supervision reform in California and nationally. The Inspector General’s report, released in November 2009, provided specific and detailed findings about what had gone wrong, and its recommendations pointed toward specific changes in policy and practice.