There was no written policy governing passive GPS monitoring. Parole agents were told, informally, that daily review was required only for active GPS monitoring—a higher-scrutiny program. The passive program, the report concluded, offered a “false sense of security” to the public: the system was generating data that no one was reviewing, and the alerts it produced were systematically ignored.
Garrido, in other words, had a GPS ankle monitor attached to his leg for more than a year before August 2009, and it had functioned principally as a false signal that responsible oversight was occurring. The oversight was not occurring.
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## The Prior Conviction That Should Have Mattered More
Garrido’s 1976 conviction was not a secret. It was in the record. A fifty-year federal sentence for kidnapping and rape, combined with concurrent state sexual assault charges, had resulted in only eleven years of actual incarceration. His release on federal parole in 1988 had placed him, in theory, under continuing legal supervision.
The federal parole system had its own failures. The Inspector General’s 2009 report focused primarily on California state parole because that was where the supervisory record was most accessible and most clearly deficient, but the report noted that the federal file—which California had never obtained—contained information about Garrido’s mental health, his drug use, his parole violations, and the soundproofed studio on his property. All of that information was available in a government file. It was simply never retrieved.
Garrido was also named as a suspect in other cases that were never resolved. His name surfaced in connection with the 1988 abduction of nine-year-old Michaela Garecht from a Hayward, California, supermarket parking lot. He was never charged in connection with that disappearance, and the case remained unsolved. Dugard’s case is the only one in which Garrido was convicted.