5 prison employees investigated in Sara Jane Olson release

Five employees at the state prison where former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson is incarcerated are under investigation in connection with her erroneous release last week, state officials said Thursday.

The employees are three rank-and-file workers who calculate inmate release dates, and two supervisors.

Olson, formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, was in prison for crimes she committed with the radical group in Los Angeles and Sacramento counties in 1975. She was freed March 17, but after an outcry by local law enforcement agencies, state officials realized that she must serve at least one more year. Olson was taken into custody Saturday and has been returned to prison.

Prison administrators apologized for their mistake and said they were launching an internal investigation.

But Scott Kernan, the department’s chief deputy secretary for adult operations, said the employees are not likely to be punished unless the department discovers that they deliberately contributed to Olson’s premature release.

“What we are trying to do is investigate what happened so we can prevent it from happening” again, Kernan said. “There is no intent to discipline our employees, unless we find malicious, willful misconduct.”

The employees under investigation, at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, Calif., all had handled Olson’s file at some point, department and union officials said. The union representing the three rank-and-file workers distributed letters that each received Monday from investigators with the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation ordering them to report for a tape-recorded “administrative inquiry” Tuesday at the prison.

“The scope of the investigation is relevant to the following allegation: On March 24, 2008, you were identified as neglectful in your duties when you failed to accurately calculate the release date of Inmate Olson, Sara, W-94197,” said the letters, which were distributed Thursday afternoon – with the workers’ names blacked out by officials of the Service Employees International Union Local International 1000.

Kernan said the letters were required by procedure and do not necessarily mean the employees will be disciplined.

Olson was in prison for a 1975 plot to kill Los Angeles police officers by blowing up their patrol cars and for second-degree murder in a Sacramento bank robbery during which a customer was killed by another SLA member. She spent 24 years as a fugitive and has been in prison for six years. She is now eligible for release in March 2009.

In a testament to the sensitivity of the high-profile case, SEIU President Jim Hard on Thursday accused prison administrators of trying to scapegoat his members. He said that four supervisors had reviewed Olson’s file since December without catching the mistake. At the time he spoke, Hard said he was not aware that any supervisors were under investigation.

“We believe that this is a coverup by the [Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] of their own lack of oversight,” Hard said.

Olson’s lawyers have filed a petition in Superior Court in Sacramento County questioning her continued imprisonment. David Nickerson, a San Rafael attorney for Olson, said she had consistently been told she would be released this month.

“They told us it was correct, and they repeated it,” Nickerson said. “If they’re going to claim, as they seem to be claiming, that it was incorrect, show us the documents. Show us the calculations. Show us where the error was made.”

A senior department lawyer, Alberto Roldan, who reviewed Olson’s file, said he had traced the mistake to a January 2005 review in which a case records worker, while implementing a decision by the state parole board, inadvertently dropped Olson’s Sacramento crime from the calculation of her release date.

Roldan said Thursday that the order by the parole board, then known as the Board of Prison Terms, was not as clear as it could have been, which may have contributed to the error.

Prison officials have acknowledged that the mistake was not caught in numerous reviews of Olson’s file after that point.

Corrections and union officials with SEIU have said the Olson case is emblematic of a broader problem involving prison record-keeping, specifically the calculation of inmate release dates.

Most of the work is done by hand, because the state’s computer technology cannot calculate the prison terms required by California’s complicated penal code. Union officials also say case records workers are overworked and undertrained, with 500 employees computing sentences for 417,000 prisoners a year.

The union sued the department in Superior Court in Sacramento County in December over a delay in recalculating prison terms for more than 30,000 inmates – some of whom, unlike Olson, were scheduled to stay in prison longer than required. State officials say they have made significant progress in recalculating those release dates.

michael.rothfeld@latimes.com