SACRAMENTO — For nearly a year after Phillip Garrido was put on supervised parole in California in 1999, parole agents never bothered to visit him at home.
They did not perform the standard parolee interview, assess him or check his living arrangements, as is routine.
And although GPS monitoring showed he was spending large amounts of time in his Antioch-area backyard, there's no evidence parole agents ever investigated why.
That yard is where authorities say he kept Jaycee Lee Dugard captive for 18 years after allegedly kidnapping her in 1991 when she was 11.
The new details of Garrido's supervision are contained in 36 pages of records released Friday in response to a suit filed and paid for by The Bee.
The records, the second set turned over by state corrections officials because of the lawsuit, illustrate how cavalierly Garrido, a convicted rapist and kidnapper, was watched.
Though parole agents spent little time with Garrido in those early years, they concluded they knew enough about him to declare him "a suitable candidate for discharge from state parole supervision," the records state.
In the days after Dugard was found with Garrido last August, corrections officials defended their supervision. But an internal review, done after the case broke open, found serious problems with the way his parole was handled.
The full picture of that supervision is not available because a year's worth of documents from his file are missing. But the records provided show he failed drug tests and disappeared at times.
For the first eight years after Dugard was abducted, Garrido was under the control of federal parole agents for a 1977 kidnapping. In that case, Garrido abducted a woman near South Lake Tahoe, took her to a Reno storage shed and repeatedly raped her.
He won early release in 1988, and was put on federal parole. Records released to The Bee on Friday by the U.S. Parole Commission show agents had high hopes for him.
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