SALT LAKE CITY — After a parolee was accused of murdering Utah County Sheriff's Sgt. Cory Wride during a traffic stop in February, the KSL investigators began digging into what’s being done to keep the public safe and improve oversight of Utah’s 13,000 parolees and probationers who live in our communities.

From door to door and house to house, agents who keep Utah's convicted criminals in check allowed KSL investigators an inside look.

“We have to wear so many different hats doing this job,” said agent James Clegg, “going from making sure public safety is in place to making sure that we’re trying to help some of those people rehabilitate themselves.”

Adult Probation and Parole is charged with keeping tabs on offenders who have been given the green light by a judge or the parole board to finish out their sentences living in our communities. One-fourth of those are parolees, some of whom have committed very violent crimes.

Clegg watches over 63 offenders, and he’s seen many successes, like one probationer who told Clegg, “I was attending church; I told you I'm mostly involved in the church all the time nowadays.”

But Clegg has spent years digging deeper into the stories he hears from convicts, and on Wednesday he invited KSL cameras along as he visited several offenders.

“Can I come in real quick,” he said after knocking on one probationer’s residence.

Clegg is trained to understand that every knock on a door invites potential risks to the agents and the community. To mitigate risks, agents travel in pairs.

“That person that got in trouble, you know they can resurface, they can turn into a real nightmare," he said. “We go in prepared. That’s our policy.”

As agents look for violations, the public may be relieved to learn most of the time they find none. But sometimes they do spot trouble.

“Do you mind if I walk down there and kind of snoop around for a minute?” Clegg asked the probationer.

The agents comb through kitchens and bathrooms looking for possible violations of an offender’s agreement. “Frequently, they have a no-alcohol clause and so we’ll check fridges, we’ll check cupboards, check freezers,” Clegg said.

At one home, the agents noticed a baseball bat by the front door, which prompted them to enhance their search of the home. “Dump all your stuff,” Clegg told the offender. His search uncovered an old drug kit, knives and prescription drugs, and suddenly the situation was not looking good.

Now Clegg had to make a decision: Should he put this probationer back behind bars or continue to work with her so she can stay in the community?

“What we try to do is sort out what’s going on and deal with what’s going on,” Clegg said.

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For several decades, agents have used their own discretion to determine if an offender can continue down a road of rehabilitation outside of prison or if that person should be sent back behind bars. However, some said such discretion has allowed offenders too many chances.

And now KSL has learned agent discretion will become a much more formalized process in the near future as Adult Probation and Parole moves toward a computer matrix system.

Think of it as a report card that grades how a parolee or probationer is doing on the outside — do they have a job, a steady place to live, are they staying crime free? Once it’s in place, the matrix will give agents options for how to deal with violators.

“We want to protect public safety, and that’s first and foremost in every law enforcement agency, of course,” said Steve Gehrke, spokesman for the Utah Department of Corrections.

Gehrke said in the past three years, 2,400 warrants have been issued to send parolees back to prison. It's uncertain if that number will go up or down under the new matrix system.

“It kind of has to work in concert with the discretion of that agent as well because we can’t just draw a hard fast line," Gehrke said. "There’s specifics, there’s context that goes into every single case, every single offender.”

Gehrke anticipates the matrix will be in development for several more months and it’ll be a first of its kind in the country.

As we returned to the streets with agent Clegg, we learned that upon further investigation he won’t send the probationer with the baseball bat by her front door back to prison. It turns out many of the concerning items he found inside the home belonged to a roommate. And with that, he’s off to visit another offender in his ongoing efforts to keep the public safe.

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