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A second warning sign floated up in 2004, when Guy conducted town meetings with the Wake County probation staff to assess the poor morale and tensions. There were other problems: not enough equipment and too many vacant positions.

Guy met with rank-and-file officers to discuss the problems. Guy and his assistants helped devise a plan to smooth tensions and fill jobs with the leaders in Wake County, including Regional Division Chief James Fullwood and Assistant Judicial Division Administrator J. David McDuffie and Pardue, the Wake office manager.

The plan's goals included improving recruitment and hiring, but the turnover continues. Last year, Wake County saw 14 percent of the probation office leave for better jobs or retirement, higher that the state average of 9.5 percent.

Rampant vacancies

At the start of 2006, 28 of Wake's 94 probation officer positions were vacant.

Pardue, the head of the Wake office, drew up an emergency plan. Officers had to work mandatory nine-hour days. Time off was discouraged, except for valid sick leave.

Managers reassigned all cases so that each offender had a probation officer; many offenders had been assigned to vacant positions, meaning that the entire office shared responsibility for the offender. All officers carried caseloads that exceeded guidelines: Community officers supervised 200 offenders; guidelines called for 110. Domestic violence officers watched 55 offenders; guidelines called for 30.

Because of these heavy caseloads, officers used their offices to meet with their offenders. Probation experts prefer field visits, where an officer can see an offender's home, talk with family members and get a sense of the social surroundings.

Heavy caseloads also take a toll on the probation officers, as Lawrence Lindsey, the lead chief probation and parole officer, noted in late 2005: "My officers and chiefs simply can't handle the type of pressure that is generated from all these cases. ... We can't keep officers to do the work, and almost anybody you talk to is seeking other employment. ... I hope that someone can understand our pain." The last two words were in bold type.

Four weeks after Guy put the crisis plan into effect, Pardue declared that the Wake office was close to being back in order, and put his staff back on eight-hour days. "Obviously our work is not finished," he wrote, "but with the continuing arrival of new hires and staff continuing to do good quality work, the end of the tunnel is much closer."

Just as Pardue was calling the emergency plan off, Atwater slipped out of reach. Atwater had cycled through four probation officers. He was assigned to Officer Chris Gladney, who made one unsuccessful phone call and didn't try to contact him again for more than a year. During that time, Atwater was arrested several times and picked up a felony conviction for weapons possession in Granville County. Atwater told a judge there that his probation officers stopped calling him.

"We have had too many offenders falling through the cracks," said Fullwood, the manager in charge of 21 counties, including Wake and Durham. "Each one is a walking time bomb."

In October 2006, internal auditors at the Department of Correction found a host of problems with how the Wake office was being run. While the internal audit focused only on routine office management, Guy agreed that the audit was a warning of festering problems with the operation of the office.

Nine months later, Guy received a complaint about a troubling practice in the Raleigh office: Offenders were being called in from their jobs to meet probation officers.

A DWI offender from Knightdale had been spending weekends in the jail and working during the week, and had paid all his court costs, jail fees and probation fees. The offender had to leave work for office appointments; on at least five occasions, his probation officer was either absent or significantly late when he arrived downtown.

"You do not ask an offender to leave work and come to an appointment," Guy said. "You do not. Period. That's Probation 101."

Guy said he has ordered the Wake and Durham offices to cut back on office appointments and spend more time in the field. He said he's tired of problems constantly surfacing in Wake and Durham counties.

"These are veteran, seasoned managers," Guy said, "and if anything, maybe I had too much faith that they were going to get things done."

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