Kentucky Administrative Office Of The Courts (AOC) Hires Felons. WTF.

AOC's puzzling hire at the jail

The Administrative Office of the Courts deserves credit for hiring felons, a class of people who are particularly at risk of dropping into permanent, debilitating unemployment.

That said, the AOC will perform a much greater service in the future if it avoids the mistakes made with Francis Baker.

Baker is the persistent felony offender (18 convictions over almost two decades on charges ranging from burglary to facilitating the trafficking of controlled substances) who the AOC hired in July 2007 as a pre-trial officer while he was still on parole.

Assigned to the Lexington-Fayette Detention Center, Baker met with new inmates, reviewed their records and made bond recommendations to judges.

He was also stationed at the Fayette County courthouse where he worked in a program that involved drug screening of defendants who will be released with electronic monitoring.

One of those defendants made complaints about Baker, as did a corrections officer at the detention center, Doris Zirbes.

In a lawsuit against the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government, Zirbes alleges that she was punished for telling law enforcement officials about Baker's background, that he had access to law enforcement databases that were supposed to be off-limits to him, and that he gave some female inmates special treatment.

The AOC has moved Baker to a job in Frankfort where he will have no contact with people in custody, noting his "inability to effectively perform his job duties," as a pre-trial officer.

This situation, reported by Herald-Leader staffer Valarie Honeycut, is packed with unanswered questions but the biggest ones revolve around this: What was the AOC thinking?

Baker is not a guy who got into trouble once or twice and just seemed to need some help getting back on the right track. His criminal history record goes on for pages, stretching back to 1981 when he was convicted of receiving stolen property.

While the AOC may have had some job that would suit Baker and help him get settled in society, it's hard to understand how anyone could think that, while he was still on parole, it made sense to put him in a job that required judgment and discretion and involved access to both vulnerable people and their histories.

Equally puzzling is the question of how much supervision Baker received from the AOC. The Lexington government, responding to Zirbes' lawsuit, contends that while he worked in our local jail, Baker was an employee of the AOC, which was responsible for his supervision. Did someone in Frankfort keep close tabs on Baker? Who knew what he was doing day in and day out in his job?

Finally, while the AOC contends that hiring Baker and other felons stems from it's commitment to rehabilitation — an admirable goal we fully support — it has no data on how many it has hired.

Presumably that also means it doesn't keep track of how many have fared well in their assignments, what support systems help them make the transition or other data that could inform and guide the AOC as it pursues that goal.