Gregory Lee Vogelsang, a 57-year-old convicted of kidnapping and molesting several children between the ages of five and eleven in the 1990s, has been granted early release by a three-person parole board in November. His original sentence: 355 years in prison.
Breitbart reported that the parole was granted under a law that Governor Gavin Newsom signed in 2020, which allows inmates who are 50 years and older and who have served 20 or more years behind bars to receive parole consideration. Vogelsang qualified on both counts.
Sacramento County's top law enforcement officials are not mincing words about what this means for the public.
The Sacramento County Sheriff's Office on Thursday laid out the scope of what Vogelsang did to earn 355 years. He was convicted on dozens of felony counts, including lewd acts on a child, kidnapping a child to commit a lewd act, and lewd acts on a child with force or violence.
According to the Sheriff's Office, he molested at least six boys after using grooming tactics to gain access to them by building trust with their parents, inviting them to sleepovers, and taking them on outings.
The details are as disturbing as you would expect. The Sheriff's Office described one case:
"In one case, a child reported Vogelsang persuaded him to get into his vehicle under the pretense of helping pick out a gift. The child was driven to a residence and repeatedly assaulted despite crying and asking him to stop."
Another victim endured years of abuse:
"Another victim spent the night at Vogelsang's home nearly every weekend for years because he was friends with Vogelsang's family. During those visits, the abuse occurred repeatedly over an extended period of time."
These were not ambiguous offenses adjudicated on technicalities. These were systematic, predatory acts against children as young as five. A court weighed all of it and arrived at 355 years. That number was not arbitrary. It reflected the gravity of what was done to those boys.
Vogelsang has blamed alleged abuse by his father when he was a child for his behavior. But his own assessment of his condition should have given any parole board pause. In his own words:
"When I don't view a child as a sex object, I don't want to become aroused, but I know it's always going to be there."
"I know it's always going to be there." The man convicted of dozens of felony counts of child molestation told people, plainly, that his predatory impulses are permanent. A three-person board heard that and voted to put him back in a community with children.
Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho offered a blunt prediction:
"This inmate will molest again, and yet this parole board is letting him out."
Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper was even more direct:
"The parole board is letting us down; they are horrible. After this case and the Funston case, they need to be gone, period."
The Funston case Cooper referenced involves David Allen Funston, who was serving three life sentences and was granted parole and ordered to be released in February under the same "Elderly Parole Program."
Funston was only stopped from walking free because he was jailed in another county on separate crimes prior to being freed.
The Sheriff's Office posted on social media that Vogelsang was "headed to a neighborhood near you," and added that "California's elderly parole system is broken. The public deserves to know how decisions like this are being made."
When a district attorney tells you a released inmate will reoffend and a sheriff publicly calls for the dissolution of the parole board, the system is not functioning. It has failed at its most basic obligation.
The 2020 law Newsom signed rests on a simple premise: that age diminishes danger. If you are 50 or older and have served 20 years, you qualify for parole consideration regardless of what you did or how long a judge determined you should serve for doing it.
The logic collapses on contact with cases like this one. Vogelsang's crimes were not crimes of opportunity or momentary impulse. They were sustained, calculated, repeated over years against multiple victims.
The sentence of 355 years reflected a judicial determination that this man should never be free again. The parole board, empowered by a law signed in Sacramento, overrode that determination.
This is the recurring pattern with California's criminal justice reforms. The laws are written in abstractions: "elderly inmates," "rehabilitation," "parole consideration."
The consequences arrive in specifics. A man who kidnapped and sexually assaulted children crying and begging him to stop now qualifies for release because he turned 50 and served his time quietly enough.
No one who voted for this law will face those children's families. No member of that three-person parole board will live next door to Gregory Lee Vogelsang. The people who engineered this outcome are insulated from it entirely. The public is not.
California has spent years constructing a criminal justice apparatus that treats incarceration itself as the problem to be solved. Sentence reductions, early parole programs, reclassified felonies. Each reform is sold as compassionate, as evidence-based, as modern. And each one shifts risk from the incarcerated to the communities that had nothing to do with the crime.
Vogelsang's case is not an edge case or an unfortunate exception that slipped through the cracks. It is the system working as designed. The law set the criteria. He met the criteria. The board applied the criteria.
The result is a man convicted of dozens of counts of child molestation, who openly acknowledges his compulsions are permanent, walking out of prison three centuries before his sentence expires.
The Funston case makes the pattern harder to ignore. Two child predators, both serving sentences meant to keep them locked away for life, both granted parole under the same program, both flagged by the same local officials sounding the same alarms.
Sacramento's district attorney and sheriff are doing what the state's own parole system will not: telling the public the truth about who is being released and what they are capable of. That they have to do so at all is an indictment of every official who built this pipeline from prison to the public.
Three hundred and fifty-five years meant something when a judge imposed it. It meant those boys mattered. It meant what was done to them was so severe that the man responsible should die behind bars. A three-person board, operating under a law signed with a pen stroke, decided otherwise.
The boys who cried and begged him to stop did not get a hearing.
