If only they'd read his file.

Phillip Garrido reported to California parole authorities on June 8, 1999, fresh from being released by federal parole authorities.

He was a convicted rapist and kidnapper on lifetime parole out of Nevada, and had been charged but never tried in another case involving the sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl. He had been returned to prison for four weeks for a 1993 marijuana violation, and he had been a regular drug abuser.

All this information was contained in Garrido's federal parole file, and should have been used by California corrections officials to determine that he was a high-risk sex offender.

But no one read Garrido's federal file at the time, and that led to an astonishing series of failures to discover that he had been hiding Jaycee Lee Dugard in his Antioch-area home for years, concludes a new state report released Wednesday.

The report from state Inspector General David R. Shaw, conducted after critical media reports and public outcry over the Dugard case, concludes that California's parole operations have "systemic problems that transcend parolee Garrido's case and jeopardize public safety."

"From our perspective, profound mistakes were made," McGregor Scott, the Sacramento attorney guiding Dugard and her family through her reorientation into society, said Wednesday.

But that barely begins to describe the extent of the missed opportunities to find Dugard earlier, Shaw's report says.

Parole agents never talked to Garrido's neighbors or checked in with local law enforcement. They ignored hundreds of instances when his GPS tracking device malfunctioned.

They never enforced a rule that he remain within a 25-mile radius of his house, and they allowed him regularly to skip drug testing.

Out of the 123 months California agents supervised Garrido, they did so properly for only 12 of those months, Shaw found.

California corrections Secretary Matthew Cate appeared with Shaw on Wednesday and conceded there had been problems with Garrido's supervision.

"We agree that serious errors were made over the last 10 years," Cate said, adding that numerous reforms are being made to the parole system.

He said he could not discuss whether anyone faced disciplinary action.

Dugard had been kidnapped in 1991 from her South Lake Tahoe neighborhood. She was 11 at the time, and authorities say Garrido kept her as a prisoner in his backyard, raping her and fathering two daughters with her.

She was kidnapped three years after Garrido was released from prison, and for the first eight years of her captivity, federal officials had responsibility for supervising Garrido.

After he was released from federal parole, Nevada officials kept him on lifetime parole status because of a 1977 rape conviction out of Reno. But they allowed California parole to supervise him because he was living with his mother near Antioch.

Shaw found that when Garrido reported to California parole authorities that day in June 1999, he objected to remaining on parole and insisted he should not have to be supervised.

According to the report, he was not supervised at all until November 1999, when he was classified as a low-level offender.

His only contact with state parole agents between then and May 2000 were some phone calls, three office visits and five written reports that Garrido submitted.

From then on, his contacts with California parole agents were irregular and limited.

For the 10-year period California supervised him up until his arrest in August, agents visited his home only 60 times, with 40 of those visits coming in the past two years. Corrections officials have said a paroled sex offender typically might merit three to four visits a month.

No agents visited Garrido's home between June 2001 and July 2002. Only one visit was made between June 2004 and August 2005.

Four different times – November 1999, July 2004, December 2005 and April 2008 – California parole officials recommended to Nevada that Garrido be released from parole, Shaw found in his investigation. Nevada refused.

Call The Bee's Sam Stanton, (916) 321-1091.