Gregory Lee Vogelsang, a 57-year-old man convicted of kidnapping and molesting children as young as five, is walking out of a California prison. A three-person parole board granted him release in November under the state's Elderly Parole Program, a law Governor Gavin Newsom signed in 2020. His original sentence: 355 years.
Vogelsang 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. His crimes, committed in the 1990s in Sacramento, targeted at least six boys between the ages of five and eleven.
According to Breitbart, the law that freed him is simple in its mechanics. Inmates who are 50 years or older and have served 20 or more years behind bars become eligible for parole consideration. A court once looked at what Vogelsang did and determined that 355 years was the appropriate measure of justice. Three people on a parole board decided otherwise.
The Sacramento County Sheriff's Office detailed Vogelsang's crimes on Thursday, and the facts deserve to be stated plainly. He groomed his victims by building trust with their parents, inviting children to sleepovers, and taking them on outings.
"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 boy spent the night at Vogelsang's home nearly every weekend for years because he was friends with Vogelsang's family. The abuse occurred repeatedly over that entire period.
These are not abstract policy data points. These were children. They trusted the adults around them, and the system that convicted the man who hurt them determined he should never walk free again. That system has now been overruled by a parole mechanism that treats age as a form of rehabilitation.
During his parole hearing, Vogelsang reportedly made the following statement:
"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."
Read that again. He told the board, in his own words, that his predatory impulse is permanent. The board heard that and voted to release him anyway.
Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho offered a blunt assessment:
"This inmate will molest again, and yet this parole board is letting him out."
That is not a political statement. It is a prediction grounded in the offender's own testimony about himself. The chief prosecutor in the county where these crimes occurred is telling the public, clearly, that this man remains a danger. The parole board overrode him.
Vogelsang is not the only convicted predator freed under the Elderly Parole Program. David Allen Funston, who was serving three life sentences for crimes against children, was granted parole and ordered released in February under the same law. Funston was only prevented from walking free because he was jailed in another county on separate crimes.
Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper connected the cases directly:
"The parole board is letting us down; they are horrible. After this case and the Funston case, they need to be gone, period."
When your county's district attorney and sheriff are both publicly condemning the same parole decisions, the system is not functioning as intended. Or perhaps it is functioning exactly as intended, which is worse.
Governor Newsom signed the Elderly Parole Program into law in 2020. The premise is straightforward: aging inmates are less dangerous, incarceration is expensive, and mercy has its place. That is the theory. The practice is a man convicted on dozens of felony counts against small children, sentenced to three and a half centuries in prison, telling a parole board that his attraction to children will "always be there" and being released into the public.
The Sacramento County Sheriff's Office put it plainly in a social media post: Vogelsang is "headed to a neighborhood near you."
"California's elderly parole system is broken. The public deserves to know how decisions like this are being made."
That statement came not from a political organization or a cable news commentator. It came from the law enforcement agency that investigated the original crimes.
California's political class has spent years constructing a criminal justice framework built on the assumption that the system is too harsh, that sentences are too long, that incarceration itself is the problem to be solved. The Elderly Parole Program is a product of that worldview. And in the abstract, the question of aging inmates and proportionality is not unreasonable.
But governance is not an abstraction. It is the specific application of law to specific people. A 355-year sentence exists because a judge and jury confronted the full scope of what Vogelsang did to at least six children and concluded that no amount of time would constitute an excessive punishment. The Elderly Parole Program does not engage with those facts. It simply counts birthdays and years served, and if the numbers line up, the door opens.
No mechanism in this law appears to weigh the nature of the crime with the seriousness that a 355-year sentence demands. No mechanism stopped the board from releasing a man who openly admitted his compulsions are permanent. The law created a formula, and the formula produced this result.
Authorities now want the program changed. The question is whether Sacramento will listen, or whether the next case will arrive before the reform does.
Somewhere in Sacramento, the boys Vogelsang assaulted in the 1990s are now grown men. They were told the system handled it. They were told 355 years meant something. Now, a three-person board and a six-year-old law have told them it didn't.