Miguel Olea held a 17-year-old girl in his room against her will for days, raping her repeatedly. The victim escaped on the third day, a Monday morning in San Bernardino County two years ago this month.

Olea was convicted of statutory rape and sent to prison.

He was paroled on the condition that he avoid contact with minors, but this year state parole officials put him on a new budget-saving program called nonrevocable parole.

No longer would Olea, 22, have to report to an agent or risk being returned to prison for violating conditions of his release.

He is one of 452 high-risk offenders excused from supervised parole this year, a group the state is now trying to get back in the fold. Their dismissal was not a mistake, officials say, but the result of a recalibrated computer model that better accounted for certain risk factors.

The list of parolees being rounded up and returned to active supervision includes rapists, gang members, repeat wife-beaters and ex-felons found with guns, records obtained by The San Diego Union-Tribune show.

Even though the state has decided these offenders should be back on parole, they are immune from violations until they are formally returned. Officials do not know how long it will take to return them to active supervision or how many have been found.

The freed parolees include 29 domestic-violence cases, four convicted rapists, 12 people convicted of illegally possessing firearms or other deadly weapons, and three street-gang members, according to information released by the state.

"It happens because people aren't being trained," said Caroline Aguirre, a career parole officer from Los Angeles who retired in 2007. "And these parolees are committing new crimes."

Risk of reoffending is measured on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest risk. Those scoring above a 2 are supposed to be retained on active supervision.

Officials would not release details about individuals excused from supervision. According to a list obtained by the Union-Tribune, 77 scored a 5, 188 scored a 4 and 187 scored a 3.

To determine what kinds of criminals were involved, the newspaper did additional research on those who scored a 4 or 5. The newspaper searched court databases and news clippings to find noteworthy cases in which the name, date of birth and community correlated to the list.

In September 2006, Steven Frank Corral of Moreno Valley was arrested for felony spousal abuse. Corral was sentenced to nine months in county jail but violated probation in 2008, when he again was arrested for domestic violence and sent to state prison for two years.

Corral was paroled and was placed on nonrevocable status this year. He was arrested on new spousal-abuse charges in February and faces trial this year.

Isaac Villa, 24, of Santa Ana was released from prison after raping a girl younger than 16.

The conditions of Villa's release prohibited him from having contact with the girl, but he was placed on nonrevocable parole, so no one currently enforces that rule.

Prison officials began screening thousands of inmates and parolees for nonrevocable parole in January as part of a state budget fix adopted last summer.

By last week, they had transferred almost 8,000 parolees and soon-to-be-freed inmates to the minimal level of supervision. They expect to release 22,000 by next year.

The plan, included in a bill authored by Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego, and signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was designed to reduce prison overcrowding and parolee caseloads.

But problems surfaced quickly.

Three weeks ago, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation acknowledged that 656 parolees - one of every 10 evaluated to that point - were discharged from active supervision even though they pose a significant risk to public safety.

In written responses to questions, department spokesman Gordon Hinkle said the mass reclassification came from improvements to the California Static Risk Assessment, the 5-point system developed by the University of California Irvine.

The evaluation considers arrests, convictions, and sentencing and parole violations, but does not factor in the underlying circumstances of the crimes that send parolees to prison. Parole agents say that information is critical to determining whether an ex-felon will go straight.

The recent improvements to the model mean it can process crimes that were not previously being taken into account from their criminal background, Hinkle wrote.

"What has changed is the ability of the program to pick up charges from the rap sheets that were not entered in the expected fields," he wrote. "The result is that we now get a much better count of charges."

That improvement makes the evaluations more thorough, resulting in disqualification of the 656 parolees and inmates.

"In short, we would rather err on the side of public safety and put a relatively low number of individuals back on caseload supervision than risk one of them re-offending," Hinkle wrote.

About one-third of the felons whose risk score was reclassified were still in custody, leaving the 452 currently being sought.

As to how many of those have been returned to parole now, Hinkle wrote on Friday, "We don't have a number yet because we are first letting the parole units get out and track. We'll begin data collection in about a week."

The department's explanation of the situation has done little to satisfy state lawmakers.

Ducheny said she never expected rapists and other violent offenders to be included in the group of parolees released from active supervision.

"The idea is to free up the parole officers to focus on the more serious offenders," she said. "If they are not using those risk-assessment tools appropriately, then that's a big problem."

Assemblyman Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, called on the Inspector General's Office to investigate the handling of nonrevocable parole.

"Their main goal is budgetary and not one of public safety, but you have to have a balance," said Lieu, who voted against the bill. "What the Legislature intended was nonserious, nonviolent, non-sex offenders would be on NRP status, and what's happening now is not that."

Rounding up the parolees and returning them to formal monitoring is likely to take months - and a lot of legwork.

Under a policy adopted Tuesday, agents must make at least one attempted contact a month for reclassified parolees that the agency wants to return to supervision. That means agents must visit their last known address, check with former employers or ask local police if they know where the offenders might be.

No arrest warrants will be issued for the parolees simply because they cannot be found, the policy states.

If offenders commit new crimes before being returned to active supervision, "the charges shall not be addressed" by parole, wrote Robert Ambroselli, director of the state Division of Adult Parole Operations. "However, the discovery of new criminal conduct can be reported to local law enforcement for investigation."