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| Mass. DOC Commissioner sets up abuse probe system |
| By Boston Globe |
| Published: 06/28/2004 |
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The Massachusetts Department of Correction is creating a new system aimed at improving investigations of alleged inmate abuse by officers. Prison managers are building a database by examining brutality allegations gathered from inmate grievances, from inmate letters and even verbal complaints to staff. Investigators are being assigned from a new central office at headquarters to follow each case to its conclusion. Correction Commissioner Kathleen M. Dennehy said the database will help managers to monitor the allegations throughout the state prison system's 17 institutions. Dennehy said the old system was characterized by bias and peer pressure on correction employees to look the other way. "Right now, we just want to know the issue," she said in an interview with The Boston Globe published Monday. "If it is an allegation or brutality, whether you write it in correspondence, or as a grievance, or stand up and say it, we are going to take it." Previously, complaints were dealt with at the institutions by their respective superintendents, the commissioner said, and hundreds of allegations were routinely dismissed on procedural grounds such as errors on forms or tardiness in filing a complaint, with no investigation of the underlying facts. Dennehy's new program has drawn criticism from the prison officers union. Steve Kenneway, the union president, said officers lost faith in Dennehy for believing the word of one inmate over six corrections officers after she fired an officer and demoted five others in April at the maximum-security Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center. The Correction Department said the fired officer allegedly used excessive force with an inmate, and the five others allegedly filed false reports. Defrocked priest John J. Geoghan was killed last August in a Souza-Baranowski cell after his repeated complaints about abuse by officers helped prompt his transfer from a medium-security facility. Dennehy took over as acting commissioner of the state prison system in December, after Gov. Mitt Romney removed Michael T. Maloney from the top job. The governor appointed her commissioner in March. |
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