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| Mass. officials vow safer prisons |
| By Boston Globe |
| Published: 11/03/2003 |
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Grilled by lawmakers, Gov. Romney administration officials last week vowed to overhaul the way prisoners are classified to avoid the mixing of violent inmates and potential victims, as part of a broader reexamination of policies throughout the correction system. The Legislature's Public Safety Committee is reviewing problems in the prisons after the death of former priest John J. Geoghan. The prisoner classification process has been a focus of complaints and scrutiny since Geoghan was killed by an inmate Aug. 23. Critics have suggested that inmates in Massachusetts are routinely placed in higher security settings than necessary, as a way for prison officials to punish them and control the population. Geoghan, 68 and frail, was sent to the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison, in April despite having no record of violent behavior in more than a year at the medium-security Concord state prison. His transfer to the Shirley facility occurred over the objection of the prison board that reviewed his record. Prisoners' advocates said Geoghan was moved to a higher-security facility after officers at Concord had filed bogus disciplinary reports against him. He was willing to be transferred, the advocates said, as a way to escape the officers' harassment. Geoghan was serving a nine- to 10-year prison sentence for molesting a 10-year-old boy. He was confined to the protective custody unit at Souza-Baranowski when he was attacked, strangled, and beaten to death, allegedly by Joseph L. Druce, 38, who was serving life without parole for murder. During his murder trial in 1988, Druce said the victim had made a sexual advance on him, and Druce had previously expressed a hatred of gays, leaving some observers puzzled about how he could have been placed in the same unit with Geoghan. Department of Correction Commissioner Michael T. Maloney publicly addressed Geoghan's killing for the first time at a hearing before the committee. He said that, prior to Geoghan's death, the last homicide in the prison system was in 1996. "We had one homicide in seven years," Maloney said "That is one homicide too many. But this is corrections. We have the most violent population in the state of Massachusetts. Unless you put correction officers behind every inmate, we really can't have the type of system that I think a lot of people want. This is a human system. Sometimes people make mistakes." Later in the hearing, lawyers from Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, who represented Geoghan, testified that a small group of officerss at Concord state prison taunted and physically abused Geoghan. |
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