Mass. officials vow safer prisons

"I think there is an emerging consensus for changing direction," said Edward A. Flynn, the state public safety secretary. "We will not be spending a lot of money on fortress-like facilities and we will steer inmates to an appropriate level of incarceration."

Flynn made his remarks during a sometimes contentious hearing before the Legislature's Public Safety Committee, which 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 guards at Concord had filed bogus disciplinary reports against him. He was willing to be transferred, the advocates said, as a way to escape the guards' harassment.

"The classification process must be fair," Flynn told the lawmakers. "Its decisions must be transparent, and the decision-makers in the process must be held accountable for their decisions."

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 the murder of a Gloucester man.

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.

"Predators must be kept away from prey," said state Senator Stephen M. Brewer, Democrat of Barre. Flynn said about 50 percent of inmates are "real bad guys," considered violent and dangerous, and require high security custody. The rest of the population ought to be kept apart from them, he said.

Flynn, in more than two hours of testimony, repeatedly stressed that the Romney administration wants to break from the policies of the past that emphasized punitive and restrictive measures to control the prison population and deter crime.

"We are emerging from an era in which Massachusetts was proud to be `tough on crime.' " Flynn said. "The people of Massachusetts elected public officials who promised to be tough on crime, to `reintroduce prisoners to the joys of busting rocks.' "

"This emphasis on punishment over rehabilitation came with a pricetag, which was costly both economically and socially," he said.

Flynn would not detail what had gone wrong in the Geoghan case, saying he is awaiting the results of an Executive Office of Public Safety internal investigation, due in about a month. Flynn said a second investigation of the Department of Correction, by a 15-member "blue-ribbon" commission, would look at systemic problems.

As they seek to shift away from a tough-on-crime approach, Flynn said, Romney administration officials would seek to also better prepare prisoners for reintegration into society, improving programs in education, vocational training, and substance-abuse prevention. He also said parolees should be better supervised.

State Senator Jarrett T. Barrios, cochairman of the committee, pressed Flynn to commit to allocating the money needed to provide those programs. But Flynn said that "there are no guarantees" on funding, and that some reforms could be accomplished by "reallocating resources."

Department of Correction Commissioner Michael T. Maloney, who appeared at the hearing with Flynn, publicly addressed Geoghan's killing for the first time. 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 guards at Concord state prison taunted and physically abused Geoghan.

Sean P. Murphy can be reached at smurphy@globe.com.