State orders review over prison errors

The Patrick administration said yesterday it is ordering a sweeping review of state prison operations to make sure errors that led to the wrongful confinement of at least 14 inmates -- one for more than four years -- are corrected and not repeated.

Responding to a Globe Spotlight Team report yesterday about a series of sentence miscalculations, Public Safety Commissioner Kevin M. Burke called the mistakes unacceptable and said the state Department of Correction violated its moral and ethical obligation by not notifying the inmates about the errors.

"None of this is acceptable," Burke said. "There is no reason for any kind of error given the system and the numbers of lawyers who examine these cases. And the governor feels the same way."

Burke said he was puzzled by Correction Commissioner Kathleen M. Dennehy's explanation for why one inmate, Rommel Jones, was not informed that he had been kept four years beyond his lawful sentence. Dennehy said that because Jones had a mental illness, she was concerned that he would not be able to fully understand what had gone wrong. She wanted him to learn of it after the department's lawyer contacted his lawyer.

"The explanation I saw in [the Globe] puzzled me, to say the least," Burke said. "That isn't an explanation as far as I'm concerned. That's not acceptable and the commissioner knows that it's not acceptable."

As the Globe reported last week, the Patrick administration has asked Dennehy to leave her post. She will join the Bristol County sheriff's office next month.

"The commissioner is leaving and we will review the entire situation to make sure that there is no misfeasance involved or someone who needs to be disciplined," Burke said. "There will be a review when a new commissioner comes on board to see what steps need to be taken. . . . I can guarantee you that there will be a fix to that situation."

Jones told the Globe that when he was released from prison last summer, he went to Shattuck Hospital voluntarily.

Dennehy said that while Jones may have ultimately been at Shattuck on his own accord, he had been ordered there by a court -- something she took into account as she weighed how to notify him of the department's error in his sentencing. "I believed that it was morally compromising to advise the inmate in such a state and directed full disclosure be made attorney to attorney," she said in a prepared statement yesterday. That disclosure did not take place, though she said she was assured on two occasions that it had. She said an investigation into the lapse is under way.

Scott Harshbarger, a former attorney general who led a 15-member panel that conducted a top-to-bottom review of the Correction Department after the 2003 prison slaying of pedophile priest John J. Geoghan, said strong management, not another blue-ribbon panel, is what's needed now.

"This is a kind of managerial problem that's simply unacceptable," said Harshbarger, who called himself a supporter of Dennehy. "It's the kind of thing that just undermines the credibility of the administration. It's clearly a significant problem."

Harshbarger quit the prison oversight panel in late 2005, saying that Mitt Romney , governor at the time, had neglected the issue as he was preparing for his run for president.

"I'm hopeful that the next commissioner will be looking to implement common-sense things that we need to be implemented for accountability," Harshbarger said. "This is one that begs for answers. We need strong accountability in the DOC."

Legislative leaders have examined the operations of the state prison systems, called for hearings into the sentencing errors, and renewed their bid for an independent board to oversee the Department of Correction.

"How do you compensate somebody for time served beyond their sentence?" asked state Senator Jarrett T. Barrios, a Cambridge Democrat and chairman of the Legislature's Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security. "How do you repay lost days of a life? You can't put a price on what is unjust and morally repugnant. It's extraordinarily upsetting."

Barrios said the mistakes warrant a full airing before a legislative committee, and he said he would confer with his colleagues this week about how best to make that happen.

"It is not just appropriate as a matter of policy but, indeed, morally required of us to ask these questions as to why these policies continue to be applied."

State Representative Kay Khan, a Newton Democrat who has worked on correction issues for 12 years, said the Spotlight Team report underscored what she called a history of "bureaucratic and administrative incompetence" dating to the dawn of the Weld administration.

She said the $12.2 million Inmate Management System, which went on line in 2004, should be capable of calculating prisoners' sentence s accurately. Dennehy said many of the more complicated sentences need to be manually reviewed.

"It seems to me that [$12.2 million] would be an adequate amount of funding to allow the system to keep a close eye on what they're doing. My question is: Why isn't it working?" said Khan, who also called for hearings on the issue. "You've got a 10,000 [person] prison population and the public deserves to know what's going on in this system."

State Representative Ruth B. Balser, the House chair of the Joint Committee on Mental Health and Substance Abuse, said she, too, was troubled that Jones learned of his late release from a reporter six months after it occurred .

"It's an outrageous insult to the mentally ill," Balser said. "He has a mental illness. It doesn't mean he's not intelligent. It's the worst kind of stigma that somehow because he was mentally ill he had somehow lost his rights."

Dennehy said last week that if the Globe had not discovered the mistake that robbed Jones of four years , he still would not know about it.

The other 13 inmates held too long also were not alerted. Letters went out to them Friday after the Globe's inquiries.

Jones is scheduled to meet with James R. Pingeon , director of litigation for Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, today to discuss potential legal action against the state.

"The DOC's failure to apologize to Mr. Jones for the mistakes that cost him four years of his life, or even to tell him about the mistakes, shows the hypocrisy of what DOC professes are its core values: Responsible, Respectful, Honest, Caring," Pingeon said yesterday.

"Instead of taking responsibility for its mistakes, the DOC hoped no one would notice," he said. "Commissioner Dennehy's attempt to justify the cover up by blaming it on Rommel's mental illness shows a troubling lack of basic human decency and suggests that even now she is more interested in protecting DOC's public image than in fixing its own deep-seated, systemic problems."

"We expect a new commissioner to take a fresh look at every aspect of the operation," Burke said.

Thomas Farragher can be reached at farragher@globe.com