Outdated sentencing policies and a lack of effective rehabilitation programs are forcing inmates unprepared for civilian life into Massachusetts communities, corrections experts warned at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government last night.
The commonwealth’s prisons are overcrowded and cannot accept inmates at the current rate, Department of Correction Commissioner Kathleen Dennehy told the attending students, prisoners’ rights advocates and law enforcement officials.
“Until we address our sentencing practices, we are going to be in a box of increasing incarceration rates,” she said.
Many inmates are in prison long enough to need considerably more comprehensive healthcare as they grow older, she said.
“Prisons are starting to look more like hospital wards than institutions for punishment and rehabilitation,” she said, adding sentence lengths have increased by 28 percent over the last few decades.
The longer, stricter sentences not only cause overcrowding and run up the commonwealth’s expenses, but they also unfairly deny inmates the chance for rehabilitation, she said.
“The restrictions do have an impact on their ability to become law-abiding, tax-paying, hard-working citizens,” Dennehy said.
Department of Correction spokeswoman Susan Martin ranked rehabilitation as the most important element in improving the state’s corrections system.
“We want to look at proven programming — what works,” she said. “Re-entry is huge in corrections, and it starts the day the inmate comes in.”
Martin and Dennehy cited vocational programs and education, as well as the chance to serve in work-release programs, as methods of reducing the number of inmates in prisons. They both noted, however, those programs are under-funded and have long waiting lists.
Harvard criminal justice professor Christopher Stone said the transition from prison life to civilian life is the vital element missing from the current correctional system, and said the growing number of inmates entering the system must be given a chance leave prison and stay out, instead of reverting to lifestyles that eventually return them again to prison.
“Nationally, 35 percent of people entering prison are parole violators,” he said.
On a national level, the prison population has increased from 300,000 in 1977 to almost 1.6 million as of last year, Stone said, although Massachusetts imprisoned fewer inmates per capita than many of its neighbors.
Sister Christine Lacroix of the Holy Union Sisterhood in Milton said she attended the discussion to gain some insight into the prison system, and is considering volunteering as a prison chaplain in an area re-entry program. She doubted whether the proposed vocational and educational program will be put into action.
“We need to bring policy and actuality together,” she said. “If the policies and the day-by-day experience do not meet effectively, people get lost in the system.”
Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis attended the presentations, but did not speak publicly.
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