The sister of defrocked priest and convicted child molester John Geoghan issued a statement Wednesday accusing prison guards of abusing her brother and other prisoners, including those who have spoken out against the prison system since Geoghan’s murder last month.

Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services director Leslie Walker read the statement at a press conference Wednesday, and said state prison conditions have long been ‘whitewashed’ to protect corrupt guards, officers and prison management.

Walker said Geoghan’s murder has only recently drawn attention to the harassment and abuse state prisoners face from guards.

Walker read Geoghan’s sister Catherine’s statement, which accuses the Souza-Baranowksi Correction Center, a medium security facility in Shirley, of fabricating Geoghan’s disciplinary offenses and covering up the abuse of its prisoners. Catherine did not attend the press conference.

Catherine outlined two major issues in her statement that caused her ‘great concern for the safety of prisoners.’

She wrote that prisoners in the same cell as Geoghan ‘have had their time out of their cells significantly reduced since his death,’ from a few hours of free time to only ‘a matter of minutes.’

Walker said prisoners’ free time had been cut to 10 minutes only after they had begun to answer reporters’ and officials’ questions concerning Geoghan’s murder.

‘The lockdown of the unit did not begin right after John Geoghan died but was instituted only after prisoners publicly criticized the Department for failing to protect him,’ Walker said. ‘This regimen is illegal.’

Catherine also wrote that prisoners, upon cooperating with lawyers and other investigators of Geoghan’s treatment at the prison, have been harassed and threatened by prison guards.

‘I fear that a closed system may hide the truth from the investigators,’ the statement said. ‘The threat of immediate retribution by guards and concerns for personal safety will prevent the commission from gathering the information essential to the completion of the assigned task.’

On Sept. 23, Walker sent Department of Correction Commissioner Michael T. Maloney a letter listing incidents of ‘intimidation and harassment’ of prisoners. She cited 10 episodes of prisoner abuse and harassment, all of which had occurred since Aug. 26, 2003.

Walker alleges that on Sept. 14, the morning after a prisoner met with a Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services staff member, an officer ‘called the prisoner by name as he was coming down the stairs on his way back from breakfast and said, ‘If you keep running your mouth you are never going to make it out of here.”

Before his death, 66-year-old Geoghan was body-checked by guards on at least one occasion, his sister Catherine said she observed on one visit to him.

On another occasion, while a prisoner was meeting with an MCLS attorney, officers ransacked his cell and left it ‘in shambles,’ according to Walker.

Neither the letter of documented prisoner abuse sent to Maloney, nor a letter sent to SBCC Superintendent Edward Ficco protesting the decrease in free time, have been answered.

Although the prisoners have committed serious crimes, Walker said, they must not be treated as animals. She also said 40 to 60 percent of crimes are committed by repeat offenders, which means that, despite SBCC’s self-asserted commitment to prisoner rehabilitation, prisoners are not leading productive or even lawful lives once they are freed.

‘[Prisoners] are afraid of how they will react to the person that jostles them in the local CVS when they are released,’ Walker said. For this reason, she continued, the public must care about their treatment within the prison walls.

Geoghan, who had more than 130 cases of sexual abuse brought against him, was strangled to death by a fellow inmate on Aug. 23.

Gov. Mitt Romney and Public Safety Secretary Edward Flynn appointed a commission to investigate Geoghan’s murder two days after it occurred, but the panel’s members were criticized as being overly vested in the results of an investigation and the consequences of uncovered corruption.

Walker said she plans to encourage the establishment of a less ‘internal’ commission, as well as a continued, thorough examination of Massachusetts prisons’ policies and management.