Legislative penalty changes contributed only modestly to the prison population run-up.

Several observations suggest that the role of legislative enactments in the state prison population increase was limited:

• Drug sentences — mandatory and non-mandatory — have accounted for at most 26% and often much less of the state prison population. Drug offenders are currently only 15% of the state prison population.  That places an upper bound on the contribution of drug mandatory sentences to the five-fold state prison population growth. Further, in some cases, judges would have sentenced to incarceration without the threat of a mandatory, so only a hard-to-estimate fraction of the drug prison population is due to the mandatories.
• The historical expansion of drug mandatory sentences did not coincide with the historical increase in state prison population:
  • Second offense heroin distribution carried a minimum mandatory state prison sentence of 10 years (not-suspendable) in the 1957 drug laws.  Acts of 1957, Chapter 660, Section 212A.
  • The major recodification in 1971 ( Acts of 1971, Chapter 1071), added a second offense minimum mandatory of 5 years for cocaine distribution (but may not have prohibited suspension of the sentence).
  • The trafficking penalty enhancements in 1980 (Acts of 1980, Chapter 436) completed the state prison penalty structure that remains largely intact to today (with some tweaks up and down) — stiff second offense mandatories (5 years for heroin, 3 for cocaine), longer weight mandatories, no suspension or other procedural dodges allowed.
  • Yet, the drug population in state prison remained stable in the low hundreds until the mid-eighties when the crack epidemic began to tear through communities of poverty and color.  The drug population went up by a factor of six in six years from 1985 to 1991. The state prison population for non-drug offenses had already begun to surge 10 years earlier.
  • Of course, we don’t know how law enforcement and the courts would have responded to the crack epidemic without the minimum mandatories — the crack epidemic might not have led so directly to prison population growth.  But the timing of the increase suggests that the explosion of cocaine use on the streets was the proximate cause of the growth in drug incarcerations.
  • The other new major drug mandatory was the school zone sentence in 1989, but drug commitments to state prison actually declined after the school zone was introduced, perhaps because it made a long House of Correction sentence available as an alternative for prosecutors. The House of Corrections drug commitment rate did not jump sharply after the school zone was introduced, but it did not fall like the state prison drug commitment rate. See Massachusetts Sentencing Commission, Report to the General Court, Figures 7 and 8 (1996).
• Other penalty enactments during the run-up in state prison population from the 70s to the early 90s impacted primarily at the House of Correction level — the 1974 gun bill, the various OUI bills, domestic violence restraining orders — and/or related to relatively low volume crimes (e.g., against the elderly, motor vehicle homicide).

Non-legislative factors that could explain the rise include, of course, the stunning rise in crime itself and discretionary responses to that rise by communities, law enforcement and the courts.

Parole board release decisions do not seem to be a likely factor. Parole release rates are measurable and correlate obviously with administration philosophy: After peaking at 70% during the Dukakis administrations, state prison parole release rates hit lows in the King administration (51%) and the Weld administration (33%), bounced back to 66% during the first Patrick administration and then fell back to 41% in 2011 after the Cinelli murder. See Parole Board Annual Report, 2012 and prior reports. However, it is not feasible to directly quantify the impact of changing parole rates on population. Parole rates were highest during the Dukakis years, but during these years the prison population expanded most rapidly. Parole rates may be a consequence of population pressures as well as a cause.

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State Prison Population -- by Main Offense Type (as of January 1): 1973 - 2015

	Total	Person	Sex	Property	Drug	Other	Unknown
1973	1970	1111	165	285	334	75
1974	2096	1345	192	279	210	55	13
1975	2140	1430	236	244	182	48
1976	2290	1578	272	217	170	53
1977	2681	1820	288	298	183	80	12
1978	2750	1936	300	288	148	68	10
1979	2636	1870	240	248	109	69
1980	2754	1891	328	351	112	72
1981	3067	2102	405	380	106	74
1982	3690	2392	482	503	211	102
1983	4334	2746	558	654	257	119
1984	4482	2827	575	718	197	165
1985	4940	2992	660	784	316	188
1986	5390	3092	766	846	438	248
1987	5636	3063	828	838	623	284
1988	6265	3252	896	932	883	302
1989	6757	3360	966	1022	1103	306
1990	7553	3520	1131	1076	1502	324
1991	8265	3764	1229	1097	1816	359
1992	9075	4214	1402	1168	1939	352
1993	9851	4618	1690	1216	1973	354
1994	9952	4724	1759	1186	1931	352
1995	9854	4634	1758	1135	2002	325
1996	9736	4633	1620	1170	1942	371
1997	10119	4803	1690	1161	2079	386
1998	10218	4648	1872	1154	2119	425
1999	11158	5141	1939	1237	2421	420
2000	10712	4991	1893	1087	2328	413
2001	10095	4782	1815	985	2165	348
2002	9610	4622	1722	914	2018	334
2003	9223	4499	1599	790	1975	360
2004	9060	4493	1544	722	1942	359
2005	8979	4388	1447	727	2014	403
2006	9405	4533	1432	760	2174	506
2007	9778	4610	1365	744	2441	618
2008	10132	4704	1328	791	2610	699
2009	10342	4773	1343	834	2686	706
2010	10259	4772	1348	845	2571	723
2011	10222	4876	1355	872	2341	778
2012	10491	5102	1372	915	2283	819
2013	10148	5191	1372	922	1831	832
2014	9808	5174	1342	893	1564	835
2015	9670	5197	1352	865	1432	824

Source: Reports of the Department of Correction.