At a recent “ask me anything” town hall, I got a general question about where we are on criminal justice reform. Below is my 4 minute condensation of my take on the big picture. It doesn’t speak to all the issues that everyone is working on, but it does identify the issues that I am personally most focused on.
Transcript (excerpted and lightly edited)
Constituent: I wondered if you could share something about criminal justice reform.
WB: It all culminated—this sort of movement to back away from the overreaching “tough on crime” and the high incarceration rates—culminated in 2018 with the sweeping criminal justice reforms. It was one of the signal things that I can look back on and see how much difference we made, because we really bent the curve of incarceration downward. By changing things from soup to nuts in the criminal justice system, our prison population is now about half what it was at the peak.
Constituent: That’s great.
WB: So that is kind of where we are now. What that has done is opened up a number of opportunities to think about how our system should be structured. And the State Department of Correction has closed several of the biggest facilities—Walpole and Concord. Those iconic facilities, Walpole and Concord—they’re closed. And so the footprint of that system is shrinking.
And now what we’re working on, and this is something I’m in the middle of, is a conversation about the sheriffs in the state and how they should relate to the Department of Corrections. Massachusetts is unique in having 14 different county sheriffs, each with their own house of correction.
So we have this fragmented system, and that system is also way over capacity. But you can’t really close pieces of it because it’s siloed.
There’s a lot at stake for people, and we’ll see how that comes out. I want to say, you know, the fact that these places are way below capacity is not in itself proof that they’re too empty. Because actually when we were really at full capacity, you had two and three people in a cell, and that’s not necessarily good.
The other thing I just want to bring out—another couple of strands of it—is that during the nineties, even then people were starting to realize that incarceration levels were too high. So they started talking about the idea of intensive supervision on probation. You know, we’re not going to sentence somebody to incarceration; we’re going to put them on probation, but we’re going to make them report in every day, or take drug tests every two, three days, or we’re going to have them go to a day program that’s nine to five.
There was a school of thought that we should keep people on a really short leash. And the result of that was that everybody ended up in jail because it was just too hard for people to succeed.
So there’s been another movement—as well as the one with decarceration—towards fewer conditions of probation. We would put people on probation and basically lock them up only if they engaged in a new offense. And that’s a whole other conversation about the relationship between drug treatment and the criminal justice system, and mental health care and the criminal justice system, and to what extent you force people into treatment—that kind of thing. So that conversation is live.
So those are the main areas where I think we really have an active conversation.
The other area—you know, there’s a conversation about how we manage prisons. And I’ve got a bill that I’ve worked on with Senator Liz Miranda to create an inspector general to shed light when we do have incidents in prison. And there’s another thing: we did this great police reform, we have this great police accountability system; it does not extend to correctional officers. So there’s a conversation about whether we could create something for correctional officers.
That’s an overview. That’s some of the things I’ve been thinking about, how I’ve worked through it. If you want to follow up on that, I’d love it.