Cell block

Two high-profile cases demonstrate the collision of parole and politics in Massachusetts

Justice by Jason Gay

Later this month, the Massachusetts Parole Board will reconsider the case of Joseph Yandle, the convicted first-degree murderer who was granted parole in 1995, after his life sentence was reduced by the Governor's Council. Subsequently, of course, it was revealed that Yandle had fabricated key parts of his Vietnam war record, triggering the board to revoke his parole and send him back to prison. Though Yandle, the getaway driver in a 1972 killing, was a model prisoner who led an exemplary life after his release -- factors that the Governor's Council recently cited in its refusal to recommend the revocation of his parole -- many people, including Paul Cellucci, want him locked up for life.

Now, another high-profile Massachusetts convict, Benjamin La Guer, sees a possible window of opportunity. As the Boston Globe reported in mid-December, La Guer, who is serving a life sentence for a 1983 rape that he says he didn't commit, may have gotten a break when Terence McArdle -- Boston's former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms chief and a member of the parole board that rejected La Guer's bid earlier this year -- admitted in a separate civil trial this year that he had occasionally used racial slurs, including "spic" and "nigger."

La Guer, who is of African-American and Puerto Rican descent, believes that McArdle's courtroom admission entitles him at least to a new parole hearing. Like Yandle, La Guer is an exemplary prisoner, and there are also lingering questions about the fairness of his 1984 conviction before an all-white jury. But La Guer's status as a convicted sex offender, in an era when sex offenses seem to be held in higher contempt than murder, makes his hope for early release a distant one. So does his insistence that he is innocent; typically, parole boards want prisoners to admit guilt and show remorse.

Though La Guer's and Yandle's situations and histories are obviously different, their cases demonstrate the often unavoidable collision of politics with the state's parole process. Both men have discovered that parole -- in theory a politically blind device granted to the rehabilitated and remorseful -- is subject to the political undercurrents and trends of the world beyond the cell blocks. There is no specific formula for granting parole; no two decisions that are exactly alike. The result is an unpredictable process that isn't always about law and order -- or, for that matter, about justice.

In fact, these days, the only thing certain about parole in Massachusetts is that fewer and fewer people are getting it. According to figures released by the state executive office of public safety, the percentage of state prison inmates paroled after receiving hearings has dropped dramatically this decade, from 70 percent in 1990 to 37 percent in 1997. When expanded to include all county jails and houses of correction, the state's overall parole rate drops from 61 percent in 1990 to 47 percent in 1997.

Make no mistake about it: there is widespread public and political support for the ever-shrinking parole rate. In this tough-on-crime era, paroling prisoners is seen as risky for the public and suicidal for politicians. No one wants to free the next Willie Horton, whose notorious post-parole exploits helped torpedo Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential bid. Both Cellucci and his predecessor, William Weld, have been unabashed critics of parole -- Weld's truth-in-sentencing reforms successfully quashed early releases, and Cellucci has pledged to build more prisons to accommodate convicts serving longer terms.

"Governors Weld and Cellucci have long supported the abolition of early parole because of the strong belief that public safety must take precedence in sentencing and release of violent offenders," says public-safety communications director Charles McDonald.

But as events in the La Guer and Yandle cases show, troubling questions surround the state's continued war on parole. For one, the anti-parole forces often misrepresent the meaning of parole, characterizing it as an undeserved free pass out of jail instead of as an earned step in an inmate's transition from prison to the outside world. Second, parole critics falsely promote the notion that a world without parole is a safer one. Last, and most alarming, the war on parole all but dissolves the ever-fading hope in the rehabilitative potential of incarceration.

Screwups like the Willie Horton parole, obviously, are part of the problem. There are nearly 5000 paroled prisoners in Massachusetts, but all it takes is one mistake to undermine public faith in the entire system. Peter Elikann, a Boston-based attorney and Court TV commentator who has written books including The Tough on Crime Myth (Insight Books), says that parole -- like other elements of the state criminal-justice system -- has been cast in a bad light by a few attention-grabbing cases, including those of Horton and David Clark, a paroled ex-con who shot and killed state trooper Mark Charbonnier in 1994.

"We are a criminal justice-by-anecdote state," Elikann says. "We can have a policy that works very well for a number of years, and if there's one bad incident, they [political leaders] drop the whole thing."

And that's essentially what has happened. It's a political no-brainer: officials know that the more they can limit parole, the more they can reduce the chances of future Hortons and Clarks. "It's a weighty business," acknowledges Boston civil-rights attorney John Lozada, a La Guer supporter. "For every person who gets released, at some point, you're looking at them being a deterrent to releasing more people."

But this conservative approach gives short shrift to parole's utility as a rehabilitative measure. Paroled inmates are required to have state supervision and transitional assistance. "You do need some supervision of someone getting out of prison," says Bruce Macdonald, the chairman of the Massachusetts Bar Association's Corrections and Sentencing Practice Group. "You can't let someone just go out the door." Though these measures aren't perfect or fail-safe, that doesn't justify eliminating the system as a whole, supporters say.

Elikann and Lozada agree that in reality, parole is less of a risk than it is a protection to the public at large. "It absolutely astonishes me that politicians somehow think that if you eliminate parole, it's going to make the public safer," Elikann says. "In fact, eliminating it endangers the public because the last thing you want is people going from a hot little pressure-cooker of a crime school -- prison -- directly onto the street with nothing hanging over their head. The point of parole is that people are gradually reintroduced into society, and [they know that] with any little misbehavior on their part, they would be yanked back into prison."

But don't expect the parole board to be leading the charge to grant more parole. Board members are appointed by the governor, who, understandably, prefers appointees who agree with his criminal-justice policies. So the present-day board is largely in step with the anti-parole sentiments of the Weld and Cellucci administrations -- and, as the statistics show, it has followed that philosophy to the letter.

"I think the parole board is more political, and became more political under Weld," says Boston criminal-defense attorney John Swomley. "The whole notion of having appointed people do this is to get them to reflect the sensibilities of the people who appoint them."

But what happens if that sensibility supports getting rid of parole altogether? If we are to believe that prison is capable of rehabilitating the convicted -- and, all cynicism aside, that is a central tenet of incarceration in a civilized society -- shouldn't there be some device available to reward the rehabilitated? Without parole, what incentive exists for prisoners to be good prisoners? As Swomley says, "There are people who deserve parole, and that's why it's there." (Of course, there are other reasons to support parole. Elikann says that with the going rate of incarceration roughly $30,000 per prisoner per year, letting certain people out makes fiscal sense.)

But these days, parole is fading fast as an option. Just a few years ago, says the Mass Bar Association's Bruce Macdonald, "many lawyers would assume that if someone got two years, he'd serve one." But no longer. Says Swomley: "When I speak to clients and counsel them about having a minimum and maximum date [for release], I tell them they should not expect to get out ahead of the maximum date precisely because the parole board isn't letting them out."

Those words, of course, are music to the ears of Governor Cellucci and other truth-in-sentencing reformers. But they send an ominous message to prisoners who have committed themselves to rehabilitation in the hopes of obtaining early release. More than that, they represent an utter lack of faith in the criminal-justice system to do anything other than incarcerate people.

It remains to be seen how this climate will affect the parole cases of Benjamin La Guer and Joseph Yandle. Both men are fortunate in one sense -- their situations are well known. La Guer, a tireless, media-savvy telephone campaigner, counts an impressive band of journalists and academics among his supporters, including John Silber, Connection host Christopher Lydon, and Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree. Yandle has high-profile allies in the media and politics, too. But both men also have clear strikes against them -- Yandle has his war-record lies, and La Guer has his sex-offense conviction and his vigorous insistence that he is innocent.

Still, the biggest strike against La Guer's and Yandle's bids for parole may come down to one word: risk. Not to the public, but to politicians.

"Let's face it," says Bruce Macdonald. "The safe choice for a parole-board member is to deny parole."

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.