E-Mail This Article to a Friend Q&A Prescription for change at the DOC BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

Leslie Walker, executive director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, was not asked to participate in Governor Mitt Romney’s 15-member Commission on Corrections Reform, although her group has been a loud and consistent voice for systemic change. The state legislature’s Joint Committee on Public Safety — whose co-chair, Senator Jarrett Barrios, also sits on the commission — did want Walker’s advice, however, and got it at a hearing this Tuesday. Following her testimony, the Phoenix interviewed Walker to get her thoughts on what’s needed to reform the Massachusetts Department of Correction (DOC).

Q: What is the problem that needs to be fixed at the DOC?

A: Overclassification, overclassification, overclassification. The Department of Correction has chosen, for their own reasons, to overclassify prisoners. They have in place an objective assessment with a broad range of factors — age, criminal history, history of violence, disciplinary record — that result in a number. Prisoners go to Walpole and get assigned a number. But the department has decided to ignore their own system and be subjective. So, as of the summer of 2002, 89 percent of prisoners were in medium- and maximum-security beds. Well, 97 percent of those people are getting out someday, and they’re getting out without a normalization experience.

Q: How do you know that the DOC is handing out higher classifications than the objective assessment calls for?

A: In 1989, Dr. Michael Forcier, a Department of Correction researcher, told them, "Fifty percent of your prisoners are overclassified." The Department of Correction, ignoring his advice, built a 1000-bed super-max-security prison [Souza-Baranowski]. Well, guess what? If you build it, you’re going to fill it.

Q: What would you gain by proper classification?

A: You would save a lot of money if you properly classified prisoners. If the Department of Correction assigned the prisoners based on the objective assessment, they would have to turn some of the medium- and maximum-security beds into minimum security. You don’t have to build new minimum-security prisons — you can go from a higher-level security to a lower level just by opening the doors. It lets you increase your prisoner-to-guard ratio, so you need fewer guards. You can use that money you save on guards for classes and substance-abuse programs and other things that minimum-security prisoners can do. Then you have prisoners who are ready to go back out when it’s time, so you reduce recidivism.

I feel very strongly that if the Department of Correction was ordered to follow its own classification system, we would lay off guards. They have not laid off one guard, even when they closed down three facilities. Also, they are rich with sergeants and other middle management. You’ve got to lay people off.

Q: But when John Geoghan was killed, wasn’t the problem too few guards?

A: The make-up of Geoghan’s unit at Souza-Baranowski was the result of the screwed-up classification system. His unit was comprised of mentally ill and retarded men, a couple of cops, a couple of snitches — and Joseph Druce and one other really bad guy. This was terrible mismanagement. A better classification system wouldn’t have put them together.

Q: Do you think that the new commission, and ultimately Governor Romney, will go along with that?

A: [Executive Office of Public Safety secretary Edward] Flynn gets it. People on the commission get it. It concerns me that the Romney administration has placed too heavy an emphasis on mandatory post-release parole. I maintain that that is a creation of a whole new expensive bureaucracy. Let the step-down release system [a DOC program that moves the prisoner through greater levels of freedom, including work release, leading up to the end of a sentence] that is already there work before trying something new.

Q: Must DOC commissioner Michael Maloney be fired for the department to change?

A: I think so, because he has changed over the years from someone who was a former caring case worker, to someone who says in public, "I don’t believe in the research," and "It’s in my discretion to decide these things." And he is surrounded by people he has known for 20 years, and it’s very hard for someone to fire people like that. And with the current bureaucracy in place, it would be very difficult to implement a new model.