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Shame on the Department of Correction
John Geoghan’s murder is only the latest in a long line of prison-centered outrages
BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI

IN THE WAKE of the August 23 murder of defrocked priest John Geoghan — the man who had come to epitomize the worst of the clergy-sexual-abuse scandal roiling the Archdiocese of Boston — the Massachusetts Department of Correction (DOC) has launched a sweeping investigation into its own policies and procedures. Governor Mitt Romney has assembled a three-person panel to determine whether inadequate practices enabled Joseph Druce, a fellow prisoner, to strangle Geoghan to death in the most secure of the state’s 22 correctional facilities. Worcester County district attorney John Conte is examining events leading up to the brutal killing in order to pursue criminal charges against Druce, who’s already serving a life-without-parole sentence for murder. And State Representative Tim Toomey (D-Cambridge), who heads the legislature’s Joint Committee on Public Safety, which oversees the DOC, has vowed to conduct a future hearing on the incident.

But it’s unlikely that any of these official investigations will tell us what really transpired on August 23 in the so-called Protective Custody Unit at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center (SBCC), in Shirley, where Druce and Geoghan were housed. After all, the DOC has a less-than-stellar record when it comes to policing itself. Jim Pingeon, the litigation director at the Boston-based Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services (MCLS), which provides legal aid to prisoners, and his colleagues have long known that DOC inquiries into possible guard negligence and misconduct are, in his words, "not designed to actually find out what happened." When a guard threw a bucket of acidic detergent on one of Pingeon’s clients at Bridgewater State Hospital in the mid 1990s, for example, the department initiated a review. Prosecutors indicted the guard, so the DOC suspended him with pay and put its investigation on hold. But when the two-year prosecution ended in acquittal, the DOC dropped the matter. It took no disciplinary action against the officer, who was welcomed back on the job. Notes Pingeon, who represented the prisoner in a successful 1999 lawsuit against the DOC, "This guard got a paid vacation for burning an old, crazy man. That struck me as seriously problematic."

The response seems typical, however. When a prisoner alleged that three guards assaulted him while he was in segregation at MCI-Shirley last year, the DOC kicked off an internal review, which unearthed holes in the guards’ stories, according to Pingeon. Officials asked the prisoner to submit to a lie-detector test. But when he asked for a lawyer to be present, Pingeon says, "The DOC said, ‘To hell with it,’ and aborted the process." Even high-profile incidents have yielded little scrutiny of prison practices. In December 2000, allegations surfaced of prisoner abuse at MCI-Shirley during a three-day October 2000 "shakedown," or search of prison cells, in which prisoners were burned and bitten by dogs. Legislators pressured the DOC to investigate. Though the DOC’s findings resulted in a new policy for videotaping contraband searches, its investigation was standard fare. In March 2001, the department concluded that no abuse occurred, despite credible evidence to the contrary. Nobody got disciplined. The effort amounted to what Pingeon calls "a whitewash."

It seems the only exception to such a scenario came with the death of John Salvi, the infamous killer of two reproductive-health-clinic workers in Brookline in 1994. When Salvi committed suicide two years later, in 1996 — under the negligent watch of DOC guards — the department’s mental-health program faced intense media scrutiny. This outside pressure led to an independent evaluation of services by mental-health experts statewide. In the end, the DOC enacted 25 policy changes.

The action taken in the aftermath of Salvi’s suicide shows the power of independent review. As of this writing, though, there’s no indication that an outside set of eyes will pore over the details surrounding Geoghan’s murder. Kelly Nantel, a spokesperson for the DOC, insists such a review isn’t necessary. "The department is more than capable of conducting an internal investigation," she says. "We’re confident the results will be appropriate and accurate." Yet the notion that the DOC can honestly assess its own actions strikes many legal experts and prison-rights advocates as laughable. The institution has plenty of incentive to cover up its employees’ mistakes and misdeeds. The two guards on duty in the SBCC Protective Custody Unit last Saturday have more reason to lie than to tell the truth. They could lose their jobs — or worse, end up criminally indicted if their negligence rose to the level of "reckless indifference." Thus, says Wendy Murphy, a New England School of Law professor and prominent victims’ attorney, the Catholic Church — whose leaders hid Geoghan’s pedophilia for 30-plus years — isn’t the only institution prone to rationalization and cover-ups. Like the Church, she says, "The DOC wants to avoid scandal. It has a strong incentive to misstate the truth."

Governor Romney, meanwhile, deserves credit for going against the status quo and instigating his own inquiry into Geoghan’s murder. Indeed, his strongly worded remarks on Tuesday that Geoghan’s murder represented a "failure of government" indicate that the governor appreciates the severity of what has happened. Yet Romney’s three-person panel isn’t as independent-minded as, say, a civilian review board would be. In fact, it has a distinct law-and-order bent: it includes Mark Delaney, of the Massachusetts State Police; Mark Reilly, of the DOC investigations division; and George Camp, a criminologist with the American Correctional Association. David Shaw, a spokesperson for Public Safety secretary Edward Flynn, who hand-picked the panel, maintains that its members "will give an honest and frank evaluation of the [DOC] system" and will recommend necessary policy changes to Flynn and Romney. But because of their law-enforcement ties, members will, at the very least, be perceived as quick to stand behind their correctional-officer colleagues.

To date, the only promising investigation is that of Worcester DA Conte, who has stated that he’ll look at prison procedures as part of his effort. Because Conte is conducting a criminal investigation of a homicide, he will have to piece together how the murder took place — how Druce found opportunity to commit the crime despite the presence of guards, video cameras, and state-of-the-art security measures at SBCC. Conte’s already expressed concern over staffing levels at the SBCC Protective Custody Unit, among other things. So his work may make for an end to business as usual at the DOC. Still, Conte, who plans to present the case to a grand jury in September, stated at a well-attended press conference last Monday that he believes Druce acted alone. How the district attorney could know this after just three days may be indicative of the quality of the criminal investigation.

BY MONDAY, the grim details of the former priest’s final moments had begun to surface. According to Conte, who held a press event on August 25 to give a "status update" on his investigation, Druce plotted his attack on Geoghan for as long as a month before he pounced. And when he did, he was prepared. SBCC guards, Conte says, opened the Protective Custody Unit’s cells so that the 24 prisoners stationed there could return lunch trays at 11:48 a.m. last Saturday, letting Druce and Geoghan out for five minutes. Druce, Conte says, followed Geoghan. He jammed Geoghan’s cell door with a nail clipper, a toothbrush, and a book, which had been fashioned to fit the door’s electronic track. Druce tied Geoghan’s hands behind his back with a T-shirt, threw him to the floor, and used stretched socks to choke him. The former priest’s shoe and a pillowcase helped finish the act.

The DOC did not respond to the scene until another prisoner — who had heard a loud commotion and, according to Conte, had spotted Druce jumping off Geoghan’s bed onto his chest — alerted the guards. By then, eight minutes had passed. Geoghan was rushed to Leominster Hospital, where he died at 1:17 p.m. An August 25 autopsy ruled that the cause of death was strangulation and blunt chest trauma; Geoghan also suffered broken ribs and a punctured lung.

One reason why the brutal murder seems so puzzling is that it unfolded in the SBCC Protective Custody Unit, a brand-new wing consisting of 64 individual cells segregated from the rest of the prison population. Prisoners are mainly kept isolated from one another, with officials monitoring their movements. Sources familiar with the wing say that the cell doors can be operated only by a flip of the switch at the guards’ control booth. So how did Druce — a self-professed homophobe and white supremacist who strangled a 51-year-old Gloucester resident in 1988 because the man was gay — manage to slip into Geoghan’s cell undetected? How did he manage to torture his victim for eight minutes? Were guards looking the other way? Or were they distracted, as it’s been claimed, and critically understaffed?

"There’s a real stink to what we know happened already," Murphy says.

It’s hard to envision how Geoghan’s death could have occurred without a breakdown in the system. Geoghan was an obvious target of abuse — partly because he was a notorious pedophile, and partly because he was old, frail, and naive about life behind the wall. The DOC cannot argue that it didn’t know Geoghan was at risk; Nantel has publicly confirmed that the former priest was transferred to the SBCC Protective Custody Unit last April because of prior trouble. When he was stationed at MCI-Concord, Geoghan reported to MCLS attorneys that he endured abuse not just by prisoners, but also by guards, Pingeon says. Guards allegedly shoved him in the visiting room, posted newspaper articles about him, interfered with his mail, and taunted him with labels like "Lucifer" and "Satan." One guard, Pingeon says, even defecated in Geoghan’s cell. The MCLS does not know what, if any, action was taken against the guard, whose name Pingeon declined to disclose.

At the same time, the DOC had plenty of warning that Druce was a loose cannon. Just days before the murder, prison officials had relegated Druce to solitary confinement, a form of punishment. According to Pingeon, who visited several prisoners in the SBCC Protective Custody Unit on Tuesday, one of Geoghan’s fellow cell mates even tipped off guards that Druce had threatened to target Geoghan. The prisoner, Robert Assad, who is serving time for arson, maintains that Druce approached him in June with an idea for staging "a hate crime" so that he might face federal criminal charges and, as such, get shipped to a federal prison. When Assad said he wanted no part of it, Pingeon says, "Druce allegedly said, ‘If you’re not going to, the only person who would be a candidate for this sort of thing would be John Geoghan.’" Assad has told the MCLS that he reported his conversation with Druce to DOC officials — twice — but they didn’t see it "as a serious threat." Eventually, Assad says, he spoke with Geoghan, who, he claims, confided his fear of Druce. Summing up, Pingeon says the account "suggests that this was an avoidable killing, and reflects a lack of commitment on the part of the department to these very vulnerable protective-custody inmates."

That the DOC would place Geoghan — a serial pedophile who primarily assaulted boys — in the same setting as a violent homophobic murderer defies common sense. "Even an idiot would know not to do that," says Stephen Pope, a Boston College theology professor. Pope likens what DOC officials did in the time leading up to Geoghan’s murder to "giving keys to a young, drunk teenager and saying, ‘Go drive.’" The department effectively created a recipe for disaster. Pope draws parallels between Geoghan’s death and Salvi’s suicide. Salvi, too, was a known prisoner at risk. His behavior indicated severe psychological trouble. But rather than keep close watch over the convict, officials failed to monitor him, which allowed Salvi to kill himself. "It’s the same thing with Geoghan," Pope says. "The whole thing is pathetic from start to finish."

WILL GEOGHAN’S death prompt a public outcry for reform? It’s unlikely. Geoghan was, of course, a reviled man who used his priestly collar to prey on some 150 innocent children — in their bedrooms, in his family’s West Roxbury home, even in the sacristy. For three decades, he shuffled between six parishes while fondling, assaulting, and raping boys and, in rare instances, girls. Up to the day of his demise, he repeatedly denied his crimes.

Many may react to Geoghan’s murder as one of the priest’s alleged victims did. Michael Linscott, a 45-year-old Hingham resident who says he was abused by Geoghan from 1967 to 1972, sees his perpetrator’s demise as almost a form of karmic justice. As Linscott puts it: "There is a law of the jungle, and I guess that’s what happened here."

Naturally, it’s understandable to hear an alleged victim talk that way. It’s much less comprehensible to hear an elected lawmaker express the same sentiment. In an August 24 article published by the Boston Globe, State Representative Demetrius Atsalis (D-Barnstable), who serves on the public-safety committee, said: "Not to sound cold here, but growing up, you hear about jailhouse justice, and this might be a case of that." Atsalis clarified his comments to the Phoenix, emphasizing that what happened to Geoghan was tragic: "Anybody, whether he’s the devil incarnate or the average Joe doing two years for bad checks, should be protected no matter what you feel about him." He stressed that Geoghan’s murder "definitely seemed to me to be a lapse by the correctional institutions" charged with protecting him (see "Media," This Just In). But one State House insider told the Phoenix that the term "jailhouse justice" is closer to "what a lot of people up here will tell you."

The onetime priest’s death may be no loss to society at large. But, as BC’s Pope notes, "It’s confusing to say someone acting out of hatred" — e.g., Druce, who may have been, as his father has hinted, a victim of child sex abuse himself — "is in any way acting out of justice." It’s unacceptable to turn a blind eye to someone’s brutal murder just because we don’t like him or her — if only for the sake of the state’s prison system. As Pope concludes, "Jailhouse justice is a misnomer. It’s really jailhouse evil."

Perhaps Governor Romney will live up to his word and take the steps needed to fix problems within the DOC. As the governor told reporters on Tuesday: "If steps need to be taken, we will do that." And if he doesn’t, if he lets the DOC sweep the Geoghan murder under the rug as it has done with other scandals, he will have jeopardized the integrity of the state’s prison system. The MCLS’s Pingeon sums up the situation best when he says: "It’s the DOC’s job to prevent murder in its prisons. In this case, it failed."

Additional reporting by Adam Reilly. Kristen Lombardi can be reached at klombardi[a]phx.com


Issue Date: August 29 - September 4, 2003
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