EVER SINCE THE 1986 Willie Horton scandal, which both politicians and the mainstream media seized upon during the 1988 presidential campaign as a symbol of America’s coddling of criminals, criminal-justice policy in this country has gravitated more and more toward the lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key model. Just this month, for instance, Texas governor Rick Perry decided not to ban the executions of retarded prisoners languishing on that state’s death row. And two federal prisoners — Timothy McVeigh and Juan Raul Garza — were put to death within one week after three decades without a federal execution. Meanwhile, here in the Bay State, the culture of punishment has turned the Massachusetts Parole Board into a panel that fails to live up to its own mission: paroling worthy prisoners.

Take Peter Kane, 42, a former prisoner who now works as a paralegal at a Boston law firm. The Plainville resident is not the most sympathetic of figures; in 1980, at age 21, he was convicted of second-degree murder in the beating death of his girlfriend’s toddler son. While in prison, however, Kane turned his life around. He tutored fellow prisoners in English, sought anger-management therapy, and worked outside the walls cutting hay and wood. By the time he became eligible for parole in 1995 — after serving 15 years — he had earned high marks from virtually every prison official at every facility where he’d resided.

“I figured I had a pretty good chance at getting out,” Kane recalls. But his parole hearing did not turn out as anticipated. Parole-board members, Kane says, spent more than two hours grilling him about the original crime, as if he were being retried. At the same time, they glossed over his exemplary institutional record and dismissed the 15 people who had appeared to voice support for his release. Two months later, Kane got word that he’d been denied parole. In 1998, he went before the board again — and again it rebuffed him. He appealed to its seven members one final time, 12 months later, to no avail. So Kane took a different tack. Last year, he appealed his conviction. Were it not for a judge who found that Kane’s jury had been given improper instructions, and therefore overturned his conviction, Kane would still be in prison. (The state is appealing the decision.) But as Kane has demonstrated since his release, he would have been the perfect candidate for parole.

Hundreds of similar Massachusetts prisoners — those who have served their time well, who have aimed to better themselves, and who qualify for supervised release — are finding parole a remote possibility these days. Throughout the past decade, in fact, the number of state prisoners granted parole has dropped dramatically. In 1990 — right before former governor William Weld assumed office on a get-tough-on-crime platform — the parole rate for state inmates hovered around 70 percent. By 1999, that percentage had fallen to 38. Put another way, only 856 of the 2231 state prisoners who came before the parole board in 1999 were granted supervised release, compared with 1963 of the 2821 a decade earlier. For prisoners serving life-with-parole sentences, such as Kane, the rate at which parole was granted at an initial hearing declined from 41 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 1999 — or from 21 prisoners paroled in 1990 to just three in 1999.

Even for inmates housed in the county system — who were convicted of less serious crimes, such as shoplifting and low-level drug offenses, and who serve no more than two-year sentences — parole figures have dropped, although not as precipitously. In 1990, the parole rate on the county side was 58 percent. It dipped to a low of 38 percent in 1993 before slowly climbing up to 53 percent by the decade’s end.

The statistical shift has drawn attention lately. Last January, the Boston-based Community Resources for Justice (CRJ) unveiled a report about prisoner re-entry, “Returning Inmates: Closing the Public Safety Gap,” which uncovered some startling trends. While the proportion of prisoners who receive parole in Massachusetts has been cut nearly in half, the proportion of prisoners who complete their sentences in-house, or “wrap up,” has almost doubled. Since 1995, as many as 1800 prisoners have been released from the state’s prisons and jails every month, and the vast majority have moved straight from their cells to the streets without any supervision. Meanwhile, inmates are opting to forgo parole hearings in record numbers. Last year, 4744 prisoners (32 percent of those eligible for parole) waived their right to a hearing, as compared to 1719 (15 percent of eligible prisoners) in 1990. This, says John Larivee, who heads the CRJ, underscores the fact that inmates view the parole process as futile. To be considered for release, they must line up places to live and work, as well support systems such as 12-step programs. It’s an enormous investment for prisoners. “Inmates,” he says, “think, ‘I’m not going to get parole, so why go through the hassle and humiliation?’”

These trends are anything but good news. According to Stephen Saloom of the Boston-based Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, years of what he calls “an accepted no-parole policy” has set Massachusetts up for a public-safety nightmare. Right now, more and more prisoners — people who have spent decades living in tiny cells, in controlled settings — are leaving the state’s prisons without parole. That means that they’re not required to get jobs. No one sees that they stay off drugs. And they don’t have someone making sure they can survive, crime-free, in the everyday world.

THE CONCEPT of parole in Massachusetts dates back to the late 1800s, when it was set up to provide an incentive for prisoners to better themselves. The modern statute, enacted in 1955, added another purpose: parole is intended not only as a reward for a worthy prisoner, but also as a chance for the state to ensure that “his release is not incompatible with the welfare of society.” Essentially, it’s meant to enable the state to facilitate a prisoner’s return to the community as a tax-paying, law-abiding citizen.

And that’s what happened here until the 1980s. At that time, two-thirds of the state’s inmates received parole, typically after one or two hearings. But all this changed in the wake of Horton, the convicted murderer who savagely raped a woman and tortured her fiancé while on a weekend release from a Massachusetts prison. Horton had not been paroled; rather, he had been granted a 48-hour furlough, but the scandal became a symbol for the coddling of criminals and helped discredit the concept of parole as a conditional release. In 14 states, as well as in the federal system, parole has since been abolished.

The Bay State, on the other hand, has decided that parole is worth keeping on the books — yet a parole board defeats its purpose if it rarely offers supervised release, points out John Fitzpatrick, head of the Harvard University Prison Legal Assistance Program (PLAP), which represents prisoners seeking parole. The situation is “steeped in hypocrisy,” he says: “Either we have a system with parole or we don’t. But if we do, take it seriously.”

Life on supervised release isn’t exactly freedom. Every parolee must report to an assigned parole officer, who is notified within 24 hours of any job or housing changes. Parolees cannot leave the state for more than a day without permission. They cannot knowingly associate with convicted criminals, including friends they made on the inside. Depending on their needs, they may have to enroll in therapy and substance-abuse programs. Some may not be allowed to buy a lottery ticket, or to patronize a bar. Others can be randomly subjected to urine tests, curfews, and home visits.

Parole, in other words, is not about giving bad guys a break. Given that as many as 97 percent of all prisoners currently incarcerated in Massachusetts will leave in the next two years, notes Larivee, “parole should be viewed as critical.” The trend away from it, he adds, “increases the risk of harm to our communities.”