THE ABRUPT drop in the state’s parole rate has corresponded with an equally sharp change in the composition of the board. As the rate was declining 20, 10, and five percentage points annually, former governors Weld and Paul Cellucci were replacing social workers, criminal-defense attorneys, and psychologists who had served on the parole board with state troopers, parole officers, and prosecutors.

Today, the seven-member panel consists of six former law-enforcement workers (the board currently has one vacancy). Chairman Michael Pomarole and members John Kivlan and Maureen Walsh are former prosecutors; Daniel Dewey used to be a probation officer; Doris Dottridge is a retired detective for the Mashpee police department; and Robert Murphy is a former state trooper. This law-and-order complexion persists in the face of state law: the 1955 Massachusetts statute defining the board stipulates that its membership should be drawn not only from the field of law enforcement, but also from “psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and social work.”

Wallace Holohan, who teaches corrections law at Northeastern University, finds the omission of behavioral scientists on the board as “unacceptable” as the decline in parole permits. Board members, he explains, must decide which inmates to release from behind prison walls, and when. They essentially make judgment calls about human behavior and growth. A board member trained in a field such as social work might encourage colleagues to consider the psychological factors that contributed to the original crime, or the steps a prisoner has taken to address them. Without this perspective, Holohan says, “you don’t get this analysis. You get a tough law-and-order approach” that looks at inmates primarily through the lens of punishment.

Former prisoner Kane puts it more bluntly: “The parole board is dominated by people who have spent their careers putting other people in jail.” Even if law-enforcement personnel can offer a fair hearing, he adds, “deciding when to let prisoners out should require more than cross-examination skills.”

One consequence of stacking the board with law-and-order types appears to be a shift away from rewarding rehabilitation. Generally speaking, critics charge, the parole hearing has turned into an opportunity for board members to retry an inmate for the original crime, rather than evaluate his or her progress while in prison — which says more about whether a prisoner is ready for release.

Anecdotal evidence bears out this assessment. Carol Purcell, who manages a shipping business in Waltham, has grown convinced that the panel “simply re-sentences people” after watching her boyfriend Ned come before its members eight times in the past 12 years. (Because she fears retaliation, her name has been changed, and some details of her boyfriend’s case have been altered.) Ned was convicted of second-degree murder in 1974 after taking part in a botched robbery, during which a bystander was shot. While in prison, Purcell says, Ned made every effort to better himself: he took vocational courses, he enrolled in substance-abuse programs — he even kicked his heroin habit.

But whenever he appeared before the parole board, she says, “it was like we were back at square one.” Board members, she explains, would spend hours rehashing the crime, poring over minor details of that fateful day — even though Ned had pled guilty to the charge. At the same time, they were indifferent to his positive prison record and his parole package.

Last February, Ned received parole after serving 27 years in prison. Yet this is not to say that the system finally worked for him. Purcell believes Ned should have been released years earlier — indeed, in 1997, the board encouraged him to enroll in a life-skills program to prepare him for parole. But when he returned to face the panel 18 months later, it turned him down.

“It didn’t matter that he’d done everything they asked him to do,” she says. “This parole board does not believe in rehabilitation.”

In fact, critics say the board is so focused on the crime that it doesn’t even take into account the most extreme extenuating circumstances. Jim Pingeon, a staff attorney at the Boston-based Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, was stunned to learn that his client Peter Louraine had been denied parole last year because of “the nature of [his] offense.” In March 2000, Pingeon argued before the board for release of Louraine, who pled guilty to second-degree murder in 1984 after repeatedly stabbing his roommate’s brother. A paranoid schizophrenic, Louraine has served nearly 20 years of his life-with-parole sentence at Bridgewater State Hospital, a prison for the mentally ill. Ten years ago, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that has left him barely able to walk or talk. In seeking release, he was not asking to be let loose on the streets; rather, he sought transfer to a state-run psychiatric hospital, where he could receive 24-hour care. He had the full backing of mental-health officials, who testified at his hearing. Instead of listening to the experts, Pingeon says, the parole board cross-examined and “rudely attacked” them.

By the end of the three-hour hearing, Pingeon had come to feel as if the board members “saw Louraine as an alien from Mars.” He adds: “His illness was beyond their comprehension.”

Critics like Pingeon and Purcell, who helped found a small but effective reform group known as the Parole Project, maintain that the board has lost its way. The panel has not only ceased granting parole to eligible prisoners — it’s ceased believing in the concept. One Boston defense attorney says that, in the post-Weld/Cellucci era, the board has turned into “an odd, leftover agency,” where the prevailing attitude can be summarized as “Keep prisoners locked up longer; just say no to parole. That’s the name of the game.”