NOT MANY people other than prisoners, their families, and their advocates have taken complaints about the parole board seriously — until now. Earlier this year, State Representative Ruth Balser (D-Newton) began sounding the alarm over what she describes as our “disturbing” parole rate, and filed legislation that would close an apparent loophole in the law governing the composition of the Massachusetts parole board. The Balser bill — drafted by members of the Parole Project, including Purcell — would require that at least three of the seven board members come from the behavioral-science fields listed in the statute. Although the board’s present make-up is not technically illegal, she explains, “it strikes me as a clear violation of the spirit and intent of that law.” Adds Balser, herself a psychologist, “Until we get some behavioral scientists on that board, it is not a working, effective body.”

Her legislation, known as House Bill 2574, has been embraced by members of the Governor’s Council, which approves parole-board appointments. At a March 15 hearing before the legislature’s Joint Committee on Public Safety, Councilor Marilyn Petitto Devaney of Watertown took the unusual step of urging legislators to support the Balser bill because “it focuses much-needed attention on a long-simmering problem.” Her testimony offered merely one sign that the eight-member council has grown dissatisfied with the parole board. Last April, for the first time ever, the council unanimously refused to reappoint board member Mary Ellen Doyle, a victim’s-rights advocate. Councilors said the seven-year veteran could not mask her disdain for prisoners, or her empathy for victims, at parole hearings. (She became an advocate after her parents and teenage brother were killed by three armed robbers in their Tewksbury home in 1975.) According to one councilor, Doyle actually told the council that she views the hearings as a form of therapy for inmates, as if the board existed to bestow enlightenment rather than conditional release. “To me,” Devaney explains, “that demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of parole.”

But councilors have been vexed by more than Doyle’s performance. Councilor Christopher Iannella of Boston, who works as a civil lawyer, says he and colleagues hear increasing complaints about the board as a whole. They worry about the low parole rate, as well as the virtual elimination of prisoner pardons. Iannella, a 14-year council veteran, estimates that before the Weld and Cellucci administrations, the parole board used to present as many as 50 pardon recommendations per year to the Governor’s Council. Now, he says, “we’re lucky if we see five.” (In 1999, for example, the parole board received 111 petitions from prisoners for pardons, but recommended none.) Factors like these, Iannella says, have led councilors to believe that “this parole board is not doing its job.... Things should change.”

Even former parole-board members admit discomfort at the direction of their successors. Teresita Alicea, a Springfield criminal-defense attorney who served on the panel from 1978 to 1983 (alongside a social worker, a minister, a prosecutor, and several parole officers), says she’s “absolutely concerned” about the decade-long decline in parole grants. She has heard that the board’s numbers for county prisoners have improved — but finds anything less than 50 percent “not acceptable.” Given today’s figures, she says, “I’m sure there are people doing time who could be productive members of society.” Instead, they’re languishing in prison, consuming the state’s tax dollars.

“This board,” concludes Alicea, “is not called the ‘revocation board.’ It’s the parole board. It should be paroling people.”

Parole-board director Timothy App, however, contends that the panel has upheld its mission in a “fairly consistent” manner. (Chairman Pomarole and other members declined through App to be interviewed.) Too often, according to App, the board’s detractors focus solely on the decline in parole rates for state-prison inmates. But they fail to consider what he calls “the near steady” percentage of inmates paroled from county prisons, which he estimates as raising the average parole rate throughout the ’90s to 46.7 percent. “That statistic,” he says, “doesn’t lend itself to this idea of a drastic decrease” in paroles.

App acknowledges that the parole rate for state prisoners has plummeted. But he argues that the drop has been justified, because as much as 65 percent of the state-prison population consists of violent criminals — people convicted of murder, assault, rape. “We saw the number of violent offenders increase in the 1980s,” says App, who worked at the state Department of Corrections (DOC) for 28 years before assuming his present position last December. “These are the people who have come before the board in the 1990s. It’s a different population today.”

Even so, App insists that the board would much rather see a prisoner released under its supervision than watch him wrap up his sentence and walk away. Members, he says, are committed to successfully reintegrating offenders into communities. In the past six months, the board has created 12 initiatives meant to bolster support and oversight of parolees. He promises “a major change” in performance — a promise that he and Pomarole have recently expressed to legislators.

At the same time, he makes one thing clear: “We’re not about to parole somebody for the sake of boosting a low paroling rate.” He adds, “We don’t deny parole because we want to be bad guys. If we do [deny parole], it’s our view this person represents a threat to public safety.”

CRITICS OF the board do recognize that it adheres to a philosophy set by the head of the administration — i.e., the governor — rather than by members. Neither Weld nor Cellucci made any attempt to hide his disdain for parole; in fact, both tried to eliminate the practice through legislation. When that failed, the two administrations effectively gutted the program by packing the parole board with supporters of the tough-on-crime agenda. Notes Fitzpatrick of Harvard’s PLAP, “Board members have basically done what they were expected to do.” The blame for today’s hamstrung parole law, he adds, “lies squarely at the top, with the governor.”

Governor Jane Swift, who assumed office in April, did not appoint any current parole-board members, but she is quick to defend them. Swift spokesperson Sarah Magazine says the governor “has full confidence in the board,” despite the low parole numbers. If anything, says Magazine, those figures reflect a board that “holds inmates to a higher standard.” Members’ number-one criterion, she says, is “to protect the public safety.”

When asked whether the governor believes that protecting public safety and granting parole are mutually exclusive, Magazine replies, “No.” She then alludes to the record low crime statistics. “Obviously,” she says, “we must be doing something right, and we will continue to put public safety above all else.”

Now that a vacancy on the parole board has opened, the Swift administration has an opportunity to set a different tone for that agency (see “Editorial,” page 4). And critics are pushing for change. Iannella, of the Governor’s Council, says he and colleagues have informed Swift that they favor a new voice among board members. Councilors, he says, concur with critics: the administration must appoint someone with a behavioral-science background, as well as a firm grasp of the value of parole: “If another law-enforcement person comes before the council, we will likely veto the person. We want a balanced parole board.”

Demand for reform has even prompted some legislators to hunt for potential candidates. Representative Balser is so intent on seeing “a parole board that believes in parole” that she has encouraged a handful of forensic psychologists to apply, although none has heeded her advice. State Representative Jarrett Barrios (D-Cambridge), who supports the Balser bill, penned a May 25 letter to the governor urging her to consider the Reverend Paul Poyser, the prison chaplain who blew the whistle on allegations of prisoner abuse during a shakedown at MCI-Shirley last fall. Poyser, a 16-year employee of the DOC, would offer what Barrios called “an impressive combination” of corrections training, psychology, and theology. “I have confidence that these experiences make Mr. Poyser a more than capable candidate,” Barrios wrote, “well suited for the position.” (Poyser, who is on family leave from the DOC, could not be reached for comment.)

Board members have scouted for applicants as well. Former parole-board member Petra Cervoni, who served on the panel from 1993 to 1997 before taking a job as counsel for the Springfield Housing Authority, confirms that she applied for the open seat after two standing members solicited her résumé. Cervoni, who used to be a social worker, thinks she’d satisfy the call for change: “The board needs somebody who comes from the social-services community.”

It’s hard to say whether the governor would agree with such statements. Magazine declined to comment on the pending applications, except to verify that the office has received about 20 of them. When asked whether Swift sees a need for a more balanced board, she simply replies, “The governor has full confidence in the current board members and their decisions.”

Swift already has shown signs of maintaining what one critic describes as “the Republican Party’s sound-bite approach to law and order.” In an April 24 article, the governor told the Lowell Sun that she would carry on the Weld-Cellucci tradition of recommending law-and-order nominees to the parole board. “I recognize that [the Governor’s Council] has some concerns with the diversity of the board,” she said, “but I will continue to push for those people who share my philosophy.” She also implied that she sees no problem with the state’s decreasing parole numbers. Parole, she told the Sun, should be “a limited utilization.” She added: “We should be limiting the number of paroles. It’s only fair to the victims and the public safety.”

What direction Swift will take remains to be seen. But she should rethink the strategy of her predecessors, who used public safety as a catchy excuse to keep prisoners behind bars even when their behavior had earned their release. Most bad guys, after all, return to the streets eventually. And if they keep exiting the state’s prisons without the supervision of parole, as Balser puts it, “the public’s safety will be the loser in the end.”

Kristen Lombardi can be reached at klombardi[a]phx.com.