Concern focuses on packed, violent prisons

By Jason Szep

BOSTON (Reuters) – The conviction of an inmate in the
murder of defrocked pedophile priest John Geoghan in the most
secure prison in Massachusetts offers a vivid glimpse into what
rights groups say is growing prison violence as the U.S. prison
population booms.

The slaying of 68-year-old Geoghan and conviction this
month of his killer highlight what prisoners’ advocates say is
a bigger issue of how to protect prisoners from each other at a
time when the United States has 2.2 million people behind bars
– about a quarter of all the world’s prisoners.

The rate of people going into U.S. jails and prisons has
quadrupled in 25 years, swelled by get-tough policies enacted
in the 1980s and 1990s and rising by 500,000 in the last 10
years alone when the U.S. national crime rate actually fell.

Almost 10 percent of all inmates in state and federal
prisons in 2004 were serving life sentences, up 83 percent from
1992, according to the Sentencing Project.

“America’s prisons continue to suffer in many, many places
from being extraordinarily overcrowded,” said Elizabeth
Alexander of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National
Prison Project. “Overcrowding puts people at more risk.”

There have been efforts to reduce violence in prison,
particularly sexual abuse. More than a million people were
sexually assaulted in federal and state prisons in the past 20
years, according to the Prison Rape Elimination Act passed by
Congress in 2003.

Part of the problem is overcrowding in a system that costs
American taxpayers $60 billion a year. Bureau of Justice
statistics show U.S. federal prisons are about 40 percent over
capacity. State prisons are a little better, running at about
100 to 115 percent in capacity.

Some groups such as the Justice Policy Institute advocate
more lenient punishment while the Sentencing Project, which
promotes alternatives to prison, says better drug treatment
programs could drastically cut the U.S. prison population.

But simply cutting the incarceration rate — now at a
record one in every 138 U.S. residents — may not reduce the
violence, said Alexander Busansky, head of the Commission on
Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, a privately funded
nonpartisan group formed last year.

The United States needs better oversight of all its
prisons, said Busansky whose group estimates more than 34,000
U.S. inmates assaulted other inmates in 1999-2000, up 32
percent from the 12-month period five years earlier.

His year-long commission’s final hearing next week in Los
Angeles will consider whether the United States should adopt a
UK-style independent prisons inspectorate among other issues.

Britain’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, will
speak at the hearing. But Busansky said her U.S. counterpart
would need more power. The UK prisons inspectorate can
embarrass the British government with its reports but lacks
powers to subpoena or call grand juries.

“It’s a powerful tool but it’s a limited tool,” said
Busansky, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan District
Attorney’s office.

HARSH TREATMENT

Jenni Gainsborough of Penal Reform International said there
was still a perception in the United States that prisoners
should be treated harshly. She said an independent prisons
inspectorate was needed to monitor prison authorities and
report on abuse. “What we need is outside oversight.”

In Boston, the issue of prison violence surfaced with the
murder of Geoghan, the dismissed cleric at the center of the
Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal who was beaten and
strangled in his cell in 2003.

He was serving a nine- to 10-year sentence for fondling a
boy but had been accused of molesting 150 children over three
decades.

Prisoners’ rights advocate Leslie Walker says she believes
Geoghan’s death could have been prevented if he had not been
moved from a medium-security prison in Concord, Massachusetts
to a maximum-security unit whose 26 inmates included Joseph
Druce, a convicted killer known to hate homosexuals.

Druce was found guilty this month of murdering Geoghan.

“Did they place him (Geoghan) in harm’s way? Most
definitely,” said Walker, the executive director of the
Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services.

Geoghan’s killing triggered some reforms in Massachusetts,
including tighter screening of protective custody inmates. The
Department of Correction’s commissioner was replaced and an
investigation found that Geoghan had been abused by guards in
Concord and should never have been moved to Druce’s unit.

But the chairman of a panel appointed by Gov. Mitt Romney
to reform the state’s prisons resigned in December, saying too
little had been done because of a lack of urgency. “There have
been some improvements but not nearly enough,” said Walker.