04.23.07

Man Held in Prison FOUR YEARS Past Release Date

Posted in prisons, sentencing, civil liberties at 8:54 pm by misstyrios

There are times when I absolutely adore being from and in Massachusetts - like the moment I found out (while sitting in 1L Contracts class) that the Supreme Judicial Court had legalized gay marriage, and the few minutes last night sitting in the bleachers at Fenway Park and watching my beloved Red Sox hit FOUR home runs in a row against the Yankees. And then there are times when I am saddened - no, ashamed - to see what goes on in this state, such as this tale about Rommel Jones, a man held in prison for FOUR years after his release date.

Mr. Jones was a victim of the complicated rules of parole and good time in the Massachusetts correctional system, specifically the rule stating that consecutive sentences (such as Mr. Jones’s 20 years plus 10 years on-and-after) automatically convert to concurrent sentences once the inmate is placed on parole. This is not something that is easy understood or even widely known, which explains why Mr. Jones didn’t know (despite asking several times) when he was supposed to be released. But you would think that the people in charge of knowing these things would know it. They didn’t. And Mr. Jones, who admits that he has been a “hoodlum” and knows that he suffers from significant mental illnesses, was robbed of four years of his freedom.

On top of that, the Department of Corrections (when they realized their mistake) told him they had only miscalculated by one week. And then they rationalized the lie by saying the release would have had “little or no practical effect on his quality of life” and that telling would even have been cruel because “we could be criticized for explaining this to someone . . . with the history of mental illness that this individual has.”

Pardon my language, but are you EFFING KIDDING ME?

In the four years he was mistakenly detained, Jones missed his mother’s wake, lost contact with his teenage daughter, and endured the daily perils of life behind bars. where his mental illness meant a ping-pong existence between life in a prison cell and the psychiatric wards of Bridgewater State Hospital.

“She doesn’t know me,” Jones said softly over a recent lunch at the Prudential Center, referring to [outgoing DoC commissioner Kathleen] Dennehy. “She’s saying they made a decision not even to say anything because they didn’t think that I would be intelligent enough to understand. That’s horrible. That’s one of the saddest excuses that I’ve ever heard. All she had to do is just try me. I’m more intelligent than they know.”

Mr. Jones didn’t even know about the extent of his over-incarceration until reporters at the Boston Globe contacted him while researching this issue. The research prompted the DoC to actually examine what was going on behind their bars and claimed that they found 25 inmates with miscalculated release dates, none of which had been reached yet. But then they had to admit the full (?) truth, revealing that 13 more people in the last four years had been held from a low of one to a high of 515 days past their release dates.

James R. Pingeon of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services called this “stunning incompetence.” I’m not even sure that covers it.

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